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The Meteoric Rise of DigitalOcean
- akerl_ 13y agoThe growth chart is missing "IPv6 Addresses".
- andrewmunsell 13y agoBased on your comment, I'm not sure if you know this, but DigitalOcean doesn't offer Ipv6 at any of their data centers right now, so it'd just be a flat line at 0.
- korzun 13y agoI think he means that the statistics do not include IPV6 space other providers use.
- gabemart 13y agoI'd be very interested to know if DO make a positive margin on their $5 droplets. I feel like I push a fair amount of data through mine, and plan to push more in the future using a bunch of $5 droplets and round-robin DNS. I'd feel better if I knew I was still a +EV customer.
- jcampbell1 13y agoThe hardware cost is the same. 128 * $5 == $640, they charge a fixed $10/GB RAM. They do have higher support costs, credit card transaction fees, and ip address costs. They would probably lose money if the primary users of the $5/month plans were doing punishing things like video encoding, but my guess is the vast majority are no load users. I once read someone that was doing hosting, said the larger plans were actually more challenging. 4 high volume forum sites on the same host would cause IO contention. Digital Ocean has SSDs and they mix and match sizes on the physical host, so it should be less of a problem for them.
- ap22213 13y agoUntil Digital Ocean came around, I'd always thought it bizzare that there weren't more serious competitors to AWS. Under the 'competitive advantage' model, it is somewhat unusual that a diversified company like Amazon could be the most efficient vendor at providing a 'commodified', targeted offering like cloud hosting.
- smacktoward 13y agoI dunno... it seems like the likely winner in a commoditized market would be the one with the greatest economies of scale, since that would drive down their costs and allow them to underprice their competitors. (If a product is truly commoditized, then price is the only thing vendors have to compete on.) And few companies have economies of scale to the degree that Amazon does. This also provides a classic "moat" -- the more sophisticated AWS' offerings become, the more it would cost potential competitors to even attempt to compete with them.
- asharpe 13y agoThe costs of your own hardware are significant. A decent initial foray will be at least $1m when you think about servers, routers, switches, etc. Against VC money flowing around, that doesn't seem like much, but it is a big stretch for many start-ups to have that much cash tied up in Capital.
- korzun 13y agoIt would be interesting to see how many of those customers come and go. I have and know people who use DO but it's mostly for early stage development prior to moving to a dedicated/customers infrastructure.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jjoe 13y agoI feel like DO has no competitive advantage. They sell servers but then anyone with a reasonable infrastructure and programmers on payroll can scale the way they have. So while it's an impressive rise, it can't be taken for granted. Because all could falter over night. That's just the nature of the business and industry.
- mplewis 13y agoWhat do you mean by no competitive advantage? When they launched, they were selling Linode's offerings with SSD for 1/4 the price.
- showerst 13y agoThere are 4 avenues I think you can take in this market - 1) Price 2) Scalability/API (As in AWS style of instant spinup/spindown) 3) User experience for the dashboard and creation process 4) Configurability of your instances DO is currently fighting on 1 and 3 with a dash of two, which I think is very smart. They're not fighting with lowendbox providers for the lowest possible price, but they're competing with linode and AWS for relatively low cost, but with good stability and ease of use. You can't spin up/down quite as easily as amazon, but they're not targeting that exact use case anyway. I've moved a few things over to DO from linode and will continue to, because although performance is a bit less, the price points are far cheaper. I think there are a lot of people who use Linode/AWS for boxes that just hum along doing some simple server task(s) that would gladly move to DO for 1/4 of the price, as long as the stability/customer service is there. I read a rumor on a previous post that they were working on a way to customize an instances storage & RAM but at the current low price points, which I think would be huge.
- unethical_ban 13y agoYou hit the nail on the head in a way I didn't regarding the core competencies in the market. I think RAX and Amazon kick ass at 2 and 4, and DO is working on 1 and 3.
- bryanlarsen 13y ago
- mplewis 13y agoArticle is from November 2013.
