DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round | Hacker News Reader

DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round

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208 pointsbeigeotter109 comments

From DigitalOcean's cofounder on Quora:

We applied to TechStars in NYC first because we were based in NYC and we got in right before the early app deadline. After meeting David Tisch at TechStars 4 A Day he flat out told us he doesn't understand our space so it would be hard for him to pick us, because part of his decision is to determine how he as the program director can help accelerate our growth.

We did become a finalist but weren't selected and he recommended us to TechStars Boulder. So we flew out there for TechStars 4 A Day and went through the process again.

Full post: http://www.quora.com/Startups/If-youre-rejected-from-an-incu...

Pretty amazing that a company like DigitalOcean can shake-up the market for VP servers prior to even taking funding. Their $5 servers have changed the game for nearly every hosting company that offers virtual servers. And to think they've managed to offer this while bootstrapped, is incredible.

Not really. How did it change the game for service providers over at LowEndBox.com, who have been providing VPS servers for $5 or less, before DigitalOcean even existed?

Hourly Billing

Stored backups (for free) of servers that you can set up at a later date instantly via an api

It's not about being a $5 vps for me, it's about being able to pay $0.014 when I need a small vps for 2 hours.

Hourly billing is huge for us.

Our service is mostly CPU bound, embarrassingly parallel, and so far, 90% of usage is centered on a time slot that's about 8 hours per week long.

We will save a ton of money by scaling down during the off hours, which means only Amazon, Rackspace, and a few others make any sense at all.

I agree. This was massive for me. Being able to create a Droplet (from an existing backup) within a minute, test out an installation for a day, and have it cost almost nothing is huge.

In my experience, a lot of the services on LowEndBox.com are pretty sketchy. I'd go to production on DA.

Not really. Most offers on LEB and LET are from recognised and proven providers. There are some fly-by-night providers that pop up over summer and disappear, but actually reading the offers on LEB will tell you how long the company has been offering their services for and how often they post deals.

I lurked for less than a day on Lowendtalk and got an idea of the most respected/high quality hosts such as:

BuyVM ChicagoVPS Prometeus (and IperWeb) HTTPZoom Iniz Ramnode

I've had a box with most of these (apart from Ramnode which is highly regarded) and i can say i've had an awesome experience.

both ChicagoVPS (for the second time in a year) and Ramnode were hacked a little over a month ago - tons of servers deleted, customer db's dumped online.

I think "sketchy" is a good characterization when a pick of the "best" hosts have severe problems.

CVPS is as sketchy as they come, they have a fan-following of past-users who makes fun of their offering. They got hacked more than once and each time they botched their response to customers.

As someone who have used quite a few servers from LEB over the years, there is no way I am going to put anything serious in most of their offering. There are some exceptions, like Ramnode, BuyVM, but DO pretty much made the choice easy for me. Why bother taking a risk?

1) Cheap price and good offering and service.

2) Now I know they are going to stick around for a while.

> 2) Now I know they are going to stick around for a while.

Remember Slicehost? They might stick around but not in the form that you like especially given that DO are playing the startup game rather than growing organically, building a solid business, and then taking money at a later stage for targeted expansion, like Atlassian and Github.

And Digital Ocean's predecessor Reality Check Network was hacked and all servers wiped. I think Linode was hacked a few months back too.

So, a vulnerability in the control panel used in probably >90% of all lowendbox providers, combined with a specific person applying the exploit to Ramnode, makes them sketchy now? Man, Apple must be the sketchiest company out there now, you know, with the week long downtime for the Dev Center.

I've audited both WHMCS and Solus. I found a half-dozen bugs in minutes of looking at each codebase. I can't express how horrible this software is that 90% of these hosts are running on - they are both an absolute trainwreck. More hacks are only a matter of time, especially when neither company responds to emails or security incidents well.

How much real engineering are these providers doing? How well do they understand their stack? If they're all running the same underlying software, it suggests that setting up such an operation doesn't require much skill and it's heading to "script kiddy" territory. Sketchy? Certainly suspect and needing a lot of due diligence which my gut tells me that (a) they won't fare so well; and (b) they are so low-margin that they would be unwilling to participate.

If Apple got hacked because their dev center was powered by a $10 control panel script then yeah... they'd be extremely sketchy too.

Is LowEndBox and actual provider or just a listing service? The two don't even appear similar to me.

It just lists offers from actual providers.

This is really neat. One question: How are these folks able to keep such low prices?

