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Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

Hi! I'm a member of the Community team at DigitalOcean. I wanted to thank you for your kind words about our tutorials. This kind of feedback means a lot to us. We're glad we could help you get your web site set up.

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Just want to add on to this. Whenever I'm looking up a piece of software and I find a Digital Ocean tutorial on it, I know I'm in good hands.

Have yet to find a tutorial that wasn't great!

Amen. DO gets it when it comes to docs.

Your guides and tutorials are at the same level as stackoverflow for figuring out problems

How do I fix this: stackoverflow first hit

How do I do this: if DO isn’t first hit already I scroll down to yours

Thanks for the tutorials and for keeping them up to date. I’m probably not their target audience for the most part, but when I need to do something in an unfamiliar stack, [stack name] + digitalocean is usually my first search. Wish you guys had a little more of a professional oriented products (think AWS/GCP) and no ‘max 10 servers’ kind of rules so I could use it.

> no ‘max 10 servers’ kind of rules

You can contact their Support to get that increased. Just guessing at the reason, but if there was no limit, what happens if someone hacks your account and spins up a 100,000 node cryptocurrency mining farm?

The same thing applies to AWS, and AWS doesn't have '10 servers maximum' limit.

Beyond anything, it tells people about their target audience, which is indie development. That's fine, and it's a great market to be in. But in the case I have to spin up 17 servers in 24 hours in three continents, I can't really afford to deal with DigitalOcean's support under that kind of stress. This doesn't happen often, but when it happens, it absolutely breaks you.

AWS also has a initial soft limit on EC2 instances. I dont remember what it is but its <100

Yeah, I’m sure they have — It’s just that AWS’ limits are a lot more compatible with a startup (vs an indie developer) than DigitalOcean’s.

FWIW, I find AWS limits confusing and seemingly random. Also, the fact that you can't limit total spending is _very_ unfriendly to (at least indie, as you point out) developers. I have no experience with DO though, maybe that will change with this offering.

Have you actually dealt with their support though? Your example of going from (seemingly) zero servers to 17 across 3 continents in 24 hours (indicating unforeseen absolutely incredible traction and growth) seems significantly less likely than getting a response from their support team increasing usage limits within the same timeframe.

AWS most definitely has service limits that apply to all products including ec2 for this exact (and other abusive) reasons. In fact, the aws limits are even more convoluted and can hit at random if not tracked. More details here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_ru...

Yeah, as I was building out some apps over the past year it was a game of ‘which account limit will I hit next’. Most of them require a support ticket to be raised, and justification.

Hey Rolleiflex - Thanks so much for being a DigitalOcean customer! We would be happy to increase your Droplet limit if you get in touch. Just visit the support link from your Cloud control panel to make the request or drop me a line directly (first name @).

Thanks! Zach Director of Support, DigitalOcean

Hey Zach, thanks for chiming in. I’ve moved on from DO to AWS a long time ago, but I appreciate the sentiment.

May be they should allow customer to set higher default limit instead of 10? Which is silly.

( I never knew there was such a low limit of 10 instances. )

For what it's worth, my account has a limit of 25 and I've never requested an increase. So I guess after some period of use and payment they trust you and increase your limit automatically?

I've been a DO customer for 5 years but I'm not sure when my droplet limit was increased.

I thought the limit was for your protection and you can get it increased just by contacting them?

I preemptively contacted Support to verify my bona fides - I think my cap now (self-requested) is something like 50 or so

Seriously though, your tutorials are probably the reason most people I know have used DO. You guys do an amazing job with those!

Got a personal Nextcloud instance going with DO and your documentation has been an amazing help.

Hats off to you and the rest of the team.

As a Linux SysAdmin I love coming across a tutorial from DigitalOcean when Im searching for a howto because I can always be sure that they will be updated, well written and very complete. A big thank you to you and the rest of the team!

> DigitalOcean has fullfilled my needs in the most perfect way with a huge knowledge base and detailed tutorials.

Agreed. The while I liked the price point and the UI, the tutorials were leagues ahead of everything else.

Your tutorials are simple and down to the point, just the way they should be. I became a customer thanks to the tutorials, and I haven't looked back.

The Django -> Ubuntu tutorials are amazing. Thank you.

I'm a customer, but half the time I'm using your tutorials it's for home projects not my VPS.

Really great job!

I've run across DigitalOcean tutorials that helped me out many times. You all do great work, thanks.

Chiming in as well. You guys do solid work, and have untangled me more often than I can count.

Always come back to DO for the concisely written tutorials. Thumbs up for the good work.

Thank you. The tutorials have been very valuable over the years.

Keep up the good work!

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