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breck

Here are the problems I've had in my 7+ years as a DigitalOcean customer: .

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.

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They've accrued up losses of $43M, $40M and $35M in the 3 preceding years. Funny how that's considered financially healthy in the world we're living right now.

25% revenue growth past 2 years and losses have remained constant.

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.

I think it's good to point this out and think a little about what "health" means here. Looking at their consolidated financial data on page 11, you can see they spend about $1 providing a service someone pays $2 for. Then all the rest of it gets eaten up by salary, r&d and marketing.

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.

So long as the investment into growth (sales and marketing) is paid back through the cashflow of customers during their lifetime, the losses are tolerable.

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.

Capital is cheap

The business is making money, they are just spending it growing the business. Most tech companies that are still in the growth stage will lose money because they have to spend a lot on R&D and keeping employees at the company with compensation. The tech industry is highly competitive and you have to spend a lot to stay competitive.

Depends, what are they spending the money on? Are they wasting it on user acquisition or are they using it to build more datacenters? Are their losses projected to grow or are they staying the same while increasing revenue? Are customers actually using the service or are they just being lured in through loss leaders?

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 ran into issues several years ago where the IP of my DigitalOcean droplet always seemed to be on block lists or banned for abuse from various services. As a result it made it impossible to use as a VPN server or mail server. The early ability to spin up and charge hourly rates made them good targets for spammers compared to companies like Linode, who at the time didn't have hourly rates.

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.

It hasn't gotten better. I had to plead with a postmaster at a large ISP to unblock my droplet because they banned all DO's IPs after they were refusing to manage the way spammers were abusing the service. Not a "we're sending to spam" ban but a hard 550 connection refused. The postmaster suggested I do some Googling on the topic and I was shocked at what I found, so I can see why they had to throw their hands up and block the lot.

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...

In my experience this is 100% the case with all IaaS providers. AWS's entire IP space is basically on all email block lists for example.

I find this extremely hard to believe.

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...

I think the wording should be changed. I would agree that all their EC2's and lightsail instances would be in the RBL/RSL's. AWS have an email service specifically for this use case.

I would be shocked if even that were true. Well, looks like I’ve got some homework for tonight.

They come and go get listed and delisted so you may find your own nodes to be hit and miss. That is for the well behaved RBL's and RSL's. Spamcop, Spamhaus, Uceprotect will expire nodes and networks after a period of no reported spam. There are a few others that will leave things listed for a long time. I am only basing my experience on those three. The less costly a VPS provider, the more often they get listed. Ramnode for example is almost always blocked. If you have long running nodes, it is unlikely you will find them blocked outside of Uceprotect level-2.

The only issue I've ever had is the login auth email can take 20 minutes to arrive at fastmail. This seems to have gotten better lately.

What a great service!!

That's pretty much me too. I briefly thought they had a major Kubernetes fail recently, but they immediately diagnosed the issue and got back to us...We'd shot ourselves in the foot. I love DigitalOcean.

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