DigitalOcean S-1
sec.gov
sec.gov
Personally I'm really proud of the work we did, and I'm overjoyed to have been part of building a business that is going to be a public company. Thanks to the HN community for being so supportive over the years.
I guess you could call that a fantastic product idea. I’d call it applying an aggressive exit strategy to Chris Aker’s fantastic product idea from 2003 and further commoditizing said product in its wake.
Anyway, yes, you eventually reached a position where you dictated the pricing structure, slightly annoyingly because it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours (down to the incentivized Linode Library clone that’s getting praise elsewhere in this thread). I wasn’t talking about changes you forced. The entire product top to bottom was referenced against Linode’s work to grow you to a position to force those changes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I’m also not going after you for it; I’m only responding to fantastic product idea.
It’s just odd that when competitors would ask me my thoughts on the “Linode clone” at 2011-era conferences that’s something that’s news to you. Is that really not apparent to an executive? If not that you did so, at least that seemingly the entire incumbency, not just Linode, thought so?
If you work at Linode, presumably people would come up to you asking about something they then couched to you as a Linode clone. That doesn't mean it's how people were talking about DO when not directly speaking with someone at Linode.
Before DO VPS was (and somewhat remains) a community even among competition. I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the example given.
EDIT: s/general public/others
Edit: I responded to something that’s now been silently edited out and replaced with “others”.
Security:
One issue early on for Linode was just abysmal security despite claims. Lots of denial and lack of transparency too which was even worse. For a biz focused offering that was just a no go.
Even 8 year ago there was stuff with the bitcoin hacks? Do folks remember any of this?
They might have been using cold fusion or something because they got hacked again I think just like a year later?
These weren't just little corner case hacks / issues - but major with plenty of denial and obfuscation from linode.
There was this hack here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845170
I'm sure I'm missing others (unsecured mysql databases etc?).
---
Anyways, at least in my world linode was actually seen as the cheap/crappy offering even though they actually cost more which was weird. But I def told folks to stay away just because of the repeated lack of care around security.
I had no idea DO was at 350M+ ARR - nice job by them - wow!
Linode had decent service but honestly the irc channel was pretty toxic to noobs (one of the reasons I left!) and finding a "cheaper linode option" was great.
That might have switched quickly, but it was definitely a thing.
Hypothetical analogy: if I were describing my very-first-ever PaaS service, to competitors who’d only ever heard of IaaS services — and this wasn’t the point of the conversation (i.e. I wasn’t trying to sell them on the benefits of PaaS), but rather just a supporting statement to talking about how we do/don’t offer an IaaS feature, because we’re a PaaS — then I’d probably describe my PaaS by analogy to some popular IaaS that has a feature-set closest to a PaaS.
In my own mental model, I have a separate node for “PaaS”; but if I know that the people I’m communicating with don’t — and teaching them what a PaaS is would take time away from the real topic we’re trying to focus on — then I’m going to describe my PaaS provider as “basically like $foo IaaS provider” when talking about how it has the same feature X. To them.
If you know someone is from a particular company, you don't badmouth the company in front of them, but you might badmouth the competitors.
Can I see your survey results from 10 years ago, or is this an opinion formed by a Linode employee from a handful of conference conversations?
As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their web UI also has always been miles ahead.
The competition also didn’t have SSD as an option until much later, and that was a HUGE selling point for digital ocean at the time.
But the thing I liked best was their "no hidden cost". You pay what you agreed before to pay. No surprise. No upsell, trick sell which were common with all hosting at that time.
DO still maintains that honesty. Not sure what will happen after their IPO.
The UI, the simplicity, SSDs, additional block storage... but also the API and its doc, as well as IPv6, regions, snapshots/backups, and availability. Later on, load balancers, object storage and k8s. All of that much simpler than AWS and both better thought out and more featureful than Linode or OVH.
DO truly deserved their success.
Remember we are talking about early days of DO. Of course later DO innovate more and Linode had to follow. And the new Linode UI is arguably better than DO. Although it did took them years to make it. The beauty of competition.
Linode and Slicehost were very similar stories, though. Slicehost bootstrapped as well and was run by good people.
I'd strongly disagree (been on DO since about 2012 and on Linode a few years earlier; I still use both). DO UI is ok these days but years ago Linode UI was far better in every way.
Back when I was just hacking about on some SaaS ideas I looked into both Linode and DO. The positioning of both seemed quite separate to me, and DO "felt" more like the product I should be using.
Whether or not the tech was different, or that feeling was justified by anything other than an initial veneer is well up for debate - but entirely agree, they're discreet products, and this doesn't really reflect well on Linode.
I'm not arguing if DO was a clone or not, but saying that "you could use Linode/Slicehost documentation because DO was a clone" is a bit of a stretch.
Linode still has a special place in my heart, but they have some work to do if they want to remain competitive.
I would go with anyone other than Linode, considering they left the control plane running a publicly accessible unpatched version of ColdFusion, which led to multiple instances of them losing control of customer's data.
Anyone but Linode.
The one thing that made do better was they had a datacenter in my region.
No one mentioned vultr killer $2.50 which is where I would go if I wanted a dev box to play around on.
I don't know if this is still the case, but I also got no SSH logspam from bots trying to log in on a v6 host.
I moved a few very low-end hosts to DO when the $5 price point appeared but have never been overly impressed. Later Linode matched prices so no real reason to look into DO anymore.
But I do still use both. Partly to avoid migrating the DO hosts I have but more because I just like to keep aware of how both are evolving.
Around the time I switched there was a lot going on. DO had released their $5 droplets. Linode was still stuck on their old, clunky UI, and the migration to the new "Cloud UI" wasn't executed well. Then there was a few DDOS attacks that took stuff down, and the multiple serious security vulnerabilities that they did a -horrible- job managing.
I've been at DO for a number of years now and it's been solid. I have a few dozen servers and take advantage of a few of their services. Their Managed Databases are incredibly well executed.
I've been happy over all so no reason to look elsewhere.
First, you guys had the customer support interface compromise in 2013, and the worst part about that was the way that it was handled by your organization. Linode wouldn't own up to the compromise initially, dragged their feet on announcing anything about it, and then tried to downplay it.
Then there was another similar incident in 2016, and, amazingly, the response from Linode was nearly identical to 2013. No lessons learned. After that, I started seeing influential people on HN say things like, "don't use Linode". I stayed on Linode, but I also started using DigitalOcean after the 2013 compromise and split my hosted services evenly between the two of you after 2016.
DigitalOcean aggressively iterated multiple aspects of their products in that time period. They announced block storage in 2016. Your customers immediately started asking when Linode would come out with a competing service, and that didn't happen until 2018. Here, it was Linode rushing to build a DigitalOcean feature.
