$250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Test for yourself, fire up similarly sized VPSs at both DigitalOcean and OVH and benchmark them running identical tests. The DigitalOcean VPSs are pretty fast but the OVH ones consistently perform better for both CPU and disk speed.
OVH supports startups just like the rest of the companies mentioned elsewhere in the thread too - see https://www.ovh.com/en/dlp/ for info. I have no affiliation with any of these companies except as a customer.
At least you can argue in an American court that you have standing if you have proof the NSA is spying on you
Court? Legal avenues? Legal boundaries?! Surely you jest.
They're obviously both groups you don't want to have as buddies, but the NSA has lost court battles before, and ends up complying with the rulings most of the time.
The French surveillance services openly gloat about working in a "judicial vacuum": basically all the rules of its operations are decided by the Prime Minister and their pals, and basically have no legislative boundaries.
Vultr: https://gist.github.com/bobobo1618/0972fc51f49d90fb37af
I just snatched a 6-core Xeon E5-1650v2 with 64GB RAM and 2x240GB datacentre SSD (samsung 840 Pro) for 70eur/month, no setup fee. A steal.
Been with them for a year, no downtime, great prices.
AWS 10 TB = $899,
OVH 10 TB = $89,
SYS (OVH SoYouStart) 10 TB = $30, (warning about 250mbit limit and minimal support applies)
DigitalOcean 10TB = $50 (using 10 $5 nodes which is admittedly less than optimal, just trying to get a raw bandwidth estimate though)
Perhaps this isn't a fair comparison, but if you're in an industry that can be bandwidth heavy it might be something to consider. I am and it's why we couldn't look seriously at AWS. For whatever reason AWS bandwidth is extremely expensive compared to the competition.
And you don't need to be a YC company......
Microsoft Azure gives hosting to startups under their Bizspark program - get over your prejudice - it's a great way to run Linux machines.
Softlayer and Rackspace I think also have programs for startups.
Any other companies offer free hosting to startups?
AWS actually has a pretty decent free tier for an entire year.
It strikes me that these cloud hosting companies are really interested in businesses that value growth above profits and are willing to ignore startups who try to manage costs to get to profitability more quickly.
They care about a company's growth, not its profit.
They'd rather get $1M/annum from an unprofitable VC-backed company than $100k/annum from a profitable bootstrap.
Azure is so inexpensive even without BizSpark it's kind of amazing to me. Having done startups in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, what people have available now is incredible IMO.</old man>
Doesn't sound very reassuring. Do they have a good track record with non-MS stacks?
Their team has been doing good work. For example, Azure had the first/best Docker integration of all the cloud providers. What they had was superseded by docker-machine and swarm eventually, but they were definitely thinking ahead of the curve.
As a user of Azure, I admit that find some aspects of the service unusual, such as requiring users to pick a globally-unique identifier for every server they boot. As in, they ask you to provide a string for your instance's name, then they provide a hostname based on that string; if the hostname (thus the name you pick) is taken, you'll get an error.
I think they've just won favor of startups recently because they've been subsidizing their cloud costs. If theres one thing Microsoft has, its business savvy.
Granted, I'm on Digital Ocean now for my sites (most more cost effective) - but it was fun to play around with while it was free.
All of these providers have multiple levels. There's a cheap option of usually a few hundred or thousand then the upscale option with 5 or 6 figures over a year.
We got into higher tier AWS Activate for $25k/year by just asking. Then we worked with a MS Azure evangelist to get us into the $120k/year program. We would've made it but declined because we asked Softlayer and they gave us $120k/year first and their network was a better fit for us.
Lesson: JUST ASK. There are entire teams of people at these companies who are working to get more customers onboarded and will do whatever they can to help you.
In any case, I have no issue with listing them as an option, not everyone feels the same way I do.
My curiosity piqued, I just tried to sign up for BizSpark:
1. I go to http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/
2. It's "Down for maintenance"
3. Try again in an hour
4. Still down
5. Lightbulb goes off, check status.azure.com
6. "We're having issues."
7. Hmmmmm... Probably not a coincidence.
Which is a shame because I really appreciate and enjoy what the DO engineers have done.
Nonetheless, I feel slighted, and while I had been otherwise happy with the service I am now all of a sudden incentivized to explore places more ecumenical.
The feeling for me will probably pass, but I wonder how many other people have been similarly slighted.
