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DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz to Take on AWS

433 points by beigeotter 13y ago

HorizonXP 13y ago
I really like these guys. It's really no-nonsense hosting, which as a developer, is exactly what I need. I've been (stupidly) running my website, VPN, and e-mail servers all on a single EC2 instance, mostly because I had a bunch of AWS credits. I got some Google Cloud credits, so decided to move it there. I then realized that I'm spending $60 a month on a single instance, which despite having "free" money, is stupid. I split everything up into Docker containers, and run them on Droplets now. Sure, I pay $5/month now for each server, but that's fine. One of the e-mail servers is for my wedding; I'll turn it off when I don't need it anymore. The interface for bringing up new Droplets is simple and clean, and lets me do exactly what I need to, no more and no less. If you look at AWS or Google Cloud, there are so many available services that it can be daunting to get simple things going. I mean, it's not that bad, but once you've seen DO's interface, you realize how unnecessary a lot of it is. I would still likely use AWS/GC for cases where I need to respond to changing load needs, which incidentally, is exactly what you're supposed to use it for. A DO + AWS hybrid infrastructure would be most ideal IMHO.
- neom 13y ago
  Thank you for the kind words. :)
- yogo 13y ago
  With a little effort you can use the API[0] to spin up or destroy droplets. Sure, AWS and other services do that for you but I think this one of those cases where rolling your own isn't a crazy endeavour. [0] https://developers.digitalocean.com/droplets/ https://developers.digitalocean.com/droplets/
- wil421 13y ago
  Agreed, as a beginner I found the amount of configuration that is needed to set up an EC2 instance to be overwhelming. After seeing DO's interface and how easy it is to spin up an new droplet I was hooked. Its been a really great and easy testbed where I can test out new things I am learning. Now I can get a VPS running linux serving up webpages with apache in about 20 min. Add in the great price and I have been hooked for over a year.
- balladeer 13y ago
  That's right. The reason I finally settled with DigitalOcean after trying AWS, GC, RackSpace and WebFaction etc, is it's stupidly simple interface. I start things with just a few clicks and few words typed and then it's just like I am in my good old Ubuntu terminal. Though I run my low volume email server, VPN, proxy, ownCloud on one droplet and it works just fine - no load, no issues.
spindritf 13y ago
First, it’s cheap. Second, it's integrated. Which, to me at least, feels much more natural than AWS where you rent a virtual server, and then a database separately, persistent storage separately... Because it's integrated, it's also simple. And they have a datacentre* in Amsterdam. Even two of them, right in the heart of the European Internet. That means latency to their servers is not noticeable in much of the EU. * Yes, yes, probably more like a cage or whatever they rent.
- Kudos 13y ago
  What is integrated about it? They're just a VPS provider, which is a strict subset of what you can do on AWS.
  - ddorian43 13y ago
    restart your aws server = goodbye data or hello network hdd
    - dave_sullivan 13y ago
      That's true in the same way that double taxation is a concern when setting up a corporation. It kind of is, but it's really not. Due to downvotes, I guess I better explain what I mean: Basically, EC2 provides instances where "if you restart your server you lose your data". You don't use those when that would be a problem for you, you use EBS backed instances which do not have this problem. Or you do it some other way. Point being, this is technically true but it's not really a problem in practice. The double taxation reference refers to it being a somewhat common misconception among people that have taken a business class before that US corporations are "double taxed". IE, corporate profits are taxed, then your personal income is taxed. This is technically true but does not actually matter because you pay yourself a salary (which is taxed as income), but this is deducted as an expense from corporate income (thus not double taxed). Point being--it's the same FUD.
      - ddorian43 13y ago
jmngomes 13y ago
"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage." Looking at the feedback from their user base, and even rom my own experience, different storage options would be way more useful than IPv6 or even load balancing.
- Kudos 13y ago
  It's been incredibly difficult to get an answer out of them on whether they pool bandwidth[1], which would allow you to just build your own load balancers on their smallish instances while leveraging the transfer included in the rest of your clusters. I finally got an answer last night[2] 1. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/4141790-pooled-bandwidth http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... 2. https://twitter.com/jedgar/status/441314391301296128 https://twitter.com/jedgar/status/441314391301296128
  - stephen_g 13y ago
    Communication is my biggest issue with DO - I generally like their service but it's majorly frustrating when they just refuse to answer any questions about things like IPv6 (The best I could get out of them on that was 'Look at the UserVoice page about it' - which I already had hundreds of times over the years. Not really a great answer since the latest post by then from a staff member was something like eight months ago saying there's be a public beta in October which never needs up happening)
    - neom 13y ago
      It's really just been a lack of people coupled with intense growth, till recently we've been well well under 50. We're working on it, and now we have money to add lots more hires.
- miken123 13y ago
  How can storage be more important than being reachable? Please be aware that some internet users only have native IPv6 connectivity, and that IPv4 addresses are becoming increasingly scarce, especially if you are setting up thousands if not millions of virtual machines, like DO.
hiphopyo 13y ago
Love DigitalOcean. Sorta sad they still don't offer OpenBSD though. OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, and the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax. https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3232571-support-bsd-os- https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...
- flavor8 13y ago
  Saw your OpenBSD spam yesterday too. Do you develop for the project?
  - hiphopyo 13y ago
    Nope, I'm not on that level yet. Just voicing my love that's all.
  - 4ad 13y ago
    The thought of OpenBSD developers doing any kind of marketing, honest or otherwise is amusing. These are the last people that would do anything other than simply letting the work speak for itself.
timdorr 13y ago
$37.2m on a $153m post? That's a pretty big chunk of the company to give up. Looks like A16Z is going big on these guys. They're awesome, so that's great news!
- 3pt14159 13y ago
  They wrote a blog post recently about how they are moving to more established companies.
- pdq 13y ago
  Most VC's want 20%-25% ownership. And DigitalOcean is a very capital intensive tech company, needing to buy/build machines, pay for electricity, rent rack space, and pay for bandwidth. Virtually all tech startups on the other hand just need to pay for writing software and renting said machines/hosting.
bananas 13y ago
Adding to the commentary on here with something not so gushing: * kernels lag terribly behind the distributions meaning you're wide open sometimes. * can't resize or add storage * no freebsd support or custom kernels * VM availability problems. If you want to have another box, you aren't guaranteed to get one. * no IPv6 * somewhat shonky security reputation. * cant deliver to yahoo mail from their AMS2 IPs I've been given even after filling in numerous forms at yahoo. Apart from that, they're the best hosts out there. I pick them over Linode, Hetzner and EC2 but not colo. Even at the price point they're at.
- hiphopyo 13y ago
  My logs show increased break-in attempts after moving to Digital Ocean. Their IPs are hot targets for hackers, making it all the more important to properly secure my droplets, something I'm having a hard time doing in Linux. With Linux, it's lot of beating around the bush. Overcomplicated config files, a lot of disabling and removing of things one don't need, having to deal with a messy and outdated firewall. With OpenBSD, lo and behold I'd have one of the simplest, most secure and well-configured droplets the world has ever seen.
  - bananas 13y ago