Linode initially focused on expanding RAM and disk space for your customers' instances at the same price points. Every year, you'd announce, "hey, we're doubling your RAM!" or some such thing. It was awesome, but I also thought at the time that you were shooting yourselves in the foot. How many customers looked at that and went, "yep, cool, now I can downsize my Linode and give them less money each month"? I know I did, at least a couple of times.
Then, you chose to try to compete with DigitalOcean on price. As a long time Linode customer, I never wanted that. If I want a $5 VPS, I'll just go to DigitalOcean. Hell, you shouldn't even want me as a customer for $5. Let them deal with me instead. I wanted Linode to be the larger, slightly more expensive provider with the even better support.
I've had to deal with Linode support a few times over the years. They've mostly been awesome and first class. I've never been unhappy enough with Linode to want to leave altogether. Both of you should be focused on eating AWS, not each other; showing up to a competitor's HN thread to complain about them being copycats is really poor form.
And I think the solution could be layered on top of what they already have. Cpanel is just a bunch of buttons, icons, and little apps to create web server instances and tie them to domains, database instances, backups, web file management, manage DNS records, and so on. Basically just a consistent web app to put on top of their "droplet" ecosystem. Much of it already exists, so a fair amount of the effort would just be marketing it.
DigitalOcean was less established, less mature, offered fewer CPUs and less RAM per dollar and had only two (or was it three?) locations.
But they had SSDs and Linode did not.
The difference in Wordpress performance was night and day. So I switched and I'm still there. Linode dragged its feet on SSDs. I don't care why or how. I cared that I could get what I needed elsewhere.
But as others have said, Linode was around forever. Digital Ocean came in and disrupted them. When DO first came on the scene then you easily could have switched and got more for your money. But Linode has caught up and matched them. Right now they are both good. I have actually been favoring Linode lately with their new interface. But I have $3,000 or so of Digital Ocean credit that I am trying to use up first.
Presenting early DO as a ripoff of linode is frankly absurd, the UI, user experience, API, Load balancing, backups, and docs were all vastly superior to Linode, and it honestly felt like the copying was more the other way round as Linode tried to catch up with their UI.
Aggressive, as in two turtles fighting.
(Not sure if block storage came even earlier to other DO data centers, but as those were outside the EU they wouldn’t have been relevant)
Loved Slicehost!!!
Nothing else in the market offered that at the time.
They retained a lot of equity as well - good to see.
I found major, glaring security/architecture issues with their main product early on, and was told by DO staff to go full-disclosure because it was working as designed. When I did so, DO lied about the impact on their blog.
Those lies are still up:
https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/transparency-regarding-dat...
> At no time was customer data "leaked" between accounts.
(I have screenshots of other DO customers' data.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097
Even their outage blog post from a few months ago is now deleted.
My experience is that DO is a shady company, and I'll not do any serious/critical business with them or ever use them to store secret information.
As for the lying, I'd personally never do business with any of the early DO management/founders.
There's no amount of money that can be used to buy a reputation for integrity.
It’s a tough problem to deal with and not something you’re likely to think of designing such a product from first principles. That’s not an indictment, it’s just fundamental to experience gained doing this stuff (and it’s perilous to get wrong). Filtering unsolicited ARP to prevent domUs from hijacking default gateways was another lesson in blood, and one of the first things we tried within five minutes when we did competitive on DO around launch time (they hadn’t thought of it; it worked).
The whole scrub thing was a red herring: you don't need to scrub anything to not leak data, you just thin provision. It's (mostly) fine if customer data stays on your disks after they delete. It's not fine to give it to the next customer because you don't know how disk abstraction works.
My issue is mainly how they coped with it, which has nothing to do with their (at the time) technical incompetence: they simply lied about the effects.
Competent or not, lying on your corporate blog isn't a good choice. It doesn't take any special skills or training to be honest on your journey from incompetence to competence, all it takes is integrity.
At the time Linode had a host-side scrub daemon that simply ate LVs as customers deleted. It’s technically simple, but drive longevity and capacity on the host (the user is probably recreating their VM, for example) is where it gets tricky. External considerations. In the end scrubbing is basically killing a few dozen inodes of user data, but the architecture in VPS usually requires you to nuke the whole image, including what is ultimately the host’s 59th copy of Ubuntu. Just managing the iops without annoying neighboring customers is a challenge.
To my cloning point I made at the top of the thread, Linode was certainly no stranger to the reality distortion field when it suited, and I think that’s yet another thing DO copied. That vertical is closer to B2C since you’re usually dealing with individuals, not sales teams, and glossing over stuff is a bit easier than when your counterparty has a better engineering team than you.
You don't need to wipe, zero, or TRIM anything to not leak customer A data to customer B.
1. initial call with recruiter
2. homework project
3. call with engineer to discuss said homework project
4. two phone screens with engineers
5. onsite interview with 6 engineers
They we going through some pretty crazy growth at the time so I forgave a lot of disorganization in the interview process. Unfortunately I didn't end up getting the role but I'm glad to have had that experience; it was definitely an interesting point in DigitalOcean's history.
How much time does it typically take (or should take) to complete a 'homework' project?
> 4. two phone screens with engineers > 5. onsite interview with 6 engineers
This seems very 'camel is a horse by committee' to me.
Reminds me a bit (know it's different) of dating where someone wants you to meet their family for approval. I immediately pass on those dates (and will add I am happily married to a woman who did not do that).
I wonder about situations where it takes so many inputs to make a decision to me that speaks a great deal about the decision making process being faulty.
Fwiw when I graduated college years ago I was rejected by a company (friend of the family no less) who said they couldn't hire me because 'yes you are smart but you don't know this business' (true I knew zero). So I started a company like theirs myself and now many years later they are gone and my company (which I sold) still survives. (Will add this was years before the internet and common practice for people who knew nothing to go into businesses they knew about).
Now yes I do understand programming is not the same but my point still stands why so many chefs in the kitchen? Does anyone ever go back and track the people who were rejected what happened to them?
I was still in college at the time but I maybe spent 5-10 hours over the course of a week or so. I do remember it took a very long time for them to respond after I had sent it in though. I believe the project was to implement a basic web crawler in Go.
> Now yes I do understand programming is not the same but my point still stands why so many chefs in the kitchen?
After the homework problem I think that's where they were defining the process as they went. They seemed to be growing quite a bit at the time (IIRC when I was onsite they had just rented two more floors of office space) and I had bounced between a few contacts that were brand new to the company. The real struggle is that I never knew how many more steps were to come, and I'm not sure they knew either.
Though after the onsite they e-mailed me almost immediately to setup the call with Ben so I think everything had gone well up to that point. I don't think the call with Ben went poorly so my best guess is that they went with someone that had experience rather than a new grad.
