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Comment by yte14 | Hacker News Reader

The thesis of DigitalOcean was literally “this very established market needs a venture capital growth play because we saw Slicehost exit to Rackspace”. In the beginning the entirety of DO’s offering, tech for tech, was almost a direct lift of Linode and, as they scaled, made all the same technical mistakes and learning experiences that Linode did.

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.

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Actually, Ben and Moisey owned a managed hosting company that was coming under a lot of pressure from rackspace. DigitalOcean as a product was a direct response to that market pressure. I think if you ask any of the early executives, none of us loooovveed the venture component, it was a way to grow the business that was already growing rapidly with strong product market fit. Remember, a16z only invested once we were doing millions and millions in ARR. In terms of Linode, I have no idea what you're talking about. DigitalOcean had 1 click $5 SSD offerings years before linode/anyone else made any changes to their business.

Which is amusing because Rackspace is now overpriced garbage as far as I can tell, or a wrapper around public cloud.

I have dealt with Rackspace exact 2 times and both times, it has been a horrendous experience.

They make you call support to delete a “cloud server” - glad I’ll only have to do that once more.

Rackspace was always overpriced garbage

I remember Linode being hesitant to dip below $20 because the thinking was that it would diminish the quality of support. That thinking was reinforced when you started with $10 (if I recall, it’s been nearly a decade) and we started getting large numbers of refugees burned by experiences with your support organization. Neighboring comments tell me it’s still a problem. We consciously didn’t want to grow $5 fast because we didn’t have capital to throw at any problem that developed. We, the market, not just Linode, also knew competing to the bottom on price largely relegated shared/cpanel/etc hosting to $0.99 commodity status and we weren’t keen to kick off such a war for obvious reasons. (That was quite prescient, looking back from outside in 2021.)

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?

You might be experiencing a form of survivorship bias / confirmation bias here.

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.

I don’t understand how that impacts my point at all. If an opinion is only held in one context it’s not actually held? Is that what you’re saying? I’m sorry, I don’t follow.

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.

He is saying that your perspective as a Linode employee might not represent how others saw Digital Ocean at the time. Which for me is glaringly obvious from your comments.

EDIT: s/general public/others

I wasn’t talking about the general public. I was talking about the incumbents. I said competitors, not customers, and that wasn’t a corrected typo.

Edit: I responded to something that’s now been silently edited out and replaced with “others”.

I guess you may think of that in the same way the incumbents considered Amazon “another e-commerce play” or Google as “another search engine” while being blind to the real changes happening underneath.

I've noticed that the folks who aren't so attentive to product / market fit and other items (customer ergonomics maybe?) tend not to really see what they are missing, what's different about the "other" guy that means they are in some ways cleaning up. I wonder if that describes linode a bit.

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!

Well a non-DO employee (and someone who ran things on linode and then on DO) I would say its a fair read and what the mindshare at the time was.

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.

Perhaps it wasn’t their own mental model of the landscape at all, but just what they considered to be the most expedient way of getting the message across in terms customers would understand.

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.

Again, I’m not basing what I’m saying solely on the conference example. I’m not arguing over the psychology of multiple conference conversations from ten years ago any further because it’s completely immaterial to my point (and one example of many; the point of the example was that it was openly discussed among competition, not “let’s go to the mat on what constitutes an actual opinion with the assumption that I don’t perceive conversation appropriately”).

Have you ever watched Kitchen Nightmares? Bad chef's are often surprised to get told their food tastes bad because everyone always tells them how good their food is!

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.

Your point makes sweeping claims that "the entire incumbency" thought of DO as a Linode clone.

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 user, I agree - DO was seen a cheaper clone of Linode / Slicehost when they launched. I used to usually recommend Pair and Linode to my clients and, later DO to my more cost-conscious clients. At that time, I preferred Linode over DO, because the support was better and the prevalent practice than was to look suspiciously at new hosts because a lot of them folded up. You looked to older hosts, like Pair (and later Rackspace and Linode) because you knew they were reliable in both tech and the hosting business.

I loved pair! Never followed what happened to them!

They still seem to be doing really well - last heard, they've migrated most of their servers from FreeBSD to Linux and also offer Linode and DO like VPS hosting.