    Yeah noticed that as well. First thing I do is (on debian), update packages and the kernel, install ufw (allow only 22), fail2ban, postfix and logwatch. Then setup a non privileged user, sudo, turn of root ssh and password auth and move to key based auth. Then I can sleep/configure the rest of the system. Been meaning to package this all up in an ansible playbook but I can't be bothered :( I'd be using FreeBSD if they offered it. Much like OpenBSD it's a lot more pleasant for sysadmins!
    - hiphopyo 13y ago
      Awesome, please do! Don't forget https://github.com/kickstarter/rack-attack https://github.com/kickstarter/rack-attack as well though.
    - dmix 13y ago
morganherlocker 13y ago
While not suitable for production operations, my go to has been a random one man vps shop. I have used him for years, because it is the cheapest plan I have seen. I pay $20/year per server, which makes it an easy decision to add another one whenever an idea comes up.
arca_vorago 13y ago
I've been using DO for about 5 months now, and love it. I still host my main websites other places (dreamhost, who, despite some issues, has been consistent in improvement, and is fair in prices), and I use DO for stuff like mumble servers, a few games, as a ssh proxy from less secure locations, and as some as a shared shell with friends for various skullduggery and fun. Very impressed with DO's service and price, but even more so ease of use. My main issue is that I would like a hardening script, instead of having to go through each new one I spin up and lock it down.
- cdelsolar 13y ago
  I just make a "Skeleton" instance that has all the hardening stuff already on it, then clone all my new machines off of this instance.
  - avenger123 13y ago
    Any good guides for hardening Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?
  - arca_vorago 13y ago
    I don't know why I hadn't thought of that, thanks for the tip.
zerop 13y ago
I use linode and was drawing comparisons between two: 1. 8 cores on linode is what binds me to it. Linode rules here 2. Digital ocean is cheaper than linode 3. More Network transfer in linode (minimum 2TB) 4. Digital ocean offers more RAM 5. Private network - Does not exist on Linode. Shame. DO Rules.. What else...
- smanuel 13y ago
  > 5. Private network - Does not exist on Linode. Shame. What do you mean? Actually private network did not exist on DO until recently and it's been on Linode for a long time.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- kyrra 13y ago
  5) huh? DO added this in 2013[0], Linode has had it since 2008[1]. To add another. 6) Linode offers IPv6, while DO says it's coming "soon"[2] (and has been saying that for well over a year). [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/introducing-private-networking/ https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/introducing-privat... [1] https://blog.linode.com/2008/03/14/private-back-end-network-support/ https://blog.linode.com/2008/03/14/private-back-end-network-... [2] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-available https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-ava...
  - zerop 13y ago
    OK. What I meant was the concept of VPC in EC2, should have addressed it correctly :). Basically following: 1. No public IP on each machine by default 2. Security settings managed through web UI and apply to linodes from UI.
- velodrome 13y ago
  However, you can pool the bandwidth on Linode. DO, you can't.
- 13y ago
recmend 13y ago
We run our infrastructure on both AWS and DigitalOcean. 1) DO consistently beats the price performance. 2) DO has simple pricing model --> No ondemand / reserved instances 3) AWS is more feature rich but DO continues to add new functionalities like private networking and new data centers
- twistedpair 13y ago
  Must be nice to have your providers competing with each other. Everyone knows Bezos loves a good ole race to the bottom better than anyone. I suspect we'll see even steeper AWS price cuts this year in response.
  - recmend 13y ago
    yup, competition drives innovation and is good for the cloud ecosystem.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    S3 price cut was nice. The EBS storage price cut was even more extreme (and fantastic) going from 10 cents/GB to 5 cents/GB. At Amazon's scale, you can make it up on volume.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  Comparing DO to AWS is extremely disingenuous unless you're only comparing compute per $. Running in AWS, we get access to unlimited storage through S3, EBS volumes we can move between instances, a CDN, etc. Digital Ocean is like the place with a bunch of servers in the garage. Yes, its cheap. No, I would not trust it to run my business. I'm very interested to see how they think they can compete with AWS, considering Amazon's cost to acquire equipment and their AWS software engineering team.
  - Patrick_Devine 13y ago
    You're right about EBS, however I kind of scratch my head over S3. Yeah, I guess it's integrated in the sense that you can access it from the same account, however, try creating an EC2 instance without a publicly addressable IP. You can't access S3 at all from your VPC, which makes S3 not usable in many use cases.
samwillis 13y ago
I would love to see DO or Linode do a S3 type service as well. I prefer the persistent virtualization of DO and Linode to EC2 but also want to use a nice quick persistent file store that isn't on my own slice. I could just use S3 from Linode but that would result more paid bandwidth and increased latency.
- thu 13y ago
  Shameless plug: I have started https://reesd.com/ https://reesd.com/. Not the S3 protocol, simply scp.
  - royjacobs 13y ago
    How would you go ahead mounting this, though? SSHFS?
    - thu 13y ago
      I don't know exactly what I have to implement to support SSHFS. But really in my mind a service like Reesd (or S3) is used through a networked API to read and write files, not through an exposed file system (although sure it can be exposed that way, just that it is not the "philosophy"). E.g. if you implement a music streaming service, you would access mp3 through say a REST API, not on disk, before streaming them.
- t0mas88 13y ago
  Rackspace Cloud has both persistent disks for VMs (on SSDs in RAID 10, so fast and reliable) and an S3 like storage system called Cloud Files. Sounds like that's the combination you want?
  - hackerboos 13y ago
    They do hourly billing as well which Linode is missing.
- IBalic 13y ago
  Second that. This is what still keeps me at AWS.
tshtf 13y ago
Broken DigitalOcean promises: IPv6 in Q4 2012: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-available https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-ava... Ability to boot own kernel ("2-3 weeks from Feb 2013"): https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2814988-give-option-to-use-the-droplet-s-own-bootloader-?page=4&per_page=20 https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...
- raiyu 13y ago
  Completely agree with you, we definitely broke a few promises. We ran into this problem because we were used to our development cycle that we had in 2012, but in 2013 our growth really took off and we spent most of our time working on scaling challenges. That unfortunately pushed us back on a lot of different timelines. Now that we've grown the company from 5 people to over 50 and with this latest round we're finally catching up and able to move things forward at a better pace. We are reviewing and reprioritizing our product roadmap this weekend and next and will be providing more updated timelines and also issuing more updates if we fall behind on the new estimates. Thanks, Moisey
  - beachstartup 13y ago
    the interesting thing about the hosting market is the less people pay, the more entitled they feel. not sure if digital ocean has customers in the $20k+/month range, but they are by far the least demanding. pretty incredible isn't it?
    - wting 13y ago
      > the interesting thing about the hosting market is the less people pay, the more entitled they feel. This is not restricted to web hosting, but common human behavior. I've freelanced as a web dev and wedding photographer in the past. Low paying clients typically demand much more than higher paying ones.
      - aduth 13y ago
lallysingh 13y ago
I'm a (moderately [1]) happy customer. But I have to ask, isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate? And in that vein, wouldn't the winner in each area just be the one who bought their hardware the most recently? Instructions/dollar are still increasing on each CPU generation, but it'll take more than one generation for each machine to pay itself off. So, whoever is closest to the current generation pays the least per instruction, and can charge the least. Or, maybe it's memory/bandwidth, which are mostly commodity, but slightly bottlenecked by the hardware (e.g, max on a motherboard, NIC throughput). Maybe the combination of prices in cpu, memory, and bandwidth leave enough variation between competitors to keep the field a little open? I donno. [1] Modulo concerns about their ssh key management. I haven't looked after the last news ping on it.