- crazygringo 13y agoTo people wondering if this is a temporary thing, or what Digital Ocean's competitive advantage is (since someone else can come along with the same price point): It's that the web interface, and process for starting a "droplet", is dead-simple and super-elegant, their support docs are comprehensive and easy to use, and they even do things like let you manage your own DNS records. And it all just works. Digital Ocean is 100x easier and quicker to use than AWS, without exaggeration. It's easy to start a hosting provider -- it's really hard to make one that is also really high quality, intuitive and easy to use, and then cheap on top of it. I've used Digital Ocean for a couple of years for small personal things, I'm actually currently in the process of moving a bigger site from AWS to Digital Ocean, at this point it's turning into a no-brainer.
- mikeash 13y agoI've been using DO for a few months. I recently set up an AWS instance to use as a proxy, as I wanted something cheap in East Asia temporarily, and AWS's Tokyo region fit the bill. Holy crap is AWS bizarre to set up. I got it done without too much trouble in the end, but man, the UI is just atrocious. It took way too long just to find the right place to go to get started with the process.
- mgkimsal 13y agoheaven help you if you manage to start an instance that has n permanent storage then reboot it. apparently that's the default, and you need to (imo) go out of your way to get permanent storage. I understand the use case for the former, but the UI and docs for the latter use case were, last I looked, pretty difficult to grok. Yeah, AWS has some functionality/scaling features that DO and Linode don't, but it's a smaller set of functionality than I think some people initially assume.
- mikeash 13y agoThat confused the hell out of me. I still don't actually understand it. I was just after an ssh host that I could bounce a SOCKS proxy through so it didn't really matter to me, but I tried to figure out what the different storage options meant and just couldn't.
- andrewflnr 13y agoSerious question: is it really worth it for a company like DO to support Windows? It seems like they maintain their edge by avoiding the kind of complexity that Windows would entail.
- loumf 13y agoIt's a significant market, not just in size, but in willingness to spend money. I didn't find Windows complex -- One nice thing about the MS world is the homogeneity of the stack, which makes a lot of things easier if it works for you. If you want to run something else, you probably don't want to run it on Windows anyway.
- matwood 13y agoOne nice thing about the MS world is the homogeneity of the stack, which makes a lot of things easier if it works for you. Yeah, one of things I miss about the MS stack. The whole freedom is slavery thing. If the MS stack has what you need it usually has a 'this is how to do X' and it works well together.
- bluedino 13y agoYou can't do a Windows VM for $5 between the facts that you need more RAM, more HD, and a Windows license.
- snuxoll 13y ago$25/mo minimum at DO's current pricing structure, 2GB minimum RAM ($20) plus enough disk space (40GB minimum) and a SPLA license ($5-10/mo for Server 2012 standard, IIRC)
- mberning 13y agoI tried them out a few months ago looking to move my infrastructure from AWS to DO. I was experiencing terrible IO performance on a fairly expensive instance. Submitted a support ticket about it. Their response was 'this is normal'. Killed all my droplets and canceled my account the next day. To me they are running a pretty transparent pump and dump scheme. Promise a great service, sell it at a loss, get a ton of users, do a shit job of supporting it, take on investment money, cash out early, profit.
- reqres 13y agoOut of curiosity, which plan were you using? The basic $5 VPS?
- mberning 13y agoHA! I was using their $160/mo option with 16gb of RAM.
- yock 13y agoThat's a pretty serious accusation. Do you have any other evidence beyond "This one instance I had performed badly"?
- vacri 13y agoThe evidence supplied is supports response "This is normal", not "one instance was bad".
- nathancahill 13y agoThey were having SERIOUS issues a few months ago. I had been scaling up to around $600/month in droplets, and almost canceled and walked away. The IO was horrible, packet loss was massive and droplets were crashing all the time. Fortunately, they've gotten much better again and I haven't had a single issue in 3 months. I think they got really popular suddenly and couldn't handle the explosive growth.
- 13y ago
- mstrem 13y agoAs the article is from Jun 2013 I should point out the following link (also linked at top of article): http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com We have been publicly tracking DO at that address on a monthly basis (I work for Netcraft).
