14 ms·

DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding

328 points by beigeotter 11y ago

icpmacdo 11y ago
I wonder if the this pushes there valuation over 1B, if so I think that means that Techstars is the first accelerator outside of YC to produce a unicorn. Personally I hope so, Digital Ocean is a great product and I think one of the really smart things they did was be generous with there free credits as it was at least a great way for me to get on there platform and later on drop a fair amount into hosting with them.
- seiji 11y ago
  Is unicorn just a billion dollar non-public startup? Isn't there some other magic sauce required like supernormal margins or superfew employees or exploiting toothless regulations? DO seems to be almost a too straight forward business model (buy servers, rent servers in sub-units) to be considered in the modern startup pool of wishful thinking. I mean, it's not like they're an iPhone app for renting other people's idle server space on demand. Now that would be a game changer.
  - proksoup 11y ago
    DO's UX is a game changer, I personally think is why they have been so successful in what seemed like a crowded market with the "same" business model as the others.
    - seiji 11y ago
      Yeah, the simplicity is great. AWS has 80 products and it takes months to figure how how they all work together. DO's click-n-go for $5 month helps just from a mental clarity point of view. At this point AWS is so complicated they should be offering an official Cisco-like series of certifications.
      - samhoggnz 11y ago
        I'm not sure they're at the level of Cisco, but they do have certifications. http://aws.amazon.com/certification/ http://aws.amazon.com/certification/
        seiji 11y ago
        Oh, great to know. They are really cheap too ($150, $300, $75 re-up). Amusingly, that page demonstrates the need for an AWS certification in the first place: the page has over 100 things trying to grab your attention with no focus or clear direction at all. Amazon as a corporate entity seems to go for "maximum information + maximum confusion" in their UX at every turn. Always worth a re-read: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
        res0nat0r 11y ago
        AWS is an inherently complex product. It has far and away more features than any other competitor, so there is obviously going to be more confusion. I think the AWS dashboard is getting better and better and relatively easy to use if you keep each product isolated. There being 40+ products to choose from is overwhelming if you don't know what you are looking at, but that is the nature of the beast.
        twistedpair 11y ago
        Why fear a complicated cloud? I tried DO. It was cute, then I kept using AWS. DO is very simple, for simple things. But where do I get my GPU optimized Droplet, or one with 10GB internet connection and 244GB of ram to computer that graph problem with 3B edges? DO's only got relatively small, simple instances. Further, DO is MORE expensive than AWS. What you say? Well right now I can grab a spot request for a box with 8 cores and 30GB ram for $0.066/hr or $48/mo compared to $160/mo on DO. That's ~1/4 the cost. Also, most "AWS Sucks" benchmarks are naive at best, failing to use the local disk, rather than the NAS, and this only requires 3 bash lines to mount.
        mooreds 11y ago
        Awesome, thanks for the pointer.
    - gsharma 11y ago
      Serious question - What part of their UX do you think is game changer? I use DO and Linode. They both look similar to me. DO does have better UX than AWS, but I think DO is comparable to Linode rather than AWS. On the other hand, I think DO's content guides as a marketing tool is a great asset for them. I haven't seen any other provider do that. Linode had a few guides, but nothing as DO's scale.
      - sbarre 11y ago
        You said it yourself when you mentioned the marketing and the community and the customer guides. User Experience is not just web interfaces, it's the whole user experience (man....) and that includes onboarding, self-service, support, learning and all the other small touches that make it a satisfying experience to be a DO customer.
        welanes 11y ago
        Yes. Moved from AWS to DO and it's like night and day. Sample of great UX that spring to mind: 1. No noise on the dashboard and intuitive process flow. 2. Very good forum and documentation. Site:digitalocean.com whatever-your-problem-is and you'll most likely get it resolved. 3. Little features like auto-populating the Gmail MX record values.