- 6cxs2hd6 13y ago
  > isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate? Well, I don't think it's like aircraft or auto leasing. More like apartment or office leasing -- there's also a property management, maintenance, and operation dimension. You're not just paying for hardware in a rack. You're paying for electricity, cooling, fire prevention, connectivity, and some level of uptime. i.e. You're paying for not having to worry about a bunch of stuff, so you can focus on your core business problems. Even with standardized management software, at some point a human needs to go into a cage, or deal with the backhoe emergency. (OK, unless someday Amazon drones are deployed in data centers, instead of doing residential delivery. :))
  - lallysingh 13y ago
    I like this analogy. It's like you're leasing an office for your program to work in. It works well for both pricing and differentiation.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
z92 13y ago
I am running these services in a $5/month DO droplet: dns [named], ntpd, httpd [apache], smtp [postfix], imap [dovecot], webmail [roundcube], vpn [pptpd]. It's taking 350MB off 500MB RAM. Now after adding getmail to back up gmail I am now wondering what more I can do with it.
- kilburn 13y ago
  Run your own jabber server using prosody: https://prosody.im/ https://prosody.im/
- bad_user 13y ago
  I tried installing postfix/dovecot but couldn't do it. Any recent tutorials I could try?
  - ekspreso 13y ago
    I've always liked this one: https://workaround.org/ispmail/wheezy https://workaround.org/ispmail/wheezy And it's not for Debian only, I'm running it on Arch by following this tutorial.
  - shirkey 13y ago
    Had you tried this tutorial? https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-up-a-postfix-e-mail-server-with-dovecot https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-u... I had used it to setup a test server and had no issues -- FYI, the date on the article is today, but the original article has been available for a few months so perhaps the article has been updated.
viana007 13y ago
"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage." A simple solution for load balancing and auto-scale will be amazing :)
sneak 13y ago
DigitalOcean are dishonest with their customers. It's sad to see such a reputable firm throw in with people known to be liars.
- gdubs 13y ago
  I've found them to be a great service.
  - ceejayoz 13y ago
    That doesn't really say anything about the comment you're replying to. You can be happy with a service regardless of their honesty, especially if you're not aware of any dishonesty that's occurring.
    - sneak 13y ago
      Yeah, I still use them for throwaway stuff occasionally because cheap and I still have credit sitting in my account. I won't top it up again but as long as you know they're somewhat dishonest and reckless with customer data then it's okay to use for stupid stuff like distributed builds or something (provided the source code you're building isn't private/secret/proprietary).
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- rhizome 13y ago
  Well, they're getting plenty of free market research in this thread.
- middleclick 13y ago
  It would be good if you can elaborate your point and back it up otherwise just saying this doesn't inspire much confidence.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
nissimk 13y ago
If you can scale your system using only 0.5 GB per node, you get more cpu per dollar since the 5$ and 10$ levels both have 1 cpu. Higher levels seem to be multiples of the 10$ level. Does anyone have experience with this in a production system with a lot of users? Are there horizontally scalable database systems that work well on many nodes with only 512MB each?
- jackowayed 13y ago
  Most DB systems will be tremendously helped by having far more RAM than that to cache, and also usually by having fewer nodes than you get when only having 20GB total disk space per node. The main place where I could see this being appealing would be complex analytic jobs (since they're more CPU-intensive), but even so, if on 512MB nodes it has to spill to disk because there isn't enough RAM (or transmit a bunch of data across the network because it split the job over two nodes) and on a bigger machine it didn't need to, you probably would have been better off with the bigger machine.
instakill 13y ago
I've been using DO for about a year, and I've been mostly happy with it but that's because the project I run http://www.mybema.com http://www.mybema.com doesn't receive as much traffic or active users as I'd like it to. DO has gone down far too many times in the last year for me to be able to be completely confident in them with a 100x userbase.
fareesh 13y ago
DO is great - I just wish features like adding extra disk space and monitoring bandwidth usage were here sooner.
fareesh 13y ago
DO is great - I just wish features like adding extra disk space and monitoring bandwidth usage were here sooner.
puppetmaster3 13y ago
I use them for remote DC's (assia, EU, etc.) at $5 each. Only their billing is a hot mess, mostly because they think it works and their customers are wrongly entering the CC #. For 4 months now, same problem and they have off-shore support that reads scripted answers. They just read the closest answer related to billing.
- blhack 13y ago
  Remote domain controllers? (Sorry, I'm missing something here, I think)
  - shirkey 13y ago
    Probably "remote data centers" in this context
whalesalad 13y ago
Mark my words these guys are gonna be huge. Sure they are lacking in a lot of areas (like bananas mentions) but thats why you get VC funding and hire a badass like Jeff Lindsay (http://progrium.com http://progrium.com) I'm really excited to see these dudes take on AWS with a higher-level and more performant platform.
- abhigupta 13y ago
  Seems like they are also highly lacking in customer service https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/
blhack 13y ago
I've said many, many times that the best thing you can do as a budding dev is to spin up a VPS somewhere and start hacking. A while ago, I started giving out VPSs to friends of mine to get them to stop making excuses about why they can't code. Digital ocean, at $5/mo, has made this really easy :)
- icpmacdo 13y ago
  Hey man what are some cool things that you recommend I try with a VPS :) ?
  - voltagex_ 13y ago
    * Try a programming language that you haven't tried before. * Set up a static blog engine like Pelican [0] * Learn Ansible [1] * Try a distro you haven't used before [0]: getpelican.com [1]: http://sendgrid.com/blog/ansible-and-digital-ocean/ http://sendgrid.com/blog/ansible-and-digital-ocean/ (although this really doesn't show off the power of something like Ansible)
dmunoz 13y ago
Only tangentially related, but when did DigitalOcean redesign their website? I think my initial dislike is due to it being changed, but there are tons of minor usability issues that I never noticed on their old website. I'm happy to see a view for new articles in the tutorials database [0], but at the moment it doesn't make any sense. When I hit it just now, an article from 11 minutes ago is above an article from 1 minute ago. Not only that, an article on the 52nd page says "less than a minute ago". From clicking around, it seems like some process has touched every article recently and all those times, and how they are sorted, are meaningless. Also, at the moment the new and tending view gives the exact same outcome, at least for the first page. [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles
- btgeekboy 13y ago
  > when did DigitalOcean redesign their website? Must have been very recent; I was on it just the other day with the old design.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
AWS is a cloud service provider with a huge ecosystem of services. Digital Ocean is a VPS provider. It's like comparing a harddisk manufacturer to Apple. Even EC2 is barely an overlap, since EC2 is a computation unit in the convenient form of a (very ephemeral) virtual server, not the virtual equivalent of an actual, permanent server. (And you're going to be in a world of hurt if you use them like that.)
erbo 13y ago
I moved my personal Web hosting from another provider to DO a couple of months ago. I'm spending the same amount I was paying the other provider, and I'm getting a hell of a lot more for my money. (I have two droplets running right now, one with my Web server and mail, one running some network services...and I have plenty of capacity on both to do more.) Plus, since it's an actual VPS as opposed to shared hosting, I have more control over it. I'm kicking myself for not having made the jump earlier.