- unethical_ban 13y agoSeems no one here so far has mentioned Rackspace. Let's start by saying that DO has fewer features for a complex deployment: No load balancing, no private subnets, (IIRC) no IPv6 at the moment. No "cloud files" or S3 equivalent, the scaling isn't as automatic as RAX or AWS can provide. DO can't host Windows (which still matters for many existing operations, don't fool yourself). RAX gives more information and granularity on its VM levels. Finally, support. RAX can do managed services, dedicated advisors, IT support and servers for sensitive data. DO has none of this. --- There are two things DO does that I appreciate (though neither concept is new): * $5 hosting. RAX is a minimum of $16/mo now, for the same VM strength. * Application deployments. The ability to one-click deploy Wordpress/Gitlab/etc. is pretty damned awesome. DO is great for technically competent people who don't need a lot of infrastructure, or otherwise have a consistent level of server/bandwidth requirements for their servers.
- munger 13y agoI like the Rackspace cloud offering a lot too. We use it exclusively for our business. I see Rackspace as being in the middle of the spectrum if DO is at the bottom and AWS is at the top in terms of more features/higher price. Also the VPS up-time we have experienced on over 20 nodes for the past 3 years on Rackspace cloud has been pretty great, all things considered.
- rgbkrk 13y agoAwesome. Actually Rackspace does have a deployments option under servers that can deploy Wordpress, GitLab, and others. It even handles some of the configuration details right out of the box.
- madsushi 13y agoI like DO for backup/secondary purposes, but until they allow more than 1 public IP per droplet (even for a fee!), I won't use them for any serious production.
- amorphid 13y agoI find it amusing that their servers aren't much more expensive than what some companies charge for an additional IP.
- asdf3asdf 13y agoMeteors don't rise.
- davexunit 13y agoI currently use digitalocean for my blog, but I was recently pointed towards this article which concerns me greatly: https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-ocean-threatened-to-shut-down-my-blog-if-i-didnt-remove-or-edit-a-blog-post/ https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/digital-ocean... If I cannot have freedom of speech on my blog, I will have to find a new provider that respects my freedom.
- bduerst 13y agoThat's a bit of a stretch, even for equivocation. Did you read the article in question? http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks-out-on-manny-cardenas-and-second-class-citizens-at-the-plex/ http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks... It took four comments, out of context, and made it into a slam. Bias of the rant aside, DO says that it was because of a TOS violation on privacy and defamation. It comes pretty close to outing where the person lives, what websites they run, and certainly makes plenty of assumptions about the four comments. It reads like someone bitter lost an internet argument when they couldn't bait the employee into saying something incriminating, and they wanted revenge.
- slantview 13y ago> It reads like someone bitter lost an internet argument when they couldn't bait the employee into saying something incriminating, and they wanted revenge. Exactly this. This guy baited someone to say something about his employer, posted quotes out of context and with obvious bias. The guy seems like an asshole.
- swah 13y agoNo cheap VPS in latin america, unfortunately... at least we have AWS in SP.
- digitalsushi 13y agoI'm trying to find a VPS provider that can do IPv6 and multiple IPv4. Digital Ocean really surprised me in having no IPv6 offering. What really surprised me is that you can't get IPv6 on Amazon's EC2. You can get a v6 address for a load balancer, but that's surely not the same thing. Linode does actually almost fit the bill, except that they require manual authorization for an additional IPv4 addresses. So there's no way to script deployment of such a system. I have gone through about 10 VPS providers and the message is clear: IPv4 is fast running out. So it's especially frustrating when we can't even get v6 addresses yet. (To pre-empt, no, it's not ssl web hosting in which I require an extra address.)
- anonova 13y agoMaybe check out 6sync (http://6sync.com/ http://6sync.com/)? They are both ipv4 and ipv6 capable.
- scott_karana 13y agoI've used Ramnode to good effect, so far. You get 16 IPv6 addresses by default, without even having to ask for 'em.
- xxpor 13y ago16 addresses? Or 16 /64's?
- scott_karana 13y ago16 addresses total. I suspect they've got loads of addresses available if you ask.
- eli 13y agoDumb question: what do you use IPv6 for? What am I missing by not having it?