FWIW I'm not actually bitter about this. I just found it to be an interesting snapshot of a particularly chaotic point in the company's history.
Almost never, in my experience. Several times I came second in the running and never heard from them again. Contacting them myself didn't work either. Typical shop would rather look thru another hundred randos than revisit one decent candidate.
I like these because they are not games. If you want something done, you'd ask an employee to do it. So just ask someone to do something you need done.
In our case at least by the time it was something that was part of an interview, it had already been implemented on the business side. Our projects were usually 2 hours tops?
The idea that this is unethical is wild.
We also do paid internships and have folks actually work on stuff that way -> do a good job, pretty good line up for a full time position.
Why would a place like google even use an interviewees code without careful copyright assignment and work for hire protections (ie, you need to pay someone in USA generally to own their code).
I've found some potential hires are randomly paranoid - and if they start giving you lots of hypothetical disaster / ripoff scenarios early, not worth the hire?
A 6-person company in New York did that to me. I reviewed the interview project I did for them and their latest product update. I had to ask them a week after the interview if they used my code in production and if so - this is how many hours I worked on it and a fair rate. The CEO emailed me threatening legal action and then called me 10 minutes later apologizing and venmo'd me the amount I stated it was worth.
If your interview process works for you that is great.
But I could totally see why potential hires are paranoid if you are giving them a situation to be paranoid about. I hope you are being super clear with your process and giving assurance you aren't using their code. If it was me, I would show them the code our team wrote at the same time they submit their project and use that as part of the follow up interview.
We also don't give them our actual problems as homework tasks. We'll occasionally talk about our real problems with candidates in interviews, but we're very clear about it when we do.
It's not a perfect system. Some candidates will choose to spend longer on the task so that in the follow-up interview they'll have the opportunity to talk about stuff that really shows off their strengths, so their effective hourly compensation for doing it would be quite low. The task is explicitly flexible like this, and we've also hired people who spent _half_ the par time on it (e.g. life circumstances making spare hours hard to come by) and didn't implement much at all, but then were able to confidently answer our questions about the bits they didn't actually implement.
Even if we were to only hire 1 out of every 15 people who get far enough through the pipeline to do the homework task (I don't recall the actual numbers) it costs us _nothing_ to compensate people for their time compared to, e.g., what it would cost us to make a bad hire. So it seems like an obvious thing to do even if only to stop candidates from having to wonder "am I getting screwed here?"
The visa process may be flawed, but putting the blame on the employer is... weird.
That said it is completely unethical to make people do real work as part of an interview process. We collectively should name and shame any firm that does that.
Agilent is not great either. They interviewed me for 6 month and implemented some of my ideas. (In fact, I got the job, out of 500 applicants, but then they axed the job and hired nobody)
This is not true.
I've can think of one employer my entire career that had conditions regarding work outside of my normal work hours.
Granted, if you worked for your competetors and they found out about it you could be fired due to trade secrets or conflicts of interest. I only remember one employer I had where I signed something with binding agreements related to other work (and, as it happens, that was perhaps the worst employer I ever had).
I know some employers in some regions do this, but it is a far cry from affecting "nearly every worker in the US". In fact, I am not aware of any of my friends in tech positions currently being under such an agreement (that is, an agreement requiring pre-approval for outside work). In fact I believe it is illegal under many circumstances in some states for an employer to require it (but don't rely on me for that, conditions/laws change, and I have had no reason to look into it recently). I do remember discussions about it in the not too distant past, however.
The language you're looking for in the contract is 'preponderance of time'.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Some people don't like take-homes that replicate scenarios/projects because they think it's too close to real work and want to be paid instead!
There's no pleasing everyone with interviewing processes.
Then it's no different to the rest of the candidate's time spent interviewing - it's cost of doing business that no one expects to be remunerated for.
The other benefit is that you then keep a benchmark of deliverables by having each candidate complete the same task (you have to change tasks over time as the details of the project get leaked/discussed).
If you feel that a request is unethical and it's not what you want in a company, well... you - as a candidate - can terminate the interviewing process.
It's good because it will determine if they're a good fit for the team and gauge how much they have to offer.
I see nothing unethical in it.
3 years later the feature has still not made it to production. I hate that every time it would have made my working day easier :)
I felt this was good. I got paid and it was a fun challenge. It also obviously wasn't "actual work," but even if it was, I was getting paid, so why not?
I don't think it would have been out of the question to say I was too busy to dedicate 8 hours either, but in my case I had the time.
Overall it was an excellent experience.
The real issue was how chaotic the process was. I had started out talking to an engineer that had picked up my application, but was handed off to recruiter only after the homework portion was done (said recruiter even mentioned that they had just been hired). The two technical phone screens also were two discrete steps (i.e. the second was only scheduled after the success of the first).
That was really the issue: neither I nor them knew how many more steps there were. It wasn't helped by having long periods of radio silence between each step either. But it was painfully obvious that they were scrambling to figure out how to scale their processes, so much so that it still stands out to me 6+ years later.
I more wanted to emphasize my view as a bystander at a very hectic point of their growth, not actually complain about the experience. It was an interesting experience to me, not a negative one.
I have no hard feelings about it and I'm sure things got sorted out. I certainly have no negative views of any individual I dealt with.
I was also building a startup piggybacking on hosting providers around 2012 and 2013 and saw the explosive growth. DigitalOcean should be the go-to case study on how to build a developer oriented company. Just like SliceHost and PickledOnion before; the technical guides on setting up LAMP stacks, Wordpress, NGINX, Node.js become resources just as important as Stackoverflow and Serverfault. DO showed up first in Google search results for technical questions.
It was a heck of a lot of fun. Thanks for bringing me on board.
BUT:
1. Their web UI stability is terrible (constantly hangs and errors out)
2. Their hosted DB IOPS aren't competitive with other PaaS providers. There's also no way to scale DB size dynamically without upgrading to a new price tier which is overkill.
3. Their Kubernetes Control Plane scaling is obfuscated. I had to contact support to realize that the control plane nodes are somehow tied to the size of your node pool when you create the cluster? That's not documented anywhere and was the cause of many control plane timeouts.
4. No ALIAS dns record, no way to serve Spaces from an apex domain. (I know this is a vendor specific implementation but it's table stakes imo)
Again, I'm a (mostly) happy DO customer and wish them the best but if they really want to be seen on the same level as AWS or GCP in terms of some parity, they need to include some of these QoL features.
Really really well done DO!
Edit: I'm wrong, see below.
> You cannot assign a Floating IP to a Droplet created from a custom image.
Edit: I wanted to double-check because this would make my life so much easier, but no, I still can't use Floating IP with Custom Images. I imported a FlatcarLinux image from a URL and created a droplet; once the droplet launched, I still see this:
> Floating IP: Disabled
> Public IPv6 Address: Not available with custom images.