dharma1 13y ago
took me 3 hours today to do a power cycle (reboot) vs 2 minutes on linode
aalpbalkan 13y ago
Classic TC title "to Take on AWS"... Don't make me laugh buddy. AWS is probably more than 1,000+ people operation with 30 different products and a marketplace, support and ops teams. DigitalOcean is purely a VM seller with no cloud or storage features.
pyrocat 13y ago
Maybe they could spend some of it on hiring a better marketing team. Holy shit those youtube ads are terrible.
checker659 13y ago
DigitalOcean banned me because I was using their server to fetch chromium's source code so that I could git-bundle/rsync it's 12 GB mammoth of a repo and download it to the third-world country that I live in (my network connection is really bad even though it's the best money can buy). Apparently I violated their TOS. As long as they limit their TOS to such narrow purposes as hosting a wordpress site or doing straight-forward things, I don't think they'll get too far. With AWS, amazon doesn't care if I spawn out a 1000 node render farm, as long as I'm paying, it's all fair game. Good luck anyways.
- mjn 13y ago
  > With AWS, amazon doesn't care if I spawn out a 1000 node render farm, as long as I'm paying, it's all fair game. For smaller numbers of instances it's true that you can spawn whatever you want and use them for whatever you want, as long as you pay the stated rates. But for larger numbers of instances you do actually have to tell Amazon what you want them for, and your requested use-case "will be considered". You can't just spin up 1000 instances and pay the stated rate without getting prior authorization; the API will block new instances after a certain point. Here are the default instance limits: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run_in_Amazon_EC2 http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run...
  - checker659 13y ago
    Well, 1000 was just a number I blurted out.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  Try Linode. Far better service in every way. I've done similar things on Linode (as well as used it for SSH tunneling to appear in a different country to reality), never a problem.
AznHisoka 13y ago
No matter where I go, the prices don't get any better than they do in OVH. A 240 GB SSD (2 X 120), quad core, 32 GB RAM, unlimited bandwidth for just $60/month?
- hackerboos 13y ago
  I'm with OVH. I like them and they are cheap but if your server fails then it can take hours to days getting back online.
ilaksh 13y ago
Its simple. It costs half as much as equivalent providers for their VPS. Or less than half in the case of AWS. And it actually works even though its so cheap. No matter how rich you are it just doesnt make sense to pay double or triple. The question is, do you really make money on $5 a month servers? I don't know if they actually are. The costs are for support people and now large numbers of engineers. The thing is with that much funding it doesn't really matter if their income is greater than expenses. They can continue for at least another few years regardless. During that time sane people who just need a VPS will take advantage of it. My recommendation for DO's business model is simply to set a precedent and make it a policy that if you pay only $5 then you don't get any kind of free support. That is the only real cost that sticks. So I suggest having a few different monthly support options available starting at zero support for $0 and up. That is the main business issue a provider like this has is the conflict between the desire to provide good support and the need to keep unit costs low. And the solution is to separate support out. The main challenge to doing that is sort of a cultural/expectations/marketing issue.
- canadev 13y ago
  I suspect they make a fair bit of money from people like me, who are lazy and/or have full-time jobs, and have commissioned a server or three and never actually use them.
- raiyu 13y ago
  Thanks for the great question. We are actually profitable on every virtual server that we sell. The reason we raised our seed round is that our growth began to outstrip our ability to acquire hardware and grow the business at the rate at which our customers were spinning up more droplets. The second round that we raised was again for the same reason. Growth has been completely unbelievable and we are humbled by the support that the community has given us. We thought that our initial Seed round would certainly be enough to cover our growth but quickly saw that growth was actually increasing so we made the decision to raise a second round in a rather short period of time. We were immediately impressed by Peter Levine's knowledge of the space and we are super excited about having a16z on board as our partners. This round has certainly provided ample funding for us to continue to expand not worry that our growth is going to outstrip our ability to finance it. Thanks, Moisey
da_n 13y ago
Despite generally rock-solid performance and uptime, I had a bad experience with DO recently. After experiencing repeated hardware failures on a node (with lots of downtime), I followed the advise of their support and did a snapshot and destroy of the failing droplet and immediately attempted to create a new one from the snapshot. It failed to build. I then tried to build again from the automated backup they create when a droplet is destroyed, this also failed. Support just did not seem to understand the issue I was having, I kept getting canned responses about doing a snapshot then building a new droplet from the image, so I gave up. The entire site had to be created again from backups on a different VPS provider. Surely their system should be able to migrate any droplets off failing nodes automatically, I mean hardware failures happen right?
ksec 13y ago
Let's hope DO finally get their act together. No Pooled Bandwidth Networking and Route, as well as capacity need some work. Linode is much better in this regards. No Custom Kernels IPs Problem. Still no deploy to different physical hardware by default. No Private Networking on most of its DC. And possibly many other small things i didn't mention. To me most of those are deal breaker. And my problems with them is that are not fixing or improving these problem quickly enough. While Linode's SSD are quickly approaching, and has none of those drawbacks.
gregpilling 13y ago
I am reading Ben Horowitz's book, and it is interesting to me that they made an investment into the same field as LoudCloud 15 years ago. Maybe they were just before their time.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Do they have IPv6 yet? What about actual security too? Maybe they'll stop the censorship if they want to be a real VPS player? (https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/) Oh, and I wish they'd use real industry terms, not stuff like 'Droplet'. That's just stupid. Right now, anyone at all who aren't GoDaddy or Network Solutions are better than Digital Ocean. You get what you pay for (AWS excepted, who are price gouging). Full disclosure: Happy Linode customer.
- broodbucket 13y ago
  News story about a cloud hosting provider? Here's some dissenting opinions about them. Half of them have some sort of merit. Disclosure: I have a vested interest in their direct competitor. Seriously, man? You point out some valid things but this post doesn't really serve a purpose.
  - blueskin_ 13y ago
    No IPv6 is fairly serious. As is censorship to the point I wouldn't feel comfortable using them in case I angered Big Google at some point. Their general lack of HA and resource shortages make them look like amateurs. So what if I use Linode? I don't work for them. I use two other providers as well. My 'vested interest' in them is limited to my VPS there running. I don't get a discount for pointing out DO sucks and Linode don't ban me if I speak ill of someone they like. PS. Is a VPS host really a 'cloud hosting provider'? That term makes me think of overpriced individual services that aren't a self contained system, like AWS/EBS/their hosted databases.
- thejosh 13y ago
  Happy Linode customer, who gets hacked constantly and lies about it... Hmmmmmmmmm....
  - blueskin_ 13y ago
    Excuse me? I've never been cracked, and chances are I know/care more about security than the average user here. Either you've misidentified me or you're lying about me.
ForFreedom 13y ago
In one line how is DO?
thezach 13y ago
I like AWS, and this is good for me - because competition is good for the customer.
gidgreen 13y ago
Digital Ocean does pretty well on price/performance at www.cloudlook.com (disclaimer: my site)