- api 13y agoUnfortunately not much yet, but you're helping make way for the future. I say unfortunately because IPv4's limitations are going to hurt more and more as the Internet gets more hosts online.
- xarien 13y agoCan we please stop using "headline grabbing math?" You know what would be a more impressive growth percentage? Starting at when they had 1 server. If you look at the chart, every other competitor save linode had faster growth by the unit (as opposed to percentage). However, with that said, my complaint is just regarding the article and not with Digital Ocean themselves. I think they're pretty kick ass...
- dalek2point3 13y agoI just setup a webserver and it literally took 3 minutes and one piece of documentation reading. Very, very impressive. I remember doing this for the first time on AWS, and it took a while! http://162.243.202.22/ http://162.243.202.22/
- TheMagicHorsey 13y agoIf you are writing a Python, PHP, Go, or Java web app, I think using Google App Engine is the easiest way to get your app live. DigitalOcean is easy, but it still requires you to know a bare minimum of Linux-Fu. App Engine is just brain-dead easy. You literally execute a deploy script locally. And as an added bonus, if you use the Google datastore instead of their RDBS it should scale smoothly too.
- fideloper 13y agoThat's more Heroku style. I get the impression that DO is for those WITH Linux-foo.
- genwin 13y agoI ruled out GAE due to the vendor lock-in issue and reports they raised their prices 3X+ on short notice.
- crassus 13y agoIt works until you want to use PIL or LXML and need to compile a python library with native extensions, or if you want to use a datastore other than google's. At least, you couldn't do those things a few years ago.
- dagw 13y agoYour point about compiled python libraries is correct in principle, but it's worth pointing out the GAE python comes with PIL and LXML (and a bunch of other libraries) pre-installed these days: See https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/libraries27 https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/li... for a complete list. But,yea if you need a library that's not on that list and uses native extensions, then you're kind of screwed.
- crassus 13y agoOh, that's cool. It makes GAE a lot more appealing.
- jtreminio 13y agoMy FOSS app [0] lets you easily configure a full stack LAMP (and other configurations) server using Vagrant/Puppet, which you can then use to easily deploy locally or Digital Ocean (and Rackspace, and AWS, and coming soon Azure). PRs welcome :) [0] https://puphpet.com https://puphpet.com
- lutorm 13y agoIs "meteoric rise" really an expression? Meteors generally go down with tremendous speed...
- broodbucket 13y agoMeteoric: similar to a meteor in speed, brilliance, or brevity: a meteoric rise to fame I think the phrase exists in a quantum state of dumb and not-dumb.
- mark_lee 13y agoTo be fair, linode has better documents, the library, DO is getting better and better meanwhile linode's documents grow slowly, partly because they already have a large volume, I have VPSs at both of them.
- blueskin_ 13y agoDigitalOcean need to get their technical side up to scratch. Still not having IPv6 at this point makes them a total joke, and the security issues around host keys and VM deletion seem amateurish. My main issue with them, and a reason I wouldn't use them even with the IPv6 issue fixed, however, is the censorship on-demand for the owners' friends.
- 0- 13y agoyeah they are growing, we noticed: my "ids" sensors grab malicious traffic originating from their ranges more frequently, compared to those originating from aws (which are plenty as well).
- buster 13y agoUhm.. yes.. So to read those numbers correctly: "Amazon, Alibaba and Hetzner each get more NEW servers online in 6 months, then what DigitalOcean created in its entire lifetime". It's all about the wording.. Not to downplay DigitalOceans achievement, though. But people should look at those statistics in another way...
- recmend 13y agoI have used AWS, DO, Linode. If you don't need the advanced functionalities that are only available on AWS infrastructure, go with DO. DO beats the price performance compared to Linode while the API, documentation, and support are comparable.
- simonlporter 13y agohave you taken a look at www.bluemix.net the new beta platform from IBM for developers ? It includes access to Watson - the cognitive computing capability
- simonlporter 13y agoHave you taken a look at www.bluemix.net ? The beta version of IBMs new open cloud platform for developers that includes access to Watson - the cognitive computing platform that won Jeopardy