For example, I run several servers on rackspace. Their least expensive option (512MB RAM, 1 core, 20GB disk) is $16.00 per month.

DigitalOcean's is $5.00 per month. On the face of it, they are identical offerings but triple the price.

Rackspace does offer other features (load balancing, cloudfiles, and other useful things which integrate nicely with their servers.) Is that the value proposition of AWS/Rackspace over these other companies, which only give you vanilla servers?

Rackspace's gross margin is 72.95%[0] and they are (or were) considered 'fat' (look at the margin trend in that chart to see how they have improved)

Some estimate AWS's margins are up around 80% [1]

Competition, low cost hardware, building their own stack, open source etc. mean better pricing for us users

[0] http://ycharts.com/companies/RAX/gross_profit_margin

[1] http://blog.profitbricks.com/the-fake-cloud-price-war/

I tried to Love AWS, but right now I just like their effort. There is something organically that feels right about the way DO has positioned themselves, they can always scale pricing based on additional features added. Yes, there margin is thin, but the the fact that the service is easy to use means less user support issues when adding them at 500 per day.

I keep hearing great things about DigitalOcean, but the critical price parameter for me is flash storage, and they don't seem to be beating AWS here. The larger DigitalOcean plans are $1 / GB / month for flash. An EC2 hi1.4xlarge instance has 2TB of flash. At on-demand pricing, $3.10/hr x 24 hours x 30 days == $2232/month, which is slightly more expensive. But reserved instances bring that down very quickly. A "Light Utilization" instance only costs $3884 upfront for a three-year term. Even if you amortize that over just 12 months, it works out to $1152/month, almost 2x as cost-effective as DigitalOcean. (Of course, with DigitalOcean you're getting a lot more CPU and RAM per GB of SSD, but only compared to the h1.4xlarge which is deliberately flash-heavy.)

This is not to run down DigitalOcean, but if you take reserved instances into account then they don't necessarily beat EC2 pricing. Or am I missing something?

For me, they are really good on the low end. I love the fact that they offer a $5 per month instance size. Plus, since I joined during the beta period I get unlimited bandwidth for free. This beats the $15 per month AWS instance sizes or the lowest Google option of like $30 bucks. Also, it's like 2x faster than AWS. Finally, for hacking you can easily use a $5 server to replace a service like Cloudant as your backend during testing. I've had cases where I would have been charged hundreds of dollars for API calls which a $5 DigitalOcean server handled marvelously. Or you can use it host a high performance blog: http://jasonormand.com/2012/07/20/introducing-lempress-super...

I thought the unlimited bandwidth thing was only until they start measuring it?

I think customers that signed up a long time ago get unlimited bandwidth forever so long as they don't do certain things (Tor, Bittorents, run a CDN)

Correct

Why would I take reserved instances into account when I don't have to reserve them with Digital Ocean? They're still kicking AWS' ass on pricing. Sure, big boys are still going to go with AWS (i.e. the CIA), but for small/mid-sized shops? Digital Ocean ahoy!

My guess is that they're a) using cheap SSD's, and b) charging at or below cost now so that when a price drop hits in a year or so's time they'll be instantly, hugely profitable.

One of my favorite startups. I signed up for a single server some time ago to try them out and was amazed when I saw the control panel, API and the ecosystem that has already built up around the service.

To those of you asking what is so special about DO compared to ExyExtraVps.is running stock WHMCS[1] or whatever over at LEB it is that DO are providing the type of features, flexibility and support that Rackspace, AWS and Azure provide but at prices that are close to what the low-end VPS types offer.

If you imagine a Gartner-style quadrant for hosting with price on one axis and then features/support/flexibility on another most providers today sit somewhere along a very straight line - you either have a bunch of features and flexibility and are expensive or you are very rigid and cheap. DO is right up in high features but low price, and it seems so obvious in hindsight (Linode were almost there).

I now have Vagrant setup with Digital Ocean as a provider[2] so setting up a box is as easy as running 'vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean' and then waiting a minute. There are tons of other tools already built up around their API and the ecosystem is thriving. I have another script setup ready to fire up additional instances of web apps.

I'm moving everything I can and that fits from AWS and recommending DO to clients also where it would fit (staging servers, dev servers, backup servers, etc.) There are still some features they need - like load balancing, multiple IP's etc. but this funding means all of that is going to be built sooner.

There is a reason why they are one of the fastest growing hosts ever[3]. These guys are destined to get really really big.