433 points by beigeotter 13y ago

I really like these guys. It's really no-nonsense hosting, which as a developer, is exactly what I need. I've been (stupidly) running my website, VPN, and e-mail servers all on a single EC2 instance, mostly because I had a bunch of AWS credits. I got some Google Cloud credits, so decided to move it there. I then realized that I'm spending $60 a month on a single instance, which despite having "free" money, is stupid. I split everything up into Docker containers, and run them on Droplets now. Sure, I pay $5/month now for each server, but that's fine. One of the e-mail servers is for my wedding; I'll turn it off when I don't need it anymore. The interface for bringing up new Droplets is simple and clean, and lets me do exactly what I need to, no more and no less. If you look at AWS or Google Cloud, there are so many available services that it can be daunting to get simple things going. I mean, it's not that bad, but once you've seen DO's interface, you realize how unnecessary a lot of it is. I would still likely use AWS/GC for cases where I need to respond to changing load needs, which incidentally, is exactly what you're supposed to use it for. A DO + AWS hybrid infrastructure would be most ideal IMHO.

neom 13y ago
Thank you for the kind words. :)
yogo 13y ago
With a little effort you can use the API[0] to spin up or destroy droplets. Sure, AWS and other services do that for you but I think this one of those cases where rolling your own isn't a crazy endeavour. [0] https://developers.digitalocean.com/droplets/ https://developers.digitalocean.com/droplets/
wil421 13y ago
Agreed, as a beginner I found the amount of configuration that is needed to set up an EC2 instance to be overwhelming. After seeing DO's interface and how easy it is to spin up an new droplet I was hooked. Its been a really great and easy testbed where I can test out new things I am learning. Now I can get a VPS running linux serving up webpages with apache in about 20 min. Add in the great price and I have been hooked for over a year.
balladeer 13y ago
That's right. The reason I finally settled with DigitalOcean after trying AWS, GC, RackSpace and WebFaction etc, is it's stupidly simple interface. I start things with just a few clicks and few words typed and then it's just like I am in my good old Ubuntu terminal. Though I run my low volume email server, VPN, proxy, ownCloud on one droplet and it works just fine - no load, no issues.

spindritf 13y ago

First, it’s cheap. Second, it's integrated. Which, to me at least, feels much more natural than AWS where you rent a virtual server, and then a database separately, persistent storage separately... Because it's integrated, it's also simple. And they have a datacentre* in Amsterdam. Even two of them, right in the heart of the European Internet. That means latency to their servers is not noticeable in much of the EU. * Yes, yes, probably more like a cage or whatever they rent.

Kudos 13y ago
What is integrated about it? They're just a VPS provider, which is a strict subset of what you can do on AWS.
- ddorian43 13y ago
  restart your aws server = goodbye data or hello network hdd
  - dave_sullivan 13y ago
    That's true in the same way that double taxation is a concern when setting up a corporation. It kind of is, but it's really not. Due to downvotes, I guess I better explain what I mean: Basically, EC2 provides instances where "if you restart your server you lose your data". You don't use those when that would be a problem for you, you use EBS backed instances which do not have this problem. Or you do it some other way. Point being, this is technically true but it's not really a problem in practice. The double taxation reference refers to it being a somewhat common misconception among people that have taken a business class before that US corporations are "double taxed". IE, corporate profits are taxed, then your personal income is taxed. This is technically true but does not actually matter because you pay yourself a salary (which is taxed as income), but this is deducted as an expense from corporate income (thus not double taxed). Point being--it's the same FUD.
    - ddorian43 13y ago

jmngomes 13y ago

"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage." Looking at the feedback from their user base, and even rom my own experience, different storage options would be way more useful than IPv6 or even load balancing.

Kudos 13y ago
It's been incredibly difficult to get an answer out of them on whether they pool bandwidth[1], which would allow you to just build your own load balancers on their smallish instances while leveraging the transfer included in the rest of your clusters. I finally got an answer last night[2] 1. http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/4141790-pooled-bandwidth http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocea... 2. https://twitter.com/jedgar/status/441314391301296128 https://twitter.com/jedgar/status/441314391301296128
- stephen_g 13y ago
  Communication is my biggest issue with DO - I generally like their service but it's majorly frustrating when they just refuse to answer any questions about things like IPv6 (The best I could get out of them on that was 'Look at the UserVoice page about it' - which I already had hundreds of times over the years. Not really a great answer since the latest post by then from a staff member was something like eight months ago saying there's be a public beta in October which never needs up happening)
  - neom 13y ago
    It's really just been a lack of people coupled with intense growth, till recently we've been well well under 50. We're working on it, and now we have money to add lots more hires.
miken123 13y ago
How can storage be more important than being reachable? Please be aware that some internet users only have native IPv6 connectivity, and that IPv4 addresses are becoming increasingly scarce, especially if you are setting up thousands if not millions of virtual machines, like DO.

hiphopyo 13y ago

Love DigitalOcean. Sorta sad they still don't offer OpenBSD though. OpenBSD -- the world's simplest and most secure Unix-like OS. Creator of the world's most used SSH implementation OpenSSH, the world's most elegant firewall PF, and the world's most elegant mail server OpenSMTPD. OpenBSD -- the cleanest kernel, the cleanest userland and the cleanest configuration syntax. https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/3232571-support-bsd-os- https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...

flavor8 13y ago
Saw your OpenBSD spam yesterday too. Do you develop for the project?
- hiphopyo 13y ago
  Nope, I'm not on that level yet. Just voicing my love that's all.
- 4ad 13y ago
  The thought of OpenBSD developers doing any kind of marketing, honest or otherwise is amusing. These are the last people that would do anything other than simply letting the work speak for itself.

timdorr 13y ago

$37.2m on a $153m post? That's a pretty big chunk of the company to give up. Looks like A16Z is going big on these guys. They're awesome, so that's great news!

3pt14159 13y ago
They wrote a blog post recently about how they are moving to more established companies.
pdq 13y ago
Most VC's want 20%-25% ownership. And DigitalOcean is a very capital intensive tech company, needing to buy/build machines, pay for electricity, rent rack space, and pay for bandwidth. Virtually all tech startups on the other hand just need to pay for writing software and renting said machines/hosting.

bananas 13y ago

Adding to the commentary on here with something not so gushing: * kernels lag terribly behind the distributions meaning you're wide open sometimes. * can't resize or add storage * no freebsd support or custom kernels * VM availability problems. If you want to have another box, you aren't guaranteed to get one. * no IPv6 * somewhat shonky security reputation. * cant deliver to yahoo mail from their AMS2 IPs I've been given even after filling in numerous forms at yahoo. Apart from that, they're the best hosts out there. I pick them over Linode, Hetzner and EC2 but not colo. Even at the price point they're at.