Given that OP claimed the feeling will pass, I don't think "economical" quite makes sense.
You’re a startup, and a significant percentage of the money you sent is directly given to your competitors.
Which is what’s happening here. If you’re a non-YC startup using DO, you’re directly financing your competitors.
If your company employs less than three people then $X amount of service provided per month.
The underlying feeling remains – I feel DO ought to offer the terms of the YC deal to startups attached to other qualified incubators.
Whether that is practical or possible is a non-trivial discussion.
Nevertheless, I believe that outcome would feel fair, and it would right what feels wrong here.
(Incidentally, we are not at this time attached to any incubators.)
So you aren't subsidizing anyone.
But that's not always a bad thing.
Don't waste your time and energy worrying about what other folks have, and focus the same into achieving your goals and getting some credits won't make that big of a difference....
Humans have weird triggers for emotions. Seeing something that benefits a group that you are not a part of but fairly equivalent to is a typical trigger, even if it does make sense to a degree. When I first saw this, as a non-YC-member, I felt pretty similar. I'm sure it's simply a business relationship in which either digital ocean is making money due to the advertising or YC is subsidizing it (though the latter is unlikely).
So it makes perfect sense from a business standpoint but I think your feelings are equally valid. I would love to see digital ocean partner with other incubators or provider offers to any start-ups in general.
We do work with a number of other incubators. DO itself is an alumni of TechStars. We have some stuff in the works with 500 Startups. We're definitely interested in working with other incubators as well. If you're involved with one, feel free to reach out to me at asb@digitalocean.com I'll make sure to get you to the right folks at DO.
If you're not in an incubator, check out the link I shared below. There's still a lot our customer success team can do for you.
YC isn't the end all of all, but it's starting to feel like it is becoming a mandatory part of the startup process (which is NOT ok).
1) If you feel you're funding direct competitors...we're talking about startups. More of a validation of your base idea than a real edge for the competition. It's also not horrible to know your direct competition uses the same infrastructure.
2) Otherwise...this lets DO add more customers from the group of startups, which you're in, and thus gain more experience with their typical problems and needs which should benefit you (ever so slightly).
There are startups and there are YC startups. If you've got in to YC you've probably already proven your idea and you're generating revenue - YC is about accelerating rather that actually starting after all. If you're directly competing with a YC company then this does put you at a disadvantage, especially if you're in a space where computational power is a big part of your burn.
Mind you, hasn't AWS given huge blocks of credits away to startups in lots of accelerators since forever? This isn't really a new problem for competitors.
Secondly, with the high attention of YC companies using the service, this may help push innovation forward for things like improved firewall and private networking, managed databases for backup and redundancy and an S3 comparable file store (thus no transfer costs).
If giving $250K to YC companies to create that demand for them to implement it, I'm all for it.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/08/digitalocean-raises-83m-ser...
It's a nice deal for startups, but the average startup will save more money in the long run by developing efficient applications that likely won't come close to a $100k credit in the first year. This will also likely result in a much more scalable app and much less technical debt.
From https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/
5.8 As of March 6, 2015, redemption of promotional credit is limited to 12 months from the date of issue (unless otherwise stated), at which time the credit will expire. Upon redemption, promotional credit expires after 12 months unless otherwise defined in the terms of the promotion. For instances where promotional credit was issued or redeemed prior to March 6, 2015, that credit will expire on March 6, 2016.
No custom kernel support
1. Digital Ocean does not allow you to run your own kernel natively.
2. Digital Ocean droplet kernels are infrequently updated.
3. These kernels often contain relevant security vulnerabilities.
4. This has been a known issue since 2013.
5. You can kexec a kernel, but this is an annoying workaround.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-i-b...
Private networking is a joke
1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-isol...
IPv6 support
1. Took forever to implement, and the timetable broke promises to customers.
2. Inferior. Digital Ocean still won't give you a /64 per standards.
How many people run custom kernels?
I have used a kernel with realtime extensions enabled but that was a very special case and wouldn't run that in a VM anyway.
How many people want to run an updated kernel without known security vulnerabilities? Or with fixes to relevant issues?
How many people call that "a custom kernel"? Haven't heard anybody call an upstream distro kernel update a "custom kernel".
Is this a typical conversation people have?
"Hey Jim, did you update the servers to get the latest OpenSSL security fixes? - Yap, I compiled and installed a custom kernel".
