Digital Ocean: tech articles | Hacker News Reader

Digital Ocean: tech articles

digitalocean.com

31 pointsnichochar14 comments

Lots of original and interesting articles centralized here.

That's explained mainly by the fact they are paying $50 for each article.

They do it as a SEO strategy, right? Someone looking for a solution to a particular problem will maybe test it on DO?

Yeah it's good content marketing, the referral rate is probably pretty good considering their $5 entry level is a bargain against most VPSs in that range and AWS.

The real genius of it is it goes directly for their audience, something many startups can learn from when they're penning their next stupid startup-article for HN - DO's stuff is going to pay off for years, random startup blah blah is barely going to pay off one time if you're lucky.

+1 :)

If you're taking feedback, it might be cool if at the end of the tutorial (or before) you actually have an embedded SSH to a very tiny virtual server where the users can do what they're reading about, and then at the end you could have "save this server" rather than "try this tutorial".

I don't know that much about DO but from what I've heard it's also a very engineering driven company. I think that engineers know how much this kind of ressource marketplace is useful for themselves and pairs.

I'd say we're a pretty developer driven company, engineering or not, we certainly think dev forward in everything we do.

Most everyone heavily involved in DO has been around the www for a long long time, lots and lots of very full stack folks who come from the days of having to know your linux kernel in and out but also understand what is going on at 7.. I think that is something we really hold to our core.

One thing we noted about a year or so ago was the disparity that was emerging in the developer world, with one click installs and applications like wordpress becoming more the norm, we wanted to make sure this new generation of front end heavy devs are well supported, this was the easiest way we could find to do so at scale.. so we've invested heavily in it, we have Etel who leads our community programs, as well as two full time technical writers who are fantastic. :)

Always looking for feedback.

I appreciate DO a lot. I am a 23 year old math and physics engineer, used to understanding how stuff works, and converting to code and development, and it's surprinsingly hard to find articles like these that give instructions then explain the why of it. Thanks and keep it up, my DO droplets are running ;)

Yes. Very clever: they provide content to test on their servers and begin to be known for great tech tutorials.

That's awesome though. You get that for free.

Similar marketing strategy as of FPComplete. Benefits community and on same time advertises the company.

Yes but aren't those articles written for their specific Linux images? For example their Ubuntu image comes with an active root user and a bunch of other things preconfigured. I wonder how useful those articles are for people using the original distro isos.

No they are generic enough for average user.

I don't think they have much stuff preconfigured on most of their images - maybe drivers. Articles are keeping a general style thought.

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