Speculating and recalling old memories here, but: floating IP is implemented as an additional IP on an existing interface. DHCP can't assign multiple IPs for the same MAC. So there's got to be some DigitalOcean magic in the base images to figure out that a floating IP is assigned and configure the interface for it. You might be able to replicate this yourself, they just don't want to be responsible for support.
Perhaps over time they will grow a more complex network fabric that will enable floating IPs to be their own DHCP-enabled interfaces straight on VMs, instead of the "dumb" forwarding rules they appear to be today. But also perhaps the lack of such things is why DigitalOcean is cheaper than Amazon.
(3) was the cause of numerous production incidents for us. We had to contact support to have it scaled up, and sometimes they'd take up to 3 working days to get back to us. Happily paid more for AWS to get better support, and stability.
This is the case for literally every managed database service that I'm aware of.
You pay a premium for the managed aspect.
That’s been my experience, at least.
It truncates both the record contents and the domain name, which means that if you've got a bunch of long domains with TXT records, telling them apart means copying the contents into a text editor to see the truncated text.
e.g
somekey._dkim.subdomaina.domain.com k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfAAAA
somekey._dkim.subdomainb.domain.com k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfBBBB
somekey._dkim.subdomainc.domain.com k=rsa; t=s; p=MIGfAAAA
somekey._dkim.subdo... k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...
somekey._dkim.subdo... k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...
somekey._dkim.subdo... k=rsa; t=s; p=MI...
But I agree, that with something that coins itself "the developer cloud" it should provide critical information first. It is ok to kill some whitespace or put some monospaced fonts in there. You aren't trying to sell me an iPhone, I am trying to manage a server.
Route53 on AWS is what I have been using for domain management and I like it because it doesn't mess around with cute UIs. It is strictly function. Instead of form fields for each TTL line and host line like other sites do, you just get a big multi-line text box and you use spaces and line breaks (gasp) to create your dns listings.
https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/ipv6/
Yes, you read that right, they assign a /124 if you enable IPv6. There is no provision for getting anything larger. All configuration is totally static as well. It's really incredible how botched the setup is, and it has been like this for years.
If you're wondering if you're sharing the same /64 with an entire datacenter worth of droplets, the answer is of course.
I haven't contacted them about it but that makes sense sadly. So they're getting a /64 from their upstream and just sharing that out to everyone. This isn't IPv4, they need to make this right.
Vultr, OTOH, gives each HOST a /64. I've been doing most of my work on Vultr right now so I can use more than 16 IPs on a single host. I was/am hoping that providers would standardize somewhere in the middle: Every customer account in each datacenter gets a /64. I wouldn't mind all of my hosts having their own /64 to subdivide.
It's not like it is hard to get IPv6 address space either. All they have to do is ask. A VPS provider like DO can get a /32 easy peasy.
(And a /48 from APNIC???)
(Edit: And a /36, /40 and /48 from APNIC?)
https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-...
Not being able to give just DNS access to a script for updating LE/ACME DNS challenges means it'd be a non-starter at work.
Really like the direction DO is going. Which is something in between millions of small VPS firm and giant like AWS. It also forced Linode to React. And proved the space in Cloud Hosting exist, which company like Vultr and UpCloud are now joining. And I think their features are finally close to hitting the perfect spot. With all the essential like DBaS, Object Storage and K8s.
They have also ( finally ) introduced AMD EPYC CPU, ( no more explicit mention of Intel CPU on their homepage ). Which is good for their margin since price / core count are cheaper.
So DO today is something I would like as an AWS competitor in 2016. And they are finally here. I am not sure if there are any other low hanging fruit at all. Or what features I would want for a company competing at this space. It will be things that people dont see, like CPU performance, SSD Performance, Services Reliability, Interconnect, Better Network, More Locations, security improvement....
There are only two suggestions I could think on top of my head right now.
First is the pricing structure and list. It is getting very messy and AWS like. SSD Storage variant should be a simple calculable option, not an extra line on pricing table that tries to bombard me with extra information. And I know Basic Droplet are burst-able CPU resources, but not showing they are vCPU ( a Single Thread ) and calling them CPU doesn't really rhymes with me.
Second is Full BareMetal Monthly option. Something like vultr [1] is offering. I am not sure if below $100 is feasible. Basically it should be something that offer much better price / performance at a monthly payment that pushes people with low spending to metal for baseline load with headroom as insurance. Pushing up Average User Spending. It should also be attractive to small business. ( Although arguably Linode and Vultr has yet to expand or launch Metal seems to suggest otherwise )
Remember kids, always register your trademarks.
The competitor, was it DigitalOcean? (Or am I misunderstanding :-) )
(I work on Cloudflare Workers.)
(But in my previous comment I totally missed that chrisweekly said "Cloudfront" and not "Cloudflare", lol.)
Implications of Being an Emerging Growth Company
We are an “emerging growth company” as defined in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act. We may take advantage of certain exemptions from various public company reporting requirements, including not being required to have our internal controls over financial reporting audited by our independent registered public accounting firm under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, reduced disclosure obligations regarding executive compensation in our periodic reports and proxy statements and exemptions from the requirements of holding a non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation and any golden parachute payments. We may take advantage of these exemptions for up to five years or until we are no longer an emerging growth company, whichever is earlier. In addition, the JOBS Act provides that an “emerging growth company” can delay adopting new or revised accounting standards until those standards apply to private companies. We have elected to take advantage of certain of the reduced disclosure obligations in the registration statement of which this prospectus is a part and may elect to take advantage of other reduced reporting requirements in future filings. As a result, the information that we provide to our stockholders may be different than you might receive from other public reporting companies in which you hold equity interests.
Wow, I didn't know about this. Shouldn't financial reporting always be transparent?
> We may take advantage of these exemptions for up to five years or until we are no longer an emerging growth company, whichever is earlier.
The definition of "emerging growth company", from https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/EGC
> A company qualifies as an emerging growth company if it has total annual gross revenues of less than $1.07 billion during its most recently completed fiscal year and, as of December 8, 2011, had not sold common equity securities under a registration statement. A company continues to be an emerging growth company for the first five fiscal years after it completes an IPO, unless one of the following occurs:
> - its total annual gross revenues are $1.07 billion or more
> - it has issued more than $1 billion in non-convertible debt in the past three years or
> - it becomes a “large accelerated filer,” as defined in Exchange Act Rule 12b-2
2020's gross revenue was 318m growing at 50-60m yoy from prior years. So, unless that growth is somehow compounding, the 5 years post-IPO is the most likely outcome.
The biggest implications are relaxed requirements around explaining executive compensation, and that financial control auditing (SOX-compliance) is not required.