There is also a great effect wherever digital ocean is mentioned online you find a comment thread with dozens of users saying how awesome they are. You can't buy that type of love.

[1] Not to mention that all of that off-the-shelf VPS software running these sites is an absolute security nightmare. The developers rely on hiding their poor code behind ioncube encoding and this has been exposed recently with some big name hacks.

[2] https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean

[3] Netcraft: The meteoric rise of Digital Ocean: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/13/the-meteoric-ri...

edit: forgot to include this earlier, but by way of a disclaimer I introduced Digital Ocean to Crunchfund but don't have a financial stake.

I've been out of the webdev loop for years so I've never used Vagrant, but I've read a bit about it and I see it mentioned all the time. I understand that Vagrant is used to quickly set up virtual machines (and all the required software) to replicate a production environment so that you can test your web app on it without having to clutter your own machine with that software.

I understand that you can have a Vagrant provider for VMWare and VirtualBox, but what does it mean for you to have a DigitalOcean provider for Vagrant?

Also, maybe someone can drop a few words in on the typical usage scenario for Vagrant? Other than automation, how else does Vagrant help a developer, and how does it tie into the various VPS services (such as AWS, DO, etc...)?

> I understand that you can have a Vagrant provider for VMWare and VirtualBox, but what does it mean for you to have a DigitalOcean provider for Vagrant?

Instead of spinning up a VM on your local machine it spins up a new droplet in your Digital Ocean account (droplet is DO's term for a virtual server).

> Also, maybe someone can drop a few words in on the typical usage scenario for Vagrant? Other than automation, how else does Vagrant help a developer, and how does it tie into the various VPS services (such as AWS, DO, etc...)?

Vagrant lets you define a server environment that you can turn on with just a simple "vagrant up". For apps that have server dependencies (who doesn't?) like databases or MQ servers, you can isolate them into a standard VM. If someone else is going to work on your app then they can get started immeidately via "vagrant up". No need to manually setup the server dependencies, it'll all automagically build itself.

Once you start using it you'll never go back to manually setting up server dependencies for dev. It pays for itself in time savings the first time you use it.

Vagrant integration with AWS or DO is simply to have the server spin up there rather than locally. Even cooler is the expermental Docker integration (as a provider) as it lets you run many Vagrant VMs with minimal overhead.

Thanks for the quick reply!

> Instead of spinning up a VM on your local machine it spins up a new droplet in your Digital Ocean account (droplet is DO's term for a virtual server). >Vagrant integration with AWS or DO is simply to have the server spin up there rather than locally.

Every droplet costs money, why would you want to create new droplets for development, when you can spin up a VM locally? What are the advantages of spinning up remote server instances over local ones?

The remote one is for production, not development. (Well, thats how I'm using them anyway).

In my workflow I have two boxes in my Vagrant profile, one for development (local VBox VM) and one for production (DO droplet). Using Chef for provisioning, I can configure and test provisioning locally, then roll it out in production with minimal effort.

Its a really nice workflow! Although all this Docker business lately looks like it might make for an even better one.

What's the overhead of Vagrant for production purposes? Maybe I'm too old school for all of this, but I still don't understand what docker is or what it does.

There is no overhead for vagrant, it is just something that provisions/sets up your server with chef/puppet/whatever

once the server is up, it is exactly the same as if you did it by hand

Other people can see and work with a remote development server. If you're pair programming or having a consultant or friend help you debug something tricky, you can set up screen sessions with just an ssh login instead of having to set up and configure another tool that the other person might not be familiar with. If you're working from home, or with a distributed team that can't all be on the same network, with a remote server you don't have to monkey with letting someone else into your network.

Droplets only cost money when they're instantiated/on. At the end of the day, you nuke the server and can deploy it again in the morning if you need to.

Instead of having one or 2 machines that simulate a much smaller production environment by connecting out to digital ocean or aws you can spin up a full sized copy of your production infrastructure.

This is nice as it allows you to do performance testing as well as stability and provisioning tests and your normal unit\functional\whatever tests.

While you wouldn't want to do it for every commit (unless you had your own infrastructure with space(though you could still do a partial test and profile)) it would be nice to test every merge to master.

For fractions of a cent an hour, Its just as comfortable not to be tying up my local resources.

Their support is absolutely amazing. I opened a ticket to ask a question, submitted it, and before I could navigate away from their website, the ticket had been answered (i.e. within 5 min).