hiphopyo 13y ago
My logs show increased break-in attempts after moving to Digital Ocean. Their IPs are hot targets for hackers, making it all the more important to properly secure my droplets, something I'm having a hard time doing in Linux. With Linux, it's lot of beating around the bush. Overcomplicated config files, a lot of disabling and removing of things one don't need, having to deal with a messy and outdated firewall. With OpenBSD, lo and behold I'd have one of the simplest, most secure and well-configured droplets the world has ever seen.
- bananas 13y ago
  Yeah noticed that as well. First thing I do is (on debian), update packages and the kernel, install ufw (allow only 22), fail2ban, postfix and logwatch. Then setup a non privileged user, sudo, turn of root ssh and password auth and move to key based auth. Then I can sleep/configure the rest of the system. Been meaning to package this all up in an ansible playbook but I can't be bothered :( I'd be using FreeBSD if they offered it. Much like OpenBSD it's a lot more pleasant for sysadmins!
  - hiphopyo 13y ago
    Awesome, please do! Don't forget https://github.com/kickstarter/rack-attack https://github.com/kickstarter/rack-attack as well though.
  - dmix 13y ago

morganherlocker 13y ago

While not suitable for production operations, my go to has been a random one man vps shop. I have used him for years, because it is the cheapest plan I have seen. I pay $20/year per server, which makes it an easy decision to add another one whenever an idea comes up.

arca_vorago 13y ago

I've been using DO for about 5 months now, and love it. I still host my main websites other places (dreamhost, who, despite some issues, has been consistent in improvement, and is fair in prices), and I use DO for stuff like mumble servers, a few games, as a ssh proxy from less secure locations, and as some as a shared shell with friends for various skullduggery and fun. Very impressed with DO's service and price, but even more so ease of use. My main issue is that I would like a hardening script, instead of having to go through each new one I spin up and lock it down.

cdelsolar 13y ago
I just make a "Skeleton" instance that has all the hardening stuff already on it, then clone all my new machines off of this instance.
- avenger123 13y ago
  Any good guides for hardening Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?
- arca_vorago 13y ago
  I don't know why I hadn't thought of that, thanks for the tip.

zerop 13y ago

I use linode and was drawing comparisons between two: 1. 8 cores on linode is what binds me to it. Linode rules here 2. Digital ocean is cheaper than linode 3. More Network transfer in linode (minimum 2TB) 4. Digital ocean offers more RAM 5. Private network - Does not exist on Linode. Shame. DO Rules.. What else...

smanuel 13y ago
> 5. Private network - Does not exist on Linode. Shame. What do you mean? Actually private network did not exist on DO until recently and it's been on Linode for a long time.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
kyrra 13y ago
5) huh? DO added this in 2013[0], Linode has had it since 2008[1]. To add another. 6) Linode offers IPv6, while DO says it's coming "soon"[2] (and has been saying that for well over a year). [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/introducing-private-networking/ https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/introducing-privat... [1] https://blog.linode.com/2008/03/14/private-back-end-network-support/ https://blog.linode.com/2008/03/14/private-back-end-network-... [2] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-available https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-ava...
- zerop 13y ago
  OK. What I meant was the concept of VPC in EC2, should have addressed it correctly :). Basically following: 1. No public IP on each machine by default 2. Security settings managed through web UI and apply to linodes from UI.
velodrome 13y ago
However, you can pool the bandwidth on Linode. DO, you can't.
13y ago

recmend 13y ago

We run our infrastructure on both AWS and DigitalOcean. 1) DO consistently beats the price performance. 2) DO has simple pricing model --> No ondemand / reserved instances 3) AWS is more feature rich but DO continues to add new functionalities like private networking and new data centers

twistedpair 13y ago
Must be nice to have your providers competing with each other. Everyone knows Bezos loves a good ole race to the bottom better than anyone. I suspect we'll see even steeper AWS price cuts this year in response.
- recmend 13y ago
  yup, competition drives innovation and is good for the cloud ecosystem.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  S3 price cut was nice. The EBS storage price cut was even more extreme (and fantastic) going from 10 cents/GB to 5 cents/GB. At Amazon's scale, you can make it up on volume.
toomuchtodo 13y ago
Comparing DO to AWS is extremely disingenuous unless you're only comparing compute per $. Running in AWS, we get access to unlimited storage through S3, EBS volumes we can move between instances, a CDN, etc. Digital Ocean is like the place with a bunch of servers in the garage. Yes, its cheap. No, I would not trust it to run my business. I'm very interested to see how they think they can compete with AWS, considering Amazon's cost to acquire equipment and their AWS software engineering team.
- Patrick_Devine 13y ago
  You're right about EBS, however I kind of scratch my head over S3. Yeah, I guess it's integrated in the sense that you can access it from the same account, however, try creating an EC2 instance without a publicly addressable IP. You can't access S3 at all from your VPC, which makes S3 not usable in many use cases.

samwillis 13y ago

I would love to see DO or Linode do a S3 type service as well. I prefer the persistent virtualization of DO and Linode to EC2 but also want to use a nice quick persistent file store that isn't on my own slice. I could just use S3 from Linode but that would result more paid bandwidth and increased latency.

thu 13y ago
Shameless plug: I have started https://reesd.com/ https://reesd.com/. Not the S3 protocol, simply scp.
- royjacobs 13y ago
  How would you go ahead mounting this, though? SSHFS?
  - thu 13y ago
    I don't know exactly what I have to implement to support SSHFS. But really in my mind a service like Reesd (or S3) is used through a networked API to read and write files, not through an exposed file system (although sure it can be exposed that way, just that it is not the "philosophy"). E.g. if you implement a music streaming service, you would access mp3 through say a REST API, not on disk, before streaming them.
t0mas88 13y ago
Rackspace Cloud has both persistent disks for VMs (on SSDs in RAID 10, so fast and reliable) and an S3 like storage system called Cloud Files. Sounds like that's the combination you want?
- hackerboos 13y ago
  They do hourly billing as well which Linode is missing.
IBalic 13y ago
Second that. This is what still keeps me at AWS.

tshtf 13y ago

Broken DigitalOcean promises: IPv6 in Q4 2012: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-available https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-ipv6-ava... Ability to boot own kernel ("2-3 weeks from Feb 2013"): https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-ocean/suggestions/2814988-give-option-to-use-the-droplet-s-own-bootloader-?page=4&per_page=20 https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...

raiyu 13y ago
Completely agree with you, we definitely broke a few promises. We ran into this problem because we were used to our development cycle that we had in 2012, but in 2013 our growth really took off and we spent most of our time working on scaling challenges. That unfortunately pushed us back on a lot of different timelines. Now that we've grown the company from 5 people to over 50 and with this latest round we're finally catching up and able to move things forward at a better pace. We are reviewing and reprioritizing our product roadmap this weekend and next and will be providing more updated timelines and also issuing more updates if we fall behind on the new estimates. Thanks, Moisey
- beachstartup 13y ago
  the interesting thing about the hosting market is the less people pay, the more entitled they feel. not sure if digital ocean has customers in the $20k+/month range, but they are by far the least demanding. pretty incredible isn't it?
  - wting 13y ago
    > the interesting thing about the hosting market is the less people pay, the more entitled they feel. This is not restricted to web hosting, but common human behavior. I've freelanced as a web dev and wedding photographer in the past. Low paying clients typically demand much more than higher paying ones.
    - aduth 13y ago

lallysingh 13y ago

I'm a (moderately [1]) happy customer. But I have to ask, isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate? And in that vein, wouldn't the winner in each area just be the one who bought their hardware the most recently? Instructions/dollar are still increasing on each CPU generation, but it'll take more than one generation for each machine to pay itself off. So, whoever is closest to the current generation pays the least per instruction, and can charge the least. Or, maybe it's memory/bandwidth, which are mostly commodity, but slightly bottlenecked by the hardware (e.g, max on a motherboard, NIC throughput). Maybe the combination of prices in cpu, memory, and bandwidth leave enough variation between competitors to keep the field a little open? I donno. [1] Modulo concerns about their ssh key management. I haven't looked after the last news ping on it.

