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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Does DO actually need and warrant an encyclopedia entry? The Netcraft article about them says they had 7,000 hosts -- versus 165K at Amazon and several million at BlueHost at the time, the other companies mentioned as points of comparison.

DO is well-known on HN, but I don't know anyone else who's heard of it. The deletion reason was "A7: No explanation of significance", which requires "a credible claim of significance or importance" to have a page on wikipedia. Merely being popular among entrepreneurs, or having some number of customers, doesn't make a company significant in the encyclopedic sense.

It was deleted again for "G11: Unambiguous advertising or promotion", and the five sentence article about their "fast, low cost options" does in fact read like an ad. It wasn't fact-checked, either, since DO is not larger than Amazon nor does it operate its own data centers.

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> DO is well-known on HN, but I don't know anyone else who's ever heard of it.

IMHO that's a pretty good reason to give them an article. I've heard the name, but I don't know what they do or what's their specialty. If I wanted to get information on them I would be looking on Wikipedia (besides their website, but companies' websites are often full of marketing speak so I usually go to a third party).

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a company index.

What does the deleted article contain that is more informative about DO as a company than DO's above-the-fold?

https://www.digitalocean.com/

> they have 7,000 hosts

ah, no, that's a growth rate of 7,000 a month.

That was the total number of hosts they had in June when Netcraft wrote that "meteoric rise of DO" article, which is what I assumed the talk page was referring to as a citation. Proving notability for Wikipedia generally means linking to news articles like this.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/13/the-meteoric-ri...

They have grown quite a bit since then, but still nowhere near the millions of customers large hosting companies have.

But the article I cited was pretty much numbers

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/12/11/digitalocean-no...

I'm willing to make a bet that you'll come back to your question ("Does DO actually need and warrant an encyclopedia entry?") in a few years and get a good laugh.

Meanwhile, this article has no problem surviving on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osh-Avia

Notable in the future does not imply notable right now.

But that article actually followed the most obvious rules of an article creation...

I think DO has far more than 7,000 hosts? Here it says almost 64,000 hosts: http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com, ranking 9th place for active hosts.

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