It's not necessarily a bad thing for investors, but a trade-off. It means the company can focus more on growth and less elsewhere.
The short answer is theoretically, yes, but in practice, it's not always practical to have transparent financial reporting.
For context, financial reporting is a tradeoff between cost and effectiveness. Whenever you're reading audited financial statements, you're reading an accounting professional's opinion which would be reasonable given a certain level of constraints. In theory, auditors could audit every facet of an organization and obtain 99.99% assurance, but the financial cost of doing so typically doesn't make sense for the company nor shareholders.
Of the reduced disclosures, the most significant is not having their internal controls audited. For a big company, this is a red flag because the financial accounts are only reasonable if you also have reasonable assurance that there are controls in place to prevent fraud and that they're working effectively.
But for smaller companies where most of the ownership is usually owned by founder-workers, employees, or early investors who are monitoring it on the ground level, there aren't many benefits from increased reporting over internal controls because if they are committing fraud, they'd mostly be defrauding themselves! That, combined with the fact that most early stage companies are already resource-constrained, makes regulators a bit more lenient because they assume investors/employees know what they're getting themselves into.
Now, when a company decides to go public, they need some time to adopt best practices and comply with broader regulations. That takes time, so regulators give them a few years to get the personnel and processes in place without penalizing them. But to cover their bases, they're required to make disclosures like above, so that early investors buying into the IPO know that they won't have similar levels of assurance about the financials for a few years.
Those are the ones just off the top of my head.
Love this company and it's made my life so much easier for the past near decade.
Excited to see they are financially very healthy.
What a great service!!
I have to imagine things have gotten better, but it did taint my view of DO as more of a dev playing field than a reliable hosting provider.
I appreciate it's not easy problem but it's clear the community felt they were being ignored and DigitalOcean did nothing to try and limit the spread. For example, moving to a model like other providers have where you need to request permission to send mail from support.
A selection over two years: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/when-will-d...
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/stop-the-sp...
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-serious...
EDIT: Just to clarify, AWS has a lot of IPs, over 100 million [1]. Let’s just speculate that 1/50th might be in an overall pool for customer allocation. Do you really think the majority of 2M IPs would come back blacklisted in some form? I haven’t dug in to this to actually see if this is the case, but it would seem laughable to even begin to think that this might be the case..
[1] https://toonk.io/aws-and-their-billions-in-ipv4-addresses/in...
If this wasn't hard tech, I would be worried, but this is hard capital intensive stuff and looks to me like they are doing fine.
If in 10 years there ends up being 1 independent cloud company, that would be a pretty amazing business. DO has a good a shot as any (only thing I can think off is AWS spins out). DO is so good that there I can't think of a worst case scenario being anything other than one of the big 3 buys them. Best case is the moon.
It feels like a very different situation than, say, Uber - where there's a question about if Uber can balance driver payouts and customer fees in a way where they make money. DO, instead, is already turning $1 in goods into $2 in revenue and they're just looking to grow enough so that $1 in potential profit covers everything.
A provider like DO expects to have customers for many years. At 50% gross margins, $100 spent to acquire a $50/yr customer will be returned in four years. That may be an acceptable trade off.
One should probably create a personal checklist to see whether a company is doing well or not and then just make decisions based on the checklist.
I had a default card set up for auto billing. That card expired. I went to remove the default card -- you cannot remove a default card. Okay. I added a new card and tried to set it as default. It didn't take. (Refreshing the browser reverted the change.)
So I tried another browser, another computer, etc. The change never took. Finally, I contacted their support. It took a ton of back and forth with people who had dubious language comprehension before I finally convinced them anything other than user error was going on... but then, instead of fixing it, they demanded I take a video and upload it for them to prove it was real!
I did, and I paid the invoice manually. The bug was eventually fixed after a month or two, but it was a pain until that happened.
I found another provider who is cheaper for the resources I need and has better customer service by miles. If I can't get you to even take my money in an easy and reliable way, I can't trust you to operate anything I rely on.
They are not as large an enterprise as DigitalOcean, by a long shot, but the upside of that is you can speak with the owner and his small staff personally and get personal service. They made me a very good deal.
I also know from their Discord that they have some conservative political leanings, so if that's a thing that matters to you either way, it's there. I don't find it to be represented in their behavior towards customers or who they choose to host, so it was acceptable to me even though I feel differently.
I thought about it quite a bit, actually. But there is a line there and they haven't crossed it.
Is this an extension of the Russian Business Network, or did you miss a negation in there? :-)
It's my view that we need this on the internet.
There's a whole community around "low-end" VPS and server hosting, and BuyVM's staff have historically been active figures in that community. The Discord is an offshoot of that. It's not all that unusual; a lot of companies do community outreach by running communities for people who do things related to their services. Digital Ocean themselves do this in another form with their documentation libraries.
BuyVM's brand relies on the perception that they are laid-back, pro-free-speech, friendly, and helpful. The Discord is a way of broadcasting that. Now, personally - I think that attracts some people I wouldn't prefer to attract. But I know they've drawn lines in the past (banning overtly anti-Semitic people, for instance), so, fair enough. Their pro-speech attitude helped me when a site I ran was subjected to bogus legal threats from an unhinged former user.
They are really the perfect size for me: big enough for multiple locations, R&D, and support coverage; but small enough so that you personally interact with the team, and you have trust that a random DMCA isn't going to end up with your site nuked.
The privacy-first stance (including allowing Tor exit nodes! sorely needed on independent infra!), and general willingness to help you ad-hoc (e.g. you wanna announce your own IP range? they'll do it, charge you a fair price for the work).
On the other hand, I woke up one day with my DigitalOcean droplet suspended and account banned, and support absolutely refuses to tell me why. My only suspicion is perhaps because I used the GitHub Student Pack even after I was no longer a student.
DigitalOcean will have to buy CPUs from Intel or Nvidia/ARM at a higher cost, and eventually maybe even from AWS or Microsoft, essentially giving money to their competition.
If DigitalOcean doesn't get into semiconductors quickly, the only two logical outcomes are to either go bust, or to be acquired by a major cloud provider as a low-cost branch, like airlines do.
Or acquired by a chip maker, like Intel.
What are the GCP and Azure equivalents of AWS Nitro?
“Because silicon is a foundational building block for technology, we’re continuing to invest in our own capabilities in areas like design, manufacturing and tools, while also fostering and strengthening partnerships with a wide range of chip providers,” says Microsoft’s communications chief Frank Shaw.
GCP, AWS, and Azure seem to all be diverging in their specialization. GCP is focusing more on AI/ML/Big Data offerings while AWS is more security-aware, and Azure is more hybrid-cloud focused.