6cxs2hd6 13y ago
> isn't this industry slowly turning into just virtualized hardware leasing? After the management tools commoditize, and I think there's a solid risk of that, isn't it just price and DC-location that differentiate? Well, I don't think it's like aircraft or auto leasing. More like apartment or office leasing -- there's also a property management, maintenance, and operation dimension. You're not just paying for hardware in a rack. You're paying for electricity, cooling, fire prevention, connectivity, and some level of uptime. i.e. You're paying for not having to worry about a bunch of stuff, so you can focus on your core business problems. Even with standardized management software, at some point a human needs to go into a cage, or deal with the backhoe emergency. (OK, unless someday Amazon drones are deployed in data centers, instead of doing residential delivery. :))
- lallysingh 13y ago
  I like this analogy. It's like you're leasing an office for your program to work in. It works well for both pricing and differentiation.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

z92 13y ago

I am running these services in a $5/month DO droplet: dns [named], ntpd, httpd [apache], smtp [postfix], imap [dovecot], webmail [roundcube], vpn [pptpd]. It's taking 350MB off 500MB RAM. Now after adding getmail to back up gmail I am now wondering what more I can do with it.

kilburn 13y ago
Run your own jabber server using prosody: https://prosody.im/ https://prosody.im/
bad_user 13y ago
I tried installing postfix/dovecot but couldn't do it. Any recent tutorials I could try?
- ekspreso 13y ago
  I've always liked this one: https://workaround.org/ispmail/wheezy https://workaround.org/ispmail/wheezy And it's not for Debian only, I'm running it on Arch by following this tutorial.
- shirkey 13y ago
  Had you tried this tutorial? https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-up-a-postfix-e-mail-server-with-dovecot https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-set-u... I had used it to setup a test server and had no issues -- FYI, the date on the article is today, but the original article has been available for a few months so perhaps the article has been updated.

viana007 13y ago

"The company is also working on IPv6, load balancing and eventually storage." A simple solution for load balancing and auto-scale will be amazing :)

sneak 13y ago

DigitalOcean are dishonest with their customers. It's sad to see such a reputable firm throw in with people known to be liars.

gdubs 13y ago
I've found them to be a great service.
- ceejayoz 13y ago
  That doesn't really say anything about the comment you're replying to. You can be happy with a service regardless of their honesty, especially if you're not aware of any dishonesty that's occurring.
  - sneak 13y ago
    Yeah, I still use them for throwaway stuff occasionally because cheap and I still have credit sitting in my account. I won't top it up again but as long as you know they're somewhat dishonest and reckless with customer data then it's okay to use for stupid stuff like distributed builds or something (provided the source code you're building isn't private/secret/proprietary).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
rhizome 13y ago
Well, they're getting plenty of free market research in this thread.
middleclick 13y ago
It would be good if you can elaborate your point and back it up otherwise just saying this doesn't inspire much confidence.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

nissimk 13y ago

If you can scale your system using only 0.5 GB per node, you get more cpu per dollar since the 5$ and 10$ levels both have 1 cpu. Higher levels seem to be multiples of the 10$ level. Does anyone have experience with this in a production system with a lot of users? Are there horizontally scalable database systems that work well on many nodes with only 512MB each?

jackowayed 13y ago
Most DB systems will be tremendously helped by having far more RAM than that to cache, and also usually by having fewer nodes than you get when only having 20GB total disk space per node. The main place where I could see this being appealing would be complex analytic jobs (since they're more CPU-intensive), but even so, if on 512MB nodes it has to spill to disk because there isn't enough RAM (or transmit a bunch of data across the network because it split the job over two nodes) and on a bigger machine it didn't need to, you probably would have been better off with the bigger machine.

instakill 13y ago

I've been using DO for about a year, and I've been mostly happy with it but that's because the project I run http://www.mybema.com http://www.mybema.com doesn't receive as much traffic or active users as I'd like it to. DO has gone down far too many times in the last year for me to be able to be completely confident in them with a 100x userbase.

fareesh 13y ago

DO is great - I just wish features like adding extra disk space and monitoring bandwidth usage were here sooner.

fareesh 13y ago

DO is great - I just wish features like adding extra disk space and monitoring bandwidth usage were here sooner.

puppetmaster3 13y ago

I use them for remote DC's (assia, EU, etc.) at $5 each. Only their billing is a hot mess, mostly because they think it works and their customers are wrongly entering the CC #. For 4 months now, same problem and they have off-shore support that reads scripted answers. They just read the closest answer related to billing.

blhack 13y ago
Remote domain controllers? (Sorry, I'm missing something here, I think)
- shirkey 13y ago
  Probably "remote data centers" in this context

whalesalad 13y ago

Mark my words these guys are gonna be huge. Sure they are lacking in a lot of areas (like bananas mentions) but thats why you get VC funding and hire a badass like Jeff Lindsay (http://progrium.com http://progrium.com) I'm really excited to see these dudes take on AWS with a higher-level and more performant platform.

abhigupta 13y ago
Seems like they are also highly lacking in customer service https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/

blhack 13y ago

I've said many, many times that the best thing you can do as a budding dev is to spin up a VPS somewhere and start hacking. A while ago, I started giving out VPSs to friends of mine to get them to stop making excuses about why they can't code. Digital ocean, at $5/mo, has made this really easy :)

icpmacdo 13y ago
Hey man what are some cool things that you recommend I try with a VPS :) ?
- voltagex_ 13y ago
  * Try a programming language that you haven't tried before. * Set up a static blog engine like Pelican [0] * Learn Ansible [1] * Try a distro you haven't used before [0]: getpelican.com [1]: http://sendgrid.com/blog/ansible-and-digital-ocean/ http://sendgrid.com/blog/ansible-and-digital-ocean/ (although this really doesn't show off the power of something like Ansible)

dmunoz 13y ago

Only tangentially related, but when did DigitalOcean redesign their website? I think my initial dislike is due to it being changed, but there are tons of minor usability issues that I never noticed on their old website. I'm happy to see a view for new articles in the tutorials database [0], but at the moment it doesn't make any sense. When I hit it just now, an article from 11 minutes ago is above an article from 1 minute ago. Not only that, an article on the 52nd page says "less than a minute ago". From clicking around, it seems like some process has touched every article recently and all those times, and how they are sorted, are meaningless. Also, at the moment the new and tending view gives the exact same outcome, at least for the first page. [0] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles

btgeekboy 13y ago
> when did DigitalOcean redesign their website? Must have been very recent; I was on it just the other day with the old design.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

AWS is a cloud service provider with a huge ecosystem of services. Digital Ocean is a VPS provider. It's like comparing a harddisk manufacturer to Apple. Even EC2 is barely an overlap, since EC2 is a computation unit in the convenient form of a (very ephemeral) virtual server, not the virtual equivalent of an actual, permanent server. (And you're going to be in a world of hurt if you use them like that.)