> it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours

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.

Right! Linode was $20/month at least and more focused to businesses. Not the then unbelievable $5/month for SSH ssh accessible virtual box with root access that DO started. Plus the SSD. Other hosting providers later caught on with DO.

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.

> As a developer, DO never looked anything like it.

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.

I’m customer for years and I don’t use any of the features you mentioned past the first two; I’m part of the 5$ VM crowd for who this is the killer feature. Should OVH have provided on-demand instead of yearly plans for VPS I would have stayed there as I’ve my domains there already.

The simper than AWS aspect was one of the main reasons I choose DO to do most of my cloud stuff. Also AWS had this odd habit of not auto charging me so it would go a couple months then I would get hit with multiple months worth of a bill.

The API is a key point many people miss when they think of early DigitalOcean as just another VPS host.

DO definitely had UI, SSD first. But Block Storage, Regions, Snapshots Backup and Load Balancer all were either first on Linode or being worked on for a long time. Linode also had Pooled Transfer and other tidbit for a long time well before DO.

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.

Before I ever paid DO a cent, I made significant use of a lot of their incredible documentation on setting up various servers, setting up your confide correctly, etc.

Gotta +1 that. Whenever I'm looking for a howto, I pray that there's a DO one already done. The quality (and brevity) is usually the best.

agreed, the recent HN feature of Cockpit piqued my interest and I prayed DO had a tutorial for debian. of course, they did

Lol, what? DO was basically a page for page copy of linode's site and product offering in 2011-2013.

They were both modeled after services like Slicehost I believe.

Negative. Slicehost launched in the middle of Linode pivoting virtualization stacks after proving out the business and running into limitations of their first stack (UML). Slicehost was ... 2006, if memory serves? Linode was a few years old by that point. For those keeping score, Linode then went to Xen and now KVM just like everyone else.

Linode and Slicehost were very similar stories, though. Slicehost bootstrapped as well and was run by good people.

You do know that Jason Seats, the founder of Slicehost, was pivotal in the DigitalOcean story also?

Yes. What’s your point?

I remember at that time feeling almost bad for Linode because they had built up so much valuable educational content about what you could run on their services, and I was using it step-by-step on DO. The only differentiator was the price. Of course DO quickly replicated and excelled in providing that tutorial value as well.

But were they really doing anything other than copy/pasting HOWTOs by Falko Timme?

> Their web UI also has always been miles ahead.

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.

Whether your claim is true or not, there’s more to a product than the underlying technology. Frankly, this line of discussion reads as sour grapes and reflects poorly on the Linode team.

> more to a product than the underlying technology

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 don't think it reflects poorly on them at all. When DO started everyone still used the help document of Linode and Slicehost to setup and spin a server on DO. They could do that because DO was a clone of these services. To their credit DO improved and grew, and that's no mean feat.

Yes. For those of us that actually went through the Slicehost, Linode era, the time when paying per month and not per hour for a simple VPS before everything was rolled into the word Cloud. Those comment read more like an accurate account of history while others read it as an attack of a company.

They all offered a VPS, which is basically a Linux box with root access. Any Linux tutorial would work on all three services.

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.

I was a huge Linode fan for years. I used them exclusively. DO showed up and slowly but surely started being the better deal. Lower entry points, better specs, and then finally a more robust product line. I slowly found myself going to DO for new servers and eventually moved everything there for simplicities sake.

Linode still has a special place in my heart, but they have some work to do if they want to remain competitive.

Wow - really? I use both Linode and DO extensively and Linode is better on almost all fronts in my experience. Faster servers, better network, Linode's Object Storage is way better than DO's "spaces" and Linode's support is hands down the better of the two. If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless you're already there?

> If you're going to spend $5 on a server why would you go with DO unless you're already there?

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.

Yeah I know about that incident - but also believe companies have the ability to learn from past mistakes and do better.

Unfortunately it wasn't a single incident.. fool me once..

I mean that was terrible, but I know full well that every company ever will have dumb vulnerabilities occasionally, so by that metric I could never use anyone.