If you work yourself into a performance dead-end, you can spend billions and end up with a chip that isn't particularly competitive. Whereas if your supplier does that, you can switch suppliers.
You could spend $X billion, end up with a chip that isn't particularly competitive and just have to eat those billions.
You bring up airlines... airlines don't build their own airplanes.
That's fine for a few major pieces of OSS, and for internal, cloud-only software (Redshift, BigQuery), but I don't think that concept scales well, or is particularly quick to adapt to market shifts.
make a chip 2% more efficient in your public cloud AND your private cloud, that is also generating money? You've got BIG savings.
Some of them refurbish and operate their own engines (by far the most complex part of the airplane) instead of going to GE or Rolls Royce.
Delta actually operates their own oil refinery.
So airlines are in fact a good analogy.
AWS are estimated to be ~50% of HyperScalers.
HyperScalers are estimated to be 50% of Server and Cloud Business.
HyperScalers are expanding at a rate faster than other market.
HyperScaler expanding trend are not projected to be slowing down anytime soon.
AWS intends to have all of their own workload and SaaS product running on Graviton / ARM. ( While still providing x86 services to those who needs it )
Google and Microsoft are already gearing up their own ARM offering. Partly confirmed by Marvell's exit of ARM Server.
>The problem is single core Arm performance outside of Apple chips isn’t there.
Cloud computing charges per vCPU. On all current x86 instances, that is one hyper-thread. On AWS Graviton, vCPU = Actual CPU Core. There are plenty of workloads, and large customers like Twitter and Pinterest has tested and shown AWS Graviton 2 vCPU perform better than x86. All while being 30% cheaper. At the end of the day, it is workload / dollars that matters on Cloud computing. And right now in lots of applications Graviton 2 are winning, and in some cases by large margin.
If AWS sell 50% of their services with ARM in 5 years time, that is 25% of Cloud Business Alone. Since it offer a huge competitive advantage Google and Microsoft has no other choice but to join the race. And then there will be enough of a market force for Qualcomm, or may be Marvell to Fab a commodity ARM Server part for the rest of the market. Which is why I was extremely worried about Intel. (Half of) The lucrative Server market is basically gone. ( And I haven't factored in AMD yet ) 5 years in Tech hardware is basically 1-2 cycles. And there is nothing on Intel's roadmap that shown they have the chance to compete apart from marketing and sales tactics. Which still goes a long way if I have to be honest, but not sustainable in long term. It is more of a delaying tactics. Along with a CEO that despite trying very hard, had no experience in market and product business. Luckily that is about to change. Evaluating ARM switch takes time, Software preparation takes time, and more importantly, getting wafer from TSMC takes time as demand from all market are exceeding expectations. But all of them are already in motion, and if these are the kind of response you get from Graviton 2, imagine Graviton 3.
Or just continue to build a profitable, cash flow positive business that continues to grow for years and years to come. Business outcomes are often not binary.
The only complaint I have with them is DO Spaces. This service seems to have issues related to degraded quality pretty often and there's so many horror stories of load times taking hundreds of milliseconds to serve content from their CDN if you Google around for folks using Spaces. I'm looking forward to the day where Spaces is as good as S3 because DO's offering of Spaces includes not only an object store but a free CDN on top. Seems like a good deal for $5 bucks a month if it were dependable.
It's weird because every other service I use by DO has been top notch.
https://wakatime.com/blog/46-latency-of-digitalocean-spaces-...
A big red flag is that 570,000 customers bring in only 357m in rev. That's $50 a month for the average customer. That's way too low.
I vaguely remember a talk I had with an employee there was a time when I think the average user was paying only $20/mo, which at the time, I had a $250-500/mo bill depending on load.
This was before they even had a load balancer product (so 2012-2013-ish?), and I was running a fairly unsuccessful managed WordPress offering that had dynamic scaling based on the reported metrics.
The infrastructure was just a big server for MySql, and a tiny server for the orchestrator. Then it would use the DO API to spin up new servers off a snapshot, ssh into them, and run the setup script to point to the right Wordpress instance in the database, then add it to the nginx reverse proxy list for the domain.
The whole thing could scale up or down in 30 seconds. Sure it isn't as fast as AWS or Azure could scale, but we were in control, in code, before containerizing was even really a thing.
Cost savings + flexibility/avoiding vendor lock-in are DO selling points in my mind.
I looked into migrating my app to Azure, to get similar performance to what I have in DO was over 3x the monthly cost. Worked with Azure support to benchmark and try and come up with a plan to migrate, and the support rep ended by saying essentially "don't think we can get close to your current performance for near that price".
It's not cut and dry.
If you value understanding how people make purchasing decisions, this is an opportunity to get some insight because as you can see, there's a lot more to it than what you were able to enumerate.
Seems you might be a software engineer. This should interest you because an engineer that understand the business end of things is immensely more valuable than a heads-down coder in the majority of tech companies.
"Our average revenue per customer (which we refer to as ARPU) has increased significantly, from $35.97 in 2018 to $40.16 in 2019 to $47.78 in 2020. We have no material customer concentration as our top 25 customers made up 11%, 10% and 9% of our revenue in 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively."
Keeping it simple is actually very hard :)
Not an internet business per say, mostly used in the context of processing and storing data + internal apps.
Do is great value, although not the cheapest. They need to double down on the useful items, maybe go a bit offroad in what they offer, lest they might be a in rough spot.
I mainly wonder as companies like C3.ai are above a $10B market cap on 50% or less of DO's revenue. And C3 (just to extend the example) is carrying lower margin services revenue as well. Growth is somewhat different, granted.
> SaaS businesses are valued on a multiple of their revenue - in most cases the projected revenue for the next 12 months. Multiples shown below are calculated by taking the Enterprise Value (market cap + debt - cash) / NTM revenue. In the buckets below I consider high growth >30% projected NTM growth, mid growth 15%-30% and low growth <15%
So if DO is mid growth, you could use 17x as the EV / NTM multiple. So if 2021 revenue will be 320mm + 25% = 397mm NTM * 17x = 6749mm EV.
Total debt is 263mm so best (rough) guess at equity market cap is 6749mm - 263mm debt + 100mm cash
I feel like the biggest competition is specific, tailored services from the bigger players - Amazon Lightsail for example.
I don't see how they could be maintaining a decent customer base with that setup, but I guess marketing is powerful.
Nope, the biggest competition is in the same niche - Linode, OVH, Scaleway.
1. Spaces keys. There is no way to fine tune access rights. Anyone with spaces key can access any space in the organization and read/write to it. I trust people I work with, but there is always room for a mistake, so even a small chance that someone can accidentally nuke our production space makes me nervous.