erbo 13y ago

I moved my personal Web hosting from another provider to DO a couple of months ago. I'm spending the same amount I was paying the other provider, and I'm getting a hell of a lot more for my money. (I have two droplets running right now, one with my Web server and mail, one running some network services...and I have plenty of capacity on both to do more.) Plus, since it's an actual VPS as opposed to shared hosting, I have more control over it. I'm kicking myself for not having made the jump earlier.

dharma1 13y ago

took me 3 hours today to do a power cycle (reboot) vs 2 minutes on linode

aalpbalkan 13y ago

Classic TC title "to Take on AWS"... Don't make me laugh buddy. AWS is probably more than 1,000+ people operation with 30 different products and a marketplace, support and ops teams. DigitalOcean is purely a VM seller with no cloud or storage features.

pyrocat 13y ago

Maybe they could spend some of it on hiring a better marketing team. Holy shit those youtube ads are terrible.

checker659 13y ago

DigitalOcean banned me because I was using their server to fetch chromium's source code so that I could git-bundle/rsync it's 12 GB mammoth of a repo and download it to the third-world country that I live in (my network connection is really bad even though it's the best money can buy). Apparently I violated their TOS. As long as they limit their TOS to such narrow purposes as hosting a wordpress site or doing straight-forward things, I don't think they'll get too far. With AWS, amazon doesn't care if I spawn out a 1000 node render farm, as long as I'm paying, it's all fair game. Good luck anyways.

mjn 13y ago
> With AWS, amazon doesn't care if I spawn out a 1000 node render farm, as long as I'm paying, it's all fair game. For smaller numbers of instances it's true that you can spawn whatever you want and use them for whatever you want, as long as you pay the stated rates. But for larger numbers of instances you do actually have to tell Amazon what you want them for, and your requested use-case "will be considered". You can't just spin up 1000 instances and pay the stated rate without getting prior authorization; the API will block new instances after a certain point. Here are the default instance limits: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run_in_Amazon_EC2 http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run...
- checker659 13y ago
  Well, 1000 was just a number I blurted out.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Try Linode. Far better service in every way. I've done similar things on Linode (as well as used it for SSH tunneling to appear in a different country to reality), never a problem.

AznHisoka 13y ago

No matter where I go, the prices don't get any better than they do in OVH. A 240 GB SSD (2 X 120), quad core, 32 GB RAM, unlimited bandwidth for just $60/month?

hackerboos 13y ago
I'm with OVH. I like them and they are cheap but if your server fails then it can take hours to days getting back online.

ilaksh 13y ago

Its simple. It costs half as much as equivalent providers for their VPS. Or less than half in the case of AWS. And it actually works even though its so cheap. No matter how rich you are it just doesnt make sense to pay double or triple. The question is, do you really make money on $5 a month servers? I don't know if they actually are. The costs are for support people and now large numbers of engineers. The thing is with that much funding it doesn't really matter if their income is greater than expenses. They can continue for at least another few years regardless. During that time sane people who just need a VPS will take advantage of it. My recommendation for DO's business model is simply to set a precedent and make it a policy that if you pay only $5 then you don't get any kind of free support. That is the only real cost that sticks. So I suggest having a few different monthly support options available starting at zero support for $0 and up. That is the main business issue a provider like this has is the conflict between the desire to provide good support and the need to keep unit costs low. And the solution is to separate support out. The main challenge to doing that is sort of a cultural/expectations/marketing issue.

canadev 13y ago
I suspect they make a fair bit of money from people like me, who are lazy and/or have full-time jobs, and have commissioned a server or three and never actually use them.
raiyu 13y ago
Thanks for the great question. We are actually profitable on every virtual server that we sell. The reason we raised our seed round is that our growth began to outstrip our ability to acquire hardware and grow the business at the rate at which our customers were spinning up more droplets. The second round that we raised was again for the same reason. Growth has been completely unbelievable and we are humbled by the support that the community has given us. We thought that our initial Seed round would certainly be enough to cover our growth but quickly saw that growth was actually increasing so we made the decision to raise a second round in a rather short period of time. We were immediately impressed by Peter Levine's knowledge of the space and we are super excited about having a16z on board as our partners. This round has certainly provided ample funding for us to continue to expand not worry that our growth is going to outstrip our ability to finance it. Thanks, Moisey

da_n 13y ago

Despite generally rock-solid performance and uptime, I had a bad experience with DO recently. After experiencing repeated hardware failures on a node (with lots of downtime), I followed the advise of their support and did a snapshot and destroy of the failing droplet and immediately attempted to create a new one from the snapshot. It failed to build. I then tried to build again from the automated backup they create when a droplet is destroyed, this also failed. Support just did not seem to understand the issue I was having, I kept getting canned responses about doing a snapshot then building a new droplet from the image, so I gave up. The entire site had to be created again from backups on a different VPS provider. Surely their system should be able to migrate any droplets off failing nodes automatically, I mean hardware failures happen right?

ksec 13y ago

Let's hope DO finally get their act together. No Pooled Bandwidth Networking and Route, as well as capacity need some work. Linode is much better in this regards. No Custom Kernels IPs Problem. Still no deploy to different physical hardware by default. No Private Networking on most of its DC. And possibly many other small things i didn't mention. To me most of those are deal breaker. And my problems with them is that are not fixing or improving these problem quickly enough. While Linode's SSD are quickly approaching, and has none of those drawbacks.

gregpilling 13y ago

I am reading Ben Horowitz's book, and it is interesting to me that they made an investment into the same field as LoudCloud 15 years ago. Maybe they were just before their time.

blueskin_ 13y ago

Do they have IPv6 yet? What about actual security too? Maybe they'll stop the censorship if they want to be a real VPS player? (https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/ https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/) Oh, and I wish they'd use real industry terms, not stuff like 'Droplet'. That's just stupid. Right now, anyone at all who aren't GoDaddy or Network Solutions are better than Digital Ocean. You get what you pay for (AWS excepted, who are price gouging). Full disclosure: Happy Linode customer.

broodbucket 13y ago
News story about a cloud hosting provider? Here's some dissenting opinions about them. Half of them have some sort of merit. Disclosure: I have a vested interest in their direct competitor. Seriously, man? You point out some valid things but this post doesn't really serve a purpose.
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  No IPv6 is fairly serious. As is censorship to the point I wouldn't feel comfortable using them in case I angered Big Google at some point. Their general lack of HA and resource shortages make them look like amateurs. So what if I use Linode? I don't work for them. I use two other providers as well. My 'vested interest' in them is limited to my VPS there running. I don't get a discount for pointing out DO sucks and Linode don't ban me if I speak ill of someone they like. PS. Is a VPS host really a 'cloud hosting provider'? That term makes me think of overpriced individual services that aren't a self contained system, like AWS/EBS/their hosted databases.
thejosh 13y ago
Happy Linode customer, who gets hacked constantly and lies about it... Hmmmmmmmmm....
- blueskin_ 13y ago
  Excuse me? I've never been cracked, and chances are I know/care more about security than the average user here. Either you've misidentified me or you're lying about me.

ForFreedom 13y ago

In one line how is DO?

thezach 13y ago

I like AWS, and this is good for me - because competition is good for the customer.

gidgreen 13y ago

Digital Ocean does pretty well on price/performance at www.cloudlook.com (disclaimer: my site)