Agreed. I had a question answered in less than a minute earlier today (and it was a dumb, non-critical question—I couldn't figure out where to enter a coupon code)

I started with Digital Ocean after I saw them on here and have been nothing but impressed. Seems like really good value, and it's great to have such cheap dev environments to work/play with. Great for budding full stack devs. I'm glad it seems they're here to stay.

Congratluations to DO! Sadly there's so much hard work involved in this space and so little money ($5/server/mo) to be made in "hosting" that founders always eye an early exit. Also a $5/server strategy is proof this isn't sustainable in the long run. Revenue isn't enough to cover capex.

And this kind of growth almost always means founders are looking for an early exit. Yes it's all a happy ending for the founders but what will happen to the end users?

I think you might be underestimating how cheap bandwidth and hardware has become at scale. If anything, because of the nature of how VPS work, you can make good money as server hardware gets faster and cheaper.

There's the people aspect in all of this. What's reasonable pay for a good sysadmin/programmer hybrid? 70k - 100k/yr? How many do you need to keep things running smoothly and build new tools? How many do you need full time for remote hands and provisioning?

Hardware prices don't drop so much at this scale unless you're buying in extremely large quantities. Even then and they don't drop as much as bandwidth (except for out of lease equipment and I doubt DO does this).

With newer, more powerful servers they can cram more VPS in to single server. Usually users rarely have continuous CPU usage on small CPUs like that, so in theory you can cram more VPS in a server, without causing any performance issue to other VPS.

VPS in general is insanely profitable, if you know what you are doing.

The employee aspect will always be there, DO can still make money by not taking outrageous profit margin like AWS and Rackspace.

I run a similar business (fully managed though). I know for certain that hardware and bandwidth costs are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Remember there's also colocation, power, contracts, networking equipment (2x10G), and DDoS costs.

You don't really charge a client for the bandwidth costs incurred during a DDoS if you choose to absorb the attack. You don't charge a client when a RAID controller fails and you need to restore xTBs of data (xx man hours). Oh and you need to purchase backup nodes, which you're not getting any immediate return on.

You need an office. You need to factor in travel costs. Overtime pay. Health insurance, payroll costs, etc. Ads...

It's definitely a tough market, and competing with Jeff Bezos in a low margin market is certainly not an enviable position, however it's certainly possible.

You can buy a 1U server that could fit 100 DO sized droplets for about $5,000. Scale that up a little bit, and you can see that it might be profitable although low margin.

"low margin" being 60-80%

You realize that DO scales up to 960$ /month right (96GB24 Cores960GB SSD )? The 20$ package competed directly with linode.

I was going to say the same thing. This whole thread of comments seems focused on $5/month. I don't even host a blog on that one ($10, I'm not fussed paying 5 bucks more to ensure it stays up on the off chance I write something people linked to). $5 offering really is the marketing line to get you looking at the offering IMO.

Equally, at our company, we're paying DO for many different machines at $160. I'd love to know their ARPU number, I expect it is actually significantly above $5.

What about their security? Seem to have been quite a few issues recently.

From just two days ago, here on HN:

"Digitalocean.com has misconfigured their network in a way that allows for anyone to monitor customer network traffic." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157747

Oversight happens. They responded quickly and sent an email to all their customer explaining the problem and how to fix it.

Hm? I was able to verify the submitter's claims (see thread for details), but have yet to receive any email regarding it. I did receive an email earlier about the duplicate Ubuntu host keys; perhaps that's what you're thinking of?

They have ignored a security issue from January to July: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6124306

I really don't get why DigitalOcean is so special. The $5/month VPS is nothing new, and in many, if not most cases you can do a lot better. I'm currently paying $2/month for a 512MB OpenVZ VPS and $6.50/month for a 1GB Xen VPS.

- The SSDs are a main selling point

- Their website is easy to use and clear

- Access via a simple API

I've used them for some side projects - although they aren't feature-full for bigger ones, they are great to use.

RamNode has been offering less expensive SSD VPS hosting for longer than DigitalOcean has been around.

Exactly. There are lots of providers on LowEndBox.com and many have them have SSDs etc.

DigitalOcean are only special because they "play" the start-up game - lots of hype, marketing, get journalists on their side to write nice things about them, etc. - and this gives investors something they can bite into.

The difference between DigitalOcean and other low end providers is that DigitalOcean isn't interested in making money as a business, they're happy to lose money as long as they get more in the front door from investors. Meanwhile other low end providers look more like lifestyle businesses and thus growing slowly and organically.

