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.
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).
Many SV startups just end up taking their VC investment and handing it to AWS over a period of 18 months.
* 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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
Also, GCP/AWS/Azure don't support OpenBSD. There are others who do. I just want a good dedicated server for a good price.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
Mind you, I'm just hosting a simple website and mail server.