      - proksoup 11y ago
        It's a lot of little details. Just looking at the pricing pages only for a minute, not because I think the pricing page is the differentiator, but because I think the effort in details DO put there is evidenced across the experience: - One green sign up button instead of 8 - One option emphasised more than the others - A toggle to see hourly pricing, instead of small print monthly - 4 stats instead of 6 In general, in DO, I find myself not distracted and finding what I need. Less information to process, the right things emphasized. Linode has improved greatly from the last time I reviewed it ... but still it seems to be a cargo cult of what DO did as opposed to really understanding the value of those details.
  - contingencies 11y ago
    +1: insightful. Honestly though, despite the sarcasm, that's not a bad idea.
- timdorr 11y ago
  Probably not. Their previous round was $37.2m on a $153m post, so about 25% equity. Hosting is very low margin, so valuations trend lower than other businesses. I would say $500m valuation, tops. Most likely <$400m.
- deleted 11y ago
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buckbova 11y ago
I've got two droplets now, one for email/owncloud and another for personal projects with automated backups. It's pretty easy to use, but I worry I don't have the sysadmin chops to keep it secure. Edit: I followed tutorials on auto-updating packages through cron, securing ssh, and setting up ufw for only services needed when I set it up. It's been about 2 years now so maybe I shouldn't worry.
- jdoss 11y ago
  Honest question. How much would you pay to have something that manages the updates and setup for you and give you the sysadmin help when you need it?
  - worklogin 11y ago
    That's what Rackspace does. I haven't used them in a while, but it looks like it's ALL they do now. (moved to DO, since it was half the cost and I /do/ have enough sysadmin chops to keep two linux servers patched). http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/compare-service-levels http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/compare-service-levels
    - jdoss 11y ago
      Yea but what if it was vendor agnostic? Rackspace has always been super expensive compared to the rest.
    - dougbarrett 11y ago
      Rackspace doesn't actively maintain the servers by applying updates, etc. You can go to them if 3rd party software breaks on your servers and they will help you out, but I know for a fact that they don't actively update the servers, and that's a good thing considering you'd want to probably roll that into doing a release where you take that server out of rotation.
  - duggan 11y ago
    Judging by the general implosion of the PaaS industry, not enough to make it worthwhile. It's a much more complex problem than most people think.
vruiz 11y ago
> The $83 million is going directly into growing our team and expanding our product offerings with networking and storage features. Great to hear. Real private networking, object/shared storage and most importantly HA (IP failover/load balancing) is all DO is missing to start really competing with AWS for "big business".
- brianwawok 11y ago
  I don't think HA is really on the needed list, seeing as you can roll your own load balancer in 5 minutes using provided tutorials. I mean I guess they could make an image for it to make it a little easier.. The AWS elastic load balancer is really nothing fancy. Real private networking and object shared storage are both huge for sure though.
  - vruiz 11y ago
    Have they implemented IP failover already? I haven't heard anything. Having your own LB without being able to fail over the IP is not HA. If the LB does down so does your business.
    - brianwawok 11y ago
      What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess client DNS retries takes a few seconds, but for a rare case of a load balancer dying, seems not a deal breaker.
      - vruiz 11y ago
        > Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. How? How does the DNS client know that the IP no longer works? do browsers today have this mechanism? I'm not a network guy so perhaps I'm wrong but it's my understanding the problem with DNS load balancing is that you can not invalidate the TTL on the client.
3pt14159 11y ago
> expanding our product offerings with networking and storage features I'm so excited for this. I'd previously commented about how the lack of non-SSD storage meant I had to screw around with S3 when I really just wanted to keep everything on DO. Great company. Been with them for two years now, and couldn't be happier. Combined with Cloud66 I worry less about deployments and servers and backups, and more about just getting the code out.
gshakir 11y ago
If all goes well, looks like they might be competing directly with AWS soon.
- TodPunk 11y ago
  AWS doesn't target the same audience or have the same product line. They're related, but not at all the same product market. To illustrate this, AWS is infrastructure management tools, and DO is infrastructure management. The fact that AWS has infrastructure management as well (built on top of their own tools) is only relevant for the people that build out the rest of their infrastructure. DO is for folks that don't want to have to learn and understand infrastructure much at all. That's very doable these days for a lot of aspects of development, but it's also not at all what AWS is going for. DO is closer to competing with just Elastic Beanstalk and maybe RDS (from the standpoint of a managed RDBM service, not the feature set).