2. Something from yesterday: we use new DO apps to deploy a static web app. Yesterday I started to get random 404s for some of the assets, so app become unusable. My colleague in Argentina had same issues, but for different assets. We are lucky that it was a staging app, but imagine it was a production app and that would happen over the weekend? How do you even detect that? Run uptime monitor form dozen different locations?
(Noting here, for the DO product manager reviewing the thread..!)
https://alejandrocremades.com/ben-and-moisey-uretsky-from-hu...
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
200k/yr for 2 yrs, or >1M net worth % price(house).
insert angry punk sentiment here
Most recent thing that made my life 100x easier is their Apps platform with direct Github integrations for deployment of react apps removing any need to learn CI/CD stuff which I dont want to waste time on in early alpha startup phase :)
I interviewed at DO a few years ago. I don't want to share the details, but it was the most annoying, unprofessional and disorganized set of interviews that I have ever witnessed in my life (I did ~140-150 interviews in my life for ~25 companies). The best part is that I was introduced to the company by one of their board members.
Since then I kept thinking that I really liked the product, but I would expect them to fail as a company.
Maybe DO's IPO proves that I was wrong, or maybe that they will be economically successful despite what I have witnessed.
If they are less than 300 people company grown over a very slow pace, that's understandable.
DO is a fantastic value proposition.
Reminds me when I was gathering cryptocurrency prices from exchanges and needed the lowest delay possible so an algorithm could protect me from pump-and-dumps.
In my testings, a $5/month machine from Digital Ocean was the fastest to fetch prices from Bittrex. I got prices within 0.2 milliseconds (yes, under 1 millisecond). It was unbeliavable.
The algo failed miserably ofc. Mostly because Exchanges price API tend to be unstable. Often giving stale or no data.
I've barely used half of my storage and my CPU/RAM is consistently sitting at 30-40% usage. Incredibly affordable for students like me. Plus, their interaction with students is fantastic (they throw free credits at us all the time).
But was a bit surprised when I saw the below, does this mean that they only payed $3,544 for the company? Or is there more to it than that?
> On April 4, 2019, the Company acquired 100% of the outstanding equity of Nanobox, Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Nanobox”), a deployment and management platform provider for cloud infrastructure. The final purchase price for Nanobox was $3,544 and the acquisition has been accounted for as a business combination.
However, for this particular project I feel like it is important to be able to get a human on a phone when I need support. If they offered that, I'd move away from AWS in a heartbeat.
in almost a decade, i havent. actually gotten more done tech related by calling the billing support, then i have through calling paid technical support.
That said all my experiences with DO support were much worse.
Sadly all mistakes done by AWS are picked up by other big vendors like GCP,Azure. Cloud vendors are more focused on adding as many features as possible. Who cares about user experience ? We got covered by certifications.
It worried me that they’re only at a couple hundred MM in a self-proclaimed 116B+ opportunity after 10 years.
Yes. How do they grow further? DO will be compared to AWS and Azure in the market, and there's a good chance their stock will be punished as a result. Plus, if DO actually makes in-roads in market share, AWS is a beast that, if it wants, can crush them on pricing and features for long enough to kill them.
Major issue that I am facing with them currently is their managed load balancer offering. They have a cap of 40k Maximum Simultaneous Connections / second. I am mostly sure that they are not measuring it correctly.
they have random resource limits which don't make sense.
Also I think AWS lightsail is a competition to DO, but AWS doesn't seem to be promoting it that much.
Coinbase reduced risk by kicking out leftists. Hopefully the rest of SV/Bay Area companies follow suit.
Why would anyone buy this?
Couldn't you just reformat with what ever OS you want?
https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/droplets/how-to/rebuild/
I thought support could help me out given the CentOS situation and it being a special case but they weren't even aware of what was happening or that users would need to move off despite my explanation in the ticket. Hopefully it's better now it's more widely known.
This line in the documentation might be misleading. Unless you have a very old legacy droplet that uses HV-assigned kernels, you should be able to reimage your droplet and use another OS.
Along with other limitations such as "we do not support IPv6 floating IPs. All floating IPs are IPv4" and "floating IPs do not support SMTP traffic"
It's probably a failure of imagination on my part that I can't think of a use case where I would want that.
Why not just use normal, forward DNS?
"Set up valid reverse DNS records of your IP addresses that point to your domain."
So anyone who's offended by content you might host on DO can report your site and some identity politics obsessed bureauocrat decides if you're cancelled or not...? The public cloud has turned into an Orwellian nightmare.
> Report abuse:
>
> - DMCA Takedown
> - Trademark Infringement
> - Spam
> - Phishing
> - Malware
> - Botnet
> - Intrusion/exploit attempts (Bruteforce, Scans etc)
> - Child Abuse
> - Violent Threats and Harassment
> - Other
That seems like a reasonable list of stuff I wouldn't want to have my platform be used for, either. Though, one might reasonably take issue with that "Other" category, but note that--at least in the US--web hosts cannot be forced to host any content they don't want to.
Do you not see how problematic this is? I agree with all of the other categories wholeheartedly, but even then, application of the policies of these organizations should be uniform, i.e., if both right wing and left wing websites publishes “Violent Threats and Harrassment”, both should be taken down. That’s not what we’re seeing in practice from the major cloud providers.
Their platform, their rules.
You're using words and phrases with significant legal implications to characterize things that don't meet the well-understood legal definitions.
I don't think you're being dishonest, but I fear you've been bamboozled by the dishonest arguments of others, and are now parroting them.
I may not like the decisions made by private companies, but private companies doing things I don't like w/r/t hosting speech is preferable to getting state power involved.
I don't like Nazi's marching in Skokie. And I don't like what the right insists of calling "cancel culture". But both of those things are constitutionally protected for good reason, and those rights are worth defending.
I understand that some are still basking in electoral victories that were without question aided by the ambiguity in Section 230; this euphoria shouldn’t be confused with righteousness.
What cause of action do you imagine you'd have that wouldn't be barred by 1A?
By and large, 230 acts merely as a procedural fast-last to dismiss suits earlier than they'd otherwise be. But they'd ultimately be decided the same way on first amendment grounds.
230 needs to be updated, not thrown out; 230 clearly has important aspects that must remain, and other aspects that are clearly being abused by big tech.
What cause of action do you imagine you'd have that wouldn't be barred by 1A?
Please tell me how your 1A hypothetical works out. Genuinely interested in hearing how you think 1A and SCOTUS will support your side of this argument.
I asked you to provide a cause of action for "censorship" by a web site. SOvP isn't that. A more recent, federal, and better-fitting case would be PragerU vs. YouTube. There, PragerU sued over their content being remove/restricted. They lost on 230 grounds. But even without 230, they almost certainly would have lost on 1A grounds, because YouTube's exercise of editorial discretion about what content they host is clearly 1A protected activity.