Maybe they need to run a better distro with faster security update response?
That is what custom means in this context. "Not yours." Read accordingly; you've made the same flawed point at several spots in this thread.
I thought they used KVM for some reason... But I guess if they use Xen they yeah, they are stuck with whatever kernel they get.
It's no longer true that Xen needs to mean managing the kernel outside the VM. PVGRUB can be specified as the 'kernel' to boot, which will chainload a grub which can be managed inside the VM, which lets you run any kernel you wish and manage the boot process as you would on a non-virtualized system.
Amazon uses Xen for their EC2 product, and as I understand they too now set people up with pvgrub.
I read "custom kernel" as in "replace distro-supplied kernel and compile your own with some custom flags and patches".
It's your virtual machine. You should be able to pick a kernel. This isn't for running Andrew Morton patches, as some of the comments imply.
Is there a good reason they can’t automatically add all new kernels from the major distributions?
This is pretty bad compared to an AWS VPC -- you basically have to manage and sync your own iptables between all your nodes.
If you're doing that defense in depth on a physical network, I'm impressed by your dedication but would avoid your work for wasting resources.
Might be a good time to mention we're hiring network engineers as well:
https://www.digitalocean.com/company/careers#software-engine...
Far more egregious is that they silently drop port 25 on IPv6. This means that enabling IPv6 will cause mail problems for some destinations (destinations that support IPv6, like Google). When asked they say it's because a /64 is too much address space in the hands of potential (ab)users. This fails to understand that an IPv6 /64 is conceptually similar to an IPv4 /32. (In fact, there are pretty reasonable arguments for assigning IPv6 /56s or /48s with the same semantics as how IPv4 /32s are assigned.)
That is on circa 600,000 emails per month sent to gmail.
You are using your users' gmail credentials? Or are you simply delivering over 587 the same as you would over 25?
This is really the only part of the list that I think has merit. I love Digital Ocean in general, but my own gripe is with their API and its lack of proper automatic key management:
https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...
I have no affiliation with them.
With near-zero traffic on my interface - and for an internally facing VM, the IP address of which has never been published in any DNS, their DDoS 'protection' system decided I was under DDoS attack and blackholed my IP with their upstreams. I investigated and my conclusion is that the most likely cause was that their system mis-idenfied the overlay networking software I was using (which communicates over UDP) as DDoS traffic.
I raised this issue with support, who did not manage to help. Amongst other things, they told me that they didn't retain logs long enough to be helpful. I agreed that I would raise the issue with them again should it re-occur.
The second time they blackholed my IP, they didn't even bother telling me. And when I filed a support ticket, they took somewhere around an hour to even respond - during the time they've taken my system offline, I expect them to make themselves available.
When I tried calling their parent company on the phone, they were downright rude with me. I understand they don't usually do phone support, and that's fine, but if you've told me that (A) you can only help me resolve a problem during an incident because you don't keep logs, and (B) don't make yourself available to me through your regular support channels, don't get pissy with me for phoning you. And especially don't completely refuse to do anything remotely helpful.
I ended up terminating the VM and moving that workload elsewhere. I don't have time to be fixing other people's networks, especially when they can't be bothered to participate in the process.
It's a shame, because their BGP & AnyCast stuff looked really interesting, and I'd love to explore their offerings more. But I don't currently have confidence I can deploy anything with them in production, because when something goes wrong with their service, they don't appear competent at making themselves available to fix things.
(For the record, in some respects I consider one of my companies to be a competitor to both Digital Ocean & Vultr. But I like to be familiar with the competition, so I use them for some things. It also provides us a way to put workloads in locations we wouldn't otherwise be able to justify.)
Right now, Debian 8, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 15.10, Fedora 23 and FreeBSD all allow you to control your kernel version. The next LTS release of Ubuntu in April, 16.04, will also allow you to customize your kernel.
For Droplets still running with external kernels, we import new ones on a regular basis as they are released. If you happen to need one that hasn't been imported yet, just open a support ticket and the team will do so.
http://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean...
What's exactly does this mean? Could you please post the link to the documentation page that explains how?
Only some of the older images still use the old method of selecting the kernel from the Control Panel. The rest that Andrew mentioned use the bootloader and kernel from the droplet's image itself.
Huh? I made a droplet just a week ago and it was assigned a whole /64. Maybe this is only a recent change, but you should know that it's here now.
