Hacker News Reader

I only use DO because they have a $5 offering. If Linode had a "meager support" option at $5 I would take it in a heartbeat. I love that company.

View on HN

By the time DO started competing with Linode, it wasn't worth Linode's time to care about a cheap $5 box. The only problem is that people go to a $5 droplet and stay for a $XXX droplet.

Linode should have taken them seriously.

Eh, if I ever need a real machine I would switch back to Linode. It's not very difficult and the support is astronomically better.

But it would definitely be to Linode's benefit to gank DO's $5 option.

It is so common there is even a term for it, 'Disruptive Innovation' [1].

The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in a new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation

Same here. I still have a $20 Linode for production, but wanting play around and test things out without thinking too much about cost is the reason I also frequently spin up 1-2 DO VPS's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com