> The difference between DigitalOcean and other low end providers is that DigitalOcean isn't interested in making money as a business

Except for that part where as they grow they develop economies of scale that allow them to undercut the "lots of providers". There's more than one way to play the game.

My personal opinion is that it just feels - given all the hype - that DigitalOcean are not here to build the best possible hosting provider for developers.

I just don't feel there is anything special about DigitalOcean, nothing that indicates to me that the founders really care about the technical nuances and details of server hosting.

Instead, my impression is that the company will continue to be pimped and supported until a profitable exit is reached. It seems to be all about money. It's hosting today, but tomorrow it could be nursing homes.

They're already undercutting a lot of much bigger providers.

It seems to me that economy of scale does not translate so well to hosting companies. Sure you might be able to get slightly better pricing on servers and connectivity, but complexity has a cost, and it goes up as you get bigger.

No one knows what the future holds. With great value and service there could be a price change or they could be acquired (a la slicehost), but I think it's very hard to depend on some of providers in that price range with poor connectivity and support using that crappy whmcs.

The marketing (you call it hype) is definitely part of the success. You could envision DO becoming a Rackspace but not so with many/all LEB providers.

1. Choice of Node, DO has both US and EU location. 2. Scalable, Instantly Scale up to 96GB of Memory. 3. API - Dont think any of those VPS has those. 4. Hourly Billing.

And would you trust your hosting with Millions of VC backed money or a small VPS company? ( No offence, it is all part of perception and marketing )

I think for less then $10 hosting only, Ramnode and many others LEH wins. But if you want sometime in production that needs more power in the future DO have you backed.

I didn't say that DigitalOcean was better or worse than any other provider, I simply implied that they are not the first to be offering low cost SSD services and that dollar for dollar, there are other companies which seem to be doing it the same or better.

I don't see any reason to "trust" DigitalOcean more or less than a company like RamNode. VC backed money is not a guarantee against failure or problems with your hosting account.

The potential of instantly scaling up to 96GB of memory and an API are an advantage, but it's not exactly a killer feature. I would imagine it's a small minority of DO customers that ever use those features.

RamNode uses the security-hole-laden WHMCS/SolusVM.

Once you get in the under $10 vps offerings it's highly hit or miss. After all, this is the you get what you pay for price range. At $5/mo DO's offering is roughly on par with what you get from Linode or the former Slicehost. This is what makes them special IMO. I'm always evaluating $2 and $3 offerings from lowendbox and so 90% of them suck. Plus I would only trust those for use as backup servers and wouldn't bring them near anything that needs reliability.

My cheaper VPS option doesn't allow you to spin up servers on demand or offer prorated billing. So while there may be cheaper, DO seems the cheapest for the flexibility it has.

In addition to what sibling comments say, DO uses KVM which a) gives better isolation and dedicated RAM, and b) looks and acts much more like a normal Linux machine. I've had issues re-using things like firewall rules on an OpenVZ VM.

Yes, with KVM you can load kernel modules and run things like kerberos which you cannot with OpenVZ.

Xen provides these features as well.

Because Railscasts switched to Digital Ocean a few months back...In all seriousness Digital Ocean is a great product and I have nothing but good things to say. The command line tool Tugboat is quite a joy to use and they keep adding new features all the time.

1. SSDs

2. Exceptional user experience

If the thing you're hosting on the 512MB VPS all of a sudden needs more RAM/Cores for a few days or hours, how long would it take you to fix? If you want to create a few clones of the server in its current state, how long would that take?

Who's your 1GB Xen VPS provider? It sounds like you got it at a special?

Congrats to the DigitalOcean team. I moved my personal server from Linode London to DigitalOcean Amsterdam-1 and haven't had any issues at all and latency is only 2-3ms more from London compared to my old Linode box which is completely acceptable for me. Support is also extremely responsive.

Interesting so I tried digital ocean and was at first pleased but with constant network outages and no private network support it was not ready for a production env as far as I could tell - for toy projects definitely nice and if they get the private network up and resolve their stability issues I'd definitely give it another go

As we were scaling up our network we ran into a few issues and had to work with our vendors to resolve them.

Quoted metrics for support for ARP and MAC addresses on devices didn't match what we were seeing in production but we were able to get that resolved, so you shouldn't see those issues recurring.

Great Now they can accelerate their long list of needed improvement.

1. Private Back End Network. 2. Auto Provision Droplet/Instance on different hardware by default 3. IPv6 4. DC in Asia 5. Something Similar to Amazon Elastic IP.