  - wspeirs 11y ago
    > DO is closer to competing with just Elastic Beanstalk Hu? DO is like EC2, a box on the net with an IP address. Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS that will auto-scale for you.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  But do they want to? AWS is going for a high price for a super super deep stack of 600 little services. I kind of like that DO focuses on their core VM thing. Obviously you can't fake some things with just VMs (rolling your own VPC for example is kind of hard to do), but a lot of people don't need Redshift or SQS or any of the amazon SAAS things...
- nosequel 11y ago
  They aren't even in the same ballpark. Hell, Google isn't even in the same ballpark as AWS and Google made $83million in the time it took me to read the article. DO is great, but doesn't belong in the same sentence as AWS.
  - 11y ago
dotBen 11y ago
DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already. DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a long time. And yet the biggest development in recent years at Linode has been a proprietary stats and monitoring system built as an upsell, which doesn't really do anything distinctive that Nagios or another package couldn't provide. Instead Linode is now switching their entire platform from Xen to KVM, a curious move which will create risk and cost velocity that could have been spent on product development. I have been a huge supporter of Linode over the years, and the startup I co-founded is one of their biggest customers, but at this point DO seems like the winning horse to back.
- astrodust 11y ago
  For all the money Linode has on hand, and the size of their technical team, it's absolutely insulting they haven't made any tangible improvement to their management front-end in at least five years, if not more. The way it's behaving it's as if it was acquired and kept on life-support.
  - EugeneOZ 11y ago
    If we talk about DO in comparison, then DO's interface is just ugly and almost unusable. Every time I use it, I want to leave their site as soon as possible.
    - astrodust 11y ago
      If you think Digital Ocean is ugly and almost unusable I have to wonder what you think is better. Their one page instance creator where you pick size, location, and distribution is extremely convenient. This is three separate steps with Linode that happens over the course of six screens, plus two more if you want to enable private networking. Eight steps vs. one. They also don't offer the ability to install a system with an SSH key pre-installed avoiding the need for password authentication when bootstrapping your system. Even on a technical level Linode is way behind here.
curiousjorge 11y ago
it's pretty amazin what they've managed to do, what was essentially an over saturated market, they've managed to pull ahead of incumbents like linode.
- pki 11y ago
  how much do you think giving away huge amounts of free credits helped?
Killswitch 11y ago
Great work Ben and team! I've been a customer for 2 years now, absolutely love the service and see no reason to leave it.
alberth 11y ago
Has anyone used Vultr.com? I ask because they have all the same features as DO + way more (e.g. dedicated hosting w/ same great panel, BYO ISO, etc).
- username 11y ago
  I am also curious about this. The fact that Vultr accepts Bitcoin as payment further piques my interest. Can anyone shed some light on their performance and convenience vs. DigitalOcean? Edit: Found this http://blog.due.io/2014/linode-digitalocean-and-vultr-comparison http://blog.due.io/2014/linode-digitalocean-and-vultr-compar..., which seems to portray it quite favorably.
  - alberth 11y ago
    This doesn't compare against DO but it does compare performance against Rackspace and AWS. https://www.vultr.com/benchmarks/ https://www.vultr.com/benchmarks/
    - grigev07 11y ago
      Slightly objective performance comparison if you ask me. Obviously Vultr is going to say they're better than the competition.
- dubcanada 11y ago
  I've used them. Their control panel is not as pretty, and their community is not as large. But the product is arguably better, they offer things that DO doesn't offer like DYO ISO, daily backups for the same cost as DO's weekly (seriously DO, only weekly backups???), and a ton more.
  - alberth 11y ago
    So if you had to choose between using DO or Vultr, which would it be and why?
    - 11y ago
lsc 11y ago
hm. Interesting. From what I know of the industry, their size and pricing, I would have thought they would be profitable enough that raising this sort of money wouldn't be particularly interesting. Does this mean that they are operating at a loss?