> 1. Your private IP addresses are accessible by everyone in the same datacenter.
This is also the case at Linode. Besides AWS VPC, are there VPS providers that give your hosts their own private VLAN?
If you've got a DoS issue, you definitely need a 3rd party DoS protection service. Cloudflare free works pretty well
I don't understand this claim, at least when it comes to services like Digital Ocean and Linode. Maybe it's a statement made out of selection bias. Yes, Ycombinator batches have had their share of hyper growth startups. Yes, hyper growth can lead to scaling challenges and expenses.
That being said, it strikes me that most early stage (or any stage for that matter) tech companies do not and may never have that kind of problem. If I had to venture a guess, the normal case for tech startups is closer to the SaaS company with a few hundred business customers. For these more common cases, it's hard to imagine server costs on Digital Ocean running much higher than what you'd see in a cable internet bill.
AWS is far more competitive now and relatively inline with offerings from Digital Ocean and Linode.
This is exactly people use Rails in startups, dev time is mminimised, at the cost of speed, and hence a requirement for more servers.
I wonder to what extent YC companies default to AWS though. Based on what I've heard from acquaintances at Microsoft, I'm not sure they're getting the traction they'd like.
also, it's mainly just for your app hosting, right? You can use DO and RDS / Dynamo DB / Lambda etc...
Also, I have some bad feedback for you (sorry). We ran a workshop last night, and during the workshop, everybody signed up for an account (about 15 people at once). Presumably because we were all connecting from the same place, people started getting "fraud alert" (or whatever you guys were calling it) problems, and had to do additional steps to verify their accounts.
One guy actually had somebody asking for his passport (wat?), and then for links to his social media profiles. That seems EXTREMELY skeezy. It also ground the workshop more-or-less to a halt.
Is there somebody that I can talk to in advance next time so that the same thing doesn't happen again?
Just one piece of anecdotal evidence, but I did not find this to be case. I received terrible support, responses, and lack of responses from Digital Ocean to the point that I no longer use their services for anything serious.
Here's one of the issues I experienced before I pulled the plug:
I wanted to perform the simple task of creating an image from a backup and spinning it up into a server so I could have a duplicate dev server. Seemed very straightforward. Clicked a few buttons in their "dead simple" control panel.
Their timer said "57 seconds remaining" but it never finished. I tried to contact support. 3.5 hours later I received a message saying that it could take hours to complete due to them:
"zeroing out the storage space to be used in order to ensure previous data in those blocks are erased."
I was further told that the advertised timer works for their images they have already setup, but everything else they couldn't give any ETA on. So, the timer was just eye candy not really attached to anything:
"Unfortunately, this part of the process can take a while, especially for larger droplets or droplets based on backups or snapshots. Smaller droplets and those that are based on images we provide are generally faster and should finish creation within the advertised 55 seconds, as long as the system is not under high load.
It's hard to give an accurate ETA for droplets of this size since there are many variables that go into the provisioning process, but note that the process could go up to three or so hours if there's high load at the time. I apologize for any inconvenience with this."
I was attempting to recreate an image from a backup they did. It was of the smallest droplets they have available and it wasn't near capacity.
The server never did actually get setup. Instead, just falling off of my "dead simple" dashboard every time, never hitting active. I mentioned this in the support ticket I had open, since the problem was obviously not resolved. Here was the response:
"Glad to be of assistance.
We appreciate you being a Digital Ocean customer and please let us know if we can be of further assistance!"
This was the third person to respond on my ticket; a different person for every response.
I left them and never looked back. You can find similar experiences on this website or by some brief Googling.
Ultimately, DO is probably still fine to get things going or play around, but I wouldn't trust it for anything serious or anything where you would expect a timely or decent response to help you ensure you can get work done that day. I certainly wouldn't trust DO with anything even close to $250k worth of operations.
Zach here, Director of Support at DigitalOcean. I found the ticket you mentioned, no question that we did a poor job replying in 2014 to this ticket.
Since your experience a while back, I can tell you that we've improved tremendously. There's no longer an issue where we can't determine the status of a create. Also, our response time has improved considerably, and on average for the past 6 months you would get a reply in under 30 minutes.
I'm going to shoot you an email as well about your account, but please feel free to keep the conversation public if you have any other questions or comments.
Thanks! Zach zach@digitalocean.com