Things i would like Node balancer More Powerful CPU Higher Quality Network ( Although it has gotten a lot better in recent months )

I have two rails SaaS apps that generate increasingly fulltime income on heroku.

combined costs currently at $140/month each app has 1 free web dyno, 1 worker, starter postgres DB, ssl, plus a few extras

Looking at the new offerings like digital ocean, i'm really tempted to switch over, but a voice in my head keeps telling me it makes no sense as I don't really have strong linux-sysadmin type skills. Even getting rails to work on new macs takes me 1-2 painful days.

Anyone have an eta of what it might take someone with limited sysadmin skills to cut over to something like digital ocean from heroku?

http://progrium.com/blog/2013/06/19/dokku-the-smallest-paas-...

https://medium.com/code-adventures/438bce155dcb

https://flynn.io/

My progression has been PaaS -> AWS -> Digital Ocean -> Dedicated and I strongly feel that if you're going to make the leap from PaaS to VPS, it's not a whole lot harder to go dedicated and there you'll find much sweeter value. I'm currently on an OVH SP2 (Xeon + SSD + 32GB ram in a data center in Quebec so not terrible latency to where I am in the northeast US) that I pay $90/mo for (http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/sp2.xml) and it's just jaw-droppingly powerful. If you're going to go through the trouble of migrating your app anyway, it's worth taking a good look at dedicated offerings like that as well.

OVH SP-series servers do not use ECC ram. This is unusual in the xeon server space. Even most VPS server providers use it.

Heh, I'm at the Digital Ocean stage of your flowchart, I just have to build something to fund that $90/month...

Not long. I had zero sys-admin skills, but DO has a slew of community guides that step by step you through setting up pretty much every application you might need.

It's possible something like Vagrant may help, but there's still a learning curve.

I'm thinking about using them for my next project. I'm glad to hear the news that they are getting funding. 3.2M is a pretty big seed round though right?

Been using their services for a while now. Highly recommended, great hardware for the money.

Really well deserved! These guys are awesome, very helpful and friendly, their site is even fun to use.

Anecdotally, I recently moved the primary web server for my DNS hosting service (https://www.slickdns.com) from AWS to Digital Ocean and am getting much better performance at 1/3 of the cost.

A lot of people keep asking/questioning what makes Digital Ocean special. I can't speak for other people, but I do track what other people say. I've collected ~1,300 opinions on them and people like them more than any other major hosting provider I track (80% positive).

Feel free to read the comments for yourselves: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean

They are obviously doing something right and a huge congratulations for their fund raise.

No offence but why would I put my data on US hosted servers?

Privacy violations would make liable under the local (a western european country) Data Protection act

no thanks

Then use their Amsterdam data center..?

Being a US company who is to say they havent been "leaned" on

Hmm, does that matter if the company itself is in the U.S?

Are there features holding people back from going to DO from somewhere like Linode? Load balancing, private backend network, etc?

Lack of a private backend network is something that is keeping me using it, for one of my projects. For my smaller projects, they're great.

ipv6 support is one of them.

I looked at Digital Ocean for an alternative and really liked the prices, but it seems to be missing some pieces to cover more elaborate use-cases. For instance, you can't scale just storage, and they don't provide a CDN.

I hope they can add more features while staying price-competitive.

Why do you need the CDN to be provided by DO? For instance, I host at Linode and use Cloudfront for CDN.

We use DO in our projects as a primary infrastructure. Switched to them from Amazon. Very happy with their service.

BTW, I'm shocked that this round was SEED. What happens when they get Series A. Will they continue to change game rules? I think yes.

I hope DO would consider have a special add-on like: $5 per month per node for priority support (< 1hr response time), then I think more people would consider moving more production systems to DO.

I've actually never had another company respond to support requests faster than DO. Almost every ticket gets a human response in under a minute (often in what seems like seconds), and for the small things (billing related), the problem is usually solved in that minute.

No serious business would move their production to DO, it's a start-up with cheap price.

(Oh how much I hate their ad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHZLCahai4Q)

I'm not sure seed round means what you think it means.

Very good. Just last weekend I migrated from AWS to DO. It is working perfectly for my usage at ~25% of the cost.

Ive only used DO for staging. Via Cloud66 deploying production to AWS and Staging to DO. Works really well.

I know them, great group of guys. Congrats!

#1255 on my top list: http://5000best.com/tools/Cloud/

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