Last time I provision on linode and do at the same time a created a ubuntu box. I found I had to setup a few additional things in linode. Linode never felt as polished which is fine.

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 remember something being off in Vultr $2.50 offer which made me stop halfway during sign-up. Had to go to https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ again to remind myself: $2.50 VPS does not come with an IPv4 address. At least today they openly mark it and I think 5 years ago you'd only find it after a few clicks.

This was an advantage to me at the time. My ISP (Internode) had enabled dual-stack v6, and a few of the other options I was looking at on LowEndBox came with a NATed v4 address. Here was Vultr offering an IP I could fully control, even point real domains to!

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.

Same here, I use both but prefer Linode in every aspect. Much better support and reliability in particular.

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.

Linodes support is great; I can't say much about DO because I haven't had to use them.

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.

As an original Slicehost customer, and long time Digital Ocean and Linode customer, your version of history is bullshit. I was looking to move from Rackspace after the Slicehost aquisition. Moved to Digital Ocean because of the SSD offering. It performed wonderfully. Needed bigger servers, and Linode had just created an offering competitive with Digital Ocean. I signed up and ran some benchmarks and Linode was about 25% faster than DO. I moved everything to Linode and the company has been there ever since. For what it is worth, my Linode bill is currently about $2000, and DO is $40. I am calling you out as a loyal Linode customer who thinks Linode is great.

I've been a customer of both for years -- in Linode's case, since 2009. Your comments are coming across like sour grapes, so I think this is a good opportunity to hear about some of Linode's mistakes from a longtime Linode customer.

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.

This just nailed just about everything I was going to say. I’ve used and liked both since both started and this entire thread is pretty embarrassing.

The real story is Ben and Moisey were running one of the largest hosting co's in porn and then there was a security problem via one of their upstream providers and it created a DISASTER. Thats how DO was born from what I understand.

As a user of both services for years, the only point on which they are similar was/is that they both offer shared cheap VMs (as do lots of other services).

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.

I'm puzzled by the praises on DO UI, since in the early days in particular I always found it intolerably terrible. Far less useful than Linode UI. Nowadays it's ok, but Linode is still has better UI.

I was on Linode for a while and moved to DigitalOcean. At the time it was a very simple calculus.

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.

What's the difference like today? As a long time Linode customer, I just never even felt the need to shop around. Maybe I should! It's always been just fine for my "tiny duty" Wordpress host. I always knew DO existed, but figured it's the same $5 and I'm probably getting about the same thing so why bother switching. I guess I'm a good example of why stickiness matters.

Today the pricing and services are essentially matched. Someone will obviously fight be on this statement, but I think today they are essentially equal from a cost perspective. They all run SSDs and have similar cost per RAM/CPU core.

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.

This doesn’t sound right. I know we evaluated linode vs do in 2016, and dropped linode because of lack of volume support. Digitalocean had that, even if only in FRA1, but it surely was ahead of linode back then

(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)

I always wondered if they would eventually make a deliberate attempt to take over the "shared Cpanel hosting" market with a non-shared-host, non-cpanel model. It seems ripe for change...lots of little players.

The market was considerably too small and it would mean building to much towards the past. The thesis of "millions of *new* developers are coming online over the next 20 years" was the main north star.

It is small compared to cloud, but it's a ~$22 billion / year market. Compare to IaaS at ~$50b. So it's not tiny, but it is highly fragmented.

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.

We were too busy building in the wake of AWS. Looking forward and building into the paradigm shift was the strategy (and it seemed to work!). :)

Makes sense, though paradoxically, that market is growing by around 10% per year.

"An aggressive exit strategy" when they started in "2003"?

Aggressive, as in two turtles fighting.

Linode was founded in 2003, not DigitalOcean.

Their approach to making VPS/Cloud offerings simple and approachable are really what set them apart, in my mind. I run all of my simple things there, because sometimes I don't want or need the complexity that actually managing things in Azure, GCloud, or AWS require.

As a happy Slicehost customer, I definitely saw Slicehost in every aspect of the DO approach.

Some are saying that about Linode and I just don't get it.

Loved Slicehost!!!

DO's offering was SSD backed small hosts for $5.

Nothing else in the market offered that at the time.

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