They’ve got growing revenue but falling profits and they’ve got more debt than assets. They may want to raise their droplet prices, or issue more stock and then refocus on making their business profitable.
[0] valustox.com/DOCN
DigitalOcean is organizationally incapable of making anything in-house anymore.
I want to blame leadership - and to be clear, leadership sucks - but the problems are pervasive through every layer of the organization.
The only significant launches in the last 4-5 years have all been acquisitions or built by partner companies and whitelabeled.
Every system and every team has massively circular dependencies on one another , so it's just a massive circle of "we can't move until they move".
The tech debt is insane. Everything is slowed down by terribly-run and massively underfunded internal "platforms" teams for kubernetes, CI/CD, various internal databases, etc.
If you want to build something useful you basically have to ignore upper management and do it in secret until it's done and so integral to the systems that they have no choice but to allow you to support it.
Asking leadership outright to invest in minor maintenance for systems the entire company depends on is never approved.
The bar for engineering practices, code quality, and system design quality is comically low.
All the systems are massively distributed, but there is no understanding of distributed systems issues.
I was told multiple times that "CAP theorem doesn't apply here" and gaslit that an asynchronously replicated MySQL instance that sometimes spiked to multi-minute replication lag to the read replicas should just be used as if it were completely consistent between master and read replicas.
Tons of stuff was just run as singletons with hand-rolled in-memory rate limiting to avoid having to understand distributed locking or semaphores. These systems inevitably start falling over a few months after creation, but you're not allowed to evolve it into a correct system, you just have to support that garbage forever.
Brain drain everywhere due to low salaries. Even engineers barely capable of committing working code were getting fat raises to leave.
Most acquisitions fail. It's a difficult path unless it fits a very specific need.
Yet a common management / product strategy is to buy random companies as though they are ingredients of a dish and think it'll just work.
Digital Ocean to me has lost their core focus and appeal. They aren't upgrading their hardware, software and other crucial pieces of their infrastructure. There's been gimmicks, acquisitions and marketing.
Someone said the executives there don't believe they can compete with the big cloud providers and so are poking at different areas to see what works.
I would be closer to nine fives than five nines, but that's good enough even for many commercial sites, including mine.
Another way is to signup for a cheap VPS and use a tunnel to your home server. There's lots of really cheap VPS's with 128MB of memory that is plenty if you just want a tunnel.
You can buy a computer that is 1000x more powerful than a droplet for a fraction of the ownership cost, especially if you only get occasional visitors.
I'm excited by the idea of completely decentralized hosting; now we just need decentralized payments - that take USD.
Doesn't sound very useful for hosting anything public.
Acquisitions are an easy way to juice top line growth. Acquisitions also offer ample opportunity to put lipstick on your finances. After all, any acquisition has many one-time costs and you can use this to juice your margins. You also forecast substantial cost savings by eliminating redundant positions. All in all, your gross margins and YoY growth look a lot healthier after the acquisition even when nothing has fundamentally improved about your business.
Repeated acquisitions really muddy the water and make it even harder for analysts to figure out how well your core business is doing. Especially when growth in your core business is stalling it makes a lot of sense to obfuscate your finances while you purchase top line growth.
All the while the stock price stays high and the executives get to enjoy their option packages. Eventually the music stops, but clever executives jump ship before that happens.