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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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'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?).

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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!

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.

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.

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