Going back to Stratton Oakmont for a moment: I understand the argument that, absent the liability shield in 230, content moderation of less-than-clearly-illegal content would be vanishingly rare. Web sites would seek to avoid potential liability by getting out of the content-moderation business, which would fix your issue. I'm not convinced that would actually be the outcome. Even if it were, I wouldn't enjoy every web site devolving into 4chan-but-covered-in-spam.
“... if they are neutral platforms, they should have immunity from litigation. If they are publishers making editorial choices, then they should relinquish this valuable exemption. They can’t claim that Section 230 immunity is necessary to protect free speech, while they shape, control, and censor the speech on their platforms. Either the courts or Congress should clarify the matter.”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/platform-or-publisher-1588...
That would still be a problem (because it would allow companies to censor critics, even if the criticism wasn't actually defamatory), but at least we wouldn't have incoherent arguments about a non-existent publisher/platform dichotomy.
That city-journal piece is pretty awful. For instance, regarding the bit you quoted, they absolutely can claim that 230 protects free speech. Private censorship on private property is free speech.
Congress almost certainly can't pass a law that outlaws viewpoint discrimination for web sites that would survive 1A scrutiny. Fiddling with defamation liability to get around the constitution might work, but just because you can doesn't mean you should.
However, moving to D.O. is a bad idea, because they have virtually the same policies. They can pull the plug if they want to, because it's their service.
Every ISP has an abuse process, this isn't very unique here.
I don't think DO's offerings are strong enough to compete with the big players long term, especially in production.
Seems like an exit for a later acquisition by a bigger company, like Slack with Salesforce.
* didn't cost more than the $10 droplet it ran on * just worked * super easy to operate * has had no issues so far
If I were working for any kind of not-ridiculously-large business that wasn't connected to an endless funnel of money (VC/adtech...?) I'd pick DO.
$10 DO Dropplet gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and 2TB of bandwidth.
$10 AWS Lifghtsail instance gets you 1 CPU, 2GB RAM, 60GB SSD, and 3 TB of transfer.
Lightsail also offers load balancers for $18/mo compared to DO's $10, $30, or $60 per month.
DO $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 10G SSD
AWS $15/mo managed DB 1G 1vCPU 40G SSD
I'm really not seeing how "pretty much everything else isn't" with respect to their offerings.
The last time I checked Lightsail uses similar CPU credits[0] as their t2 ec2 instances.
As long as you're only using a tiny portion of your CPU it's fine but if you start doing work on your instance where your CPU is being used for a sustained amount of time then you run out of CPU credits and performance is drastically degraded.
DigitalOcean has no such mechanism. I've never had a droplet's CPU performance get penalized because I used the allocated resources that I was paying for.
[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/burstabl...
From what I've seen of benchmarks online, DO's droplets have better sustained (and often overall) performance than Lightsail, and this looks to be the reason why.
(Which isn't to say people should avoid Lightsail, but I don't think Lightsail is the obvious 1:1 replacement for DO that a couple of people in this thread want it to be. Lightsail intentionally restricts various things to avoid cannibalizing their normal AWS sales.)
For example, you just pay $5 for a monthly droplet. AWS offers a near competitor to this,AWS light sail.
Digitalocean is easier to use, but only marginally. I strongly suspect many users who find AWS to be a confusing mess try DO instead. I used DO for a long time , but I've since switched to AWS
34% of the web still runs on Wordpress. A lot want somewhere cheap and easy to use with more power than shared hosting.
But I guess that is the price you pay for being AWS ready.
The big clouds offer great features, but My 5/mo Linode is fine to run a 3 user matrix server.
(I used to work at Linode, but that didn't sway my desire to avoid the big 3.)
Many SV startups just end up taking their VC investment and handing it to AWS over a period of 18 months.
They’re so small and inconsequential to the business that I don’t want to spend any time thinking about the security risk of keeping them anywhere near production. They don’t need access to prod data so why put them in a position where they could potentially allow access to it?
So, for me, the easiest thing was to be put them with a completely different company. Don’t have to worry about any potential issues with imitating it on AWS (via additional accounts, different region, etc) which are all prone to human failure over time.
Maybe I’ve a bad reason, but it works for me and DO gets ~$50/mo from us and I’ve never considered switching.
Also, GCP/AWS/Azure don't support OpenBSD. There are others who do. I just want a good dedicated server for a good price.
And don't even mention Azure, where I feel like in a huge maze of mirrors. Nothing is simple, and you waste lots of time on clicking and figuring things out.
So yes, DO has very real value, and I'm glad they exist. The only roughly comparable provider I found was Vultr, which I like quite a bit, too.
DO/Linode and others are perfectly fine serving a sizable audience of users who do not need the complexities that those larger vendors offer.
I struggled for days trying to add more disk to an existing ubuntu image on Azure in 2018. Documentation sucked - both what was there and discoverability. Their instructions just... didn't work, the UI was incredibly .... Azure wasn't my choice - client had O365 and their 'IT vendor' had 'credits' on Azure, so... I had to go with Azure... and it was a huge time sink to do some basic stuff that is literally a few clicks with DO and Linode.
Yes, I don't think I can create private VPNs in the cloud with DO - I don't need to for most projects. The level of functionality DO/Linode/etc provide is adequate for a lot of projects, and they are growing their new functionality to serve needs in a way that seems usable by people without needing to be a certified expert in BigVendorCo.
And... there's nothing inherently horrible about lightsail, but if I've decided that's all I need, I may go with other companies that have that model as their main focus. If I decide I want more of the AWS infrastructure, I'd stay in AWS (or... GCP, or Azure, or whatever).
Not everyone is interested in paying the exhorbitant pricing the big cloud providers charge, regardless of features.
Now they might get acquired by the big boys and run under their existing brands as a low cost alternative. But the services aren't going away. I'm willing to bet the big guys want nothing to do with them though. It'll just eat into their margin.
This is why I like DO. If other cloud providers do have this please lmk because nothing makes me more nervous than having my personal CC on file with very little retribution as a consumer (I don’t want to get banned from all Google services for doing a charge back).
That is the target, AWS you need a math degree to understand the billing and even then you will never know exactly what you will be billed until you are actually billed...
This is not the case with DO and Linode
Sure for a large enterprise that needs that complexity and flexiblity to squeeze every penny out it would not be a good fit
but for SMB work loads, it is great
Mind you, I'm just hosting a simple website and mail server.
Just picking a VPS from Amazon is an absolute nightmare. All the different levels, with the credit bullshit.
DO I can log in, pick a VPS with the specs I need and be done with it. I don’t need to worry about over using it and running out of credits and being throttled and having that to troubleshoot.
DO has been reliable for me, affordable, and incredibly easy to understand and use.