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Comment by whitehat2k9 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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- 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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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