- carbocation 11y ago
  There are many reasons to raise money. They may be operating at a loss but with growth in recurring revenue such that they expect to become profitable in a few years. But I wouldn't be surprised if they are raising this money to fuel an already growing fire, either by enhanced sales teams or even building out new capital projects that will open new revenue channels or create barriers to future competition.
- Mahn 11y ago
  I would be surprised if they didn't have a positive cash flow by now. It's probably more about growing faster than about having money per se.
ablation 11y ago
I'm pleased for DO. Seems like a decent company doing things well. I've never had a complaint with their services.
r0naa 11y ago
I love DO, they are doing great work. The only thing I regret is the relatively poor choice of platforms they support. For example, there have been a really big demand for NixOS for two years now but still no announcement whatsoever.
- nailer 11y ago
  Really? Do you have some stats on NixOS growth to support that?
  - r0naa 11y ago
    https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/4349028-support-nixos-image https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea... One of the highest voted customer feedback on their official forum.
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arca_vorago 11y ago
Slightly offtopic, but I am curious if anyone has any insights into the legal side of hosting profit seeking services on top of VPS's in general. Is the boilerplate contract(s)/eula/tos good enough generally or do you seek to actually make changes to a custom one? What about hosting websites vs reselling access for some other purpose (eg. similar to game hosting services that allow full customer control of the instance?) It seems to me like there is a lot of room for a tool that can spin up an instance over multiple VPS providers, because sometimes one will have a colo close to where you want and sometimes another will. Anyone aware of comprehensive location based benchmarking of all the VPS's?
- muraiki 11y ago
  There are some libraries you can use to abstract away differences between VPS providers: https://jclouds.apache.org/ https://jclouds.apache.org/ https://libcloud.apache.org/ https://libcloud.apache.org/ https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/gophercloud/ https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/gophercloud/ http://www.openstack4j.com/ http://www.openstack4j.com/ For playing with JVM stuff I found openstack4j easier to use from Scala and Clojure than jclouds. I didn't downvote you, but I figure someone thought you were too off topic.
NiftyFifty 11y ago
My only question, is the investment rounds the new form of private equity bubble fixing? How diversified are these investments and how does the interoperations of a company get changes to meet the revenue influx to ROI? I never really got this jist and how culture DOES change by these rounds. The pitches must damn near printing money kind of stuff made of magic Mike XXL and pixie dust to stick.
chrismarlow9 11y ago
I used digital ocean for a while. My experience was bad reliability and random technical issues. I had various very experience ops people verify with me that it wasn't an issue I introduced into the systems running. I went back to dedicated servers at a smallish provider and forgot how nice it can be to not have all the cloud virtualization stuff get in the way. It's just too fragmented among providers in the way they setup for me to use the service and not have a fear of lockin. Does it take me 3 or 4 days to get new boxes? Yes. Is it causing a massive headache for me? No, because I plan things and order them ahead of time. Just my 2 cents, I know others who use DO and love it.
- jdoss 11y ago
  Who do you use for a dedicated provider?
  - chrismarlow9 11y ago
    joesdatacenter.com I do not work for joes or have any affiliation. It's a very "non-automated" setup. You file a ticket with a rep to get new servers and describe what you want (I need 5 more servers just like X), no forms online to automate it or any of that. The plus side of that is you never get a canned response or ignored. Very quick and professional.
    - joshmn 11y ago
      Anyone else reading this, they're not a bad budget provider at all. A good analogy to make would be they're like a small pizza place in your hometown, versus Limestone or FDC. If you don't mind me piggy-backing, I have a non-affiliated love affair with ReliableSite.net. Yes - weird name, but I've had nothing but amazing, amazing experiences with them. The quality is 5x what you get for paying 1/5th the price. Before anyone thinks about getting into hardware on this kind of level, please do your research @ webhostingtalk.com. Yes, $5 can go a long way with DigitalOcean because they're funded (and kind of got lucky); but that other $5 VM? Good luck.
- stephen-mw 11y ago
ape4 11y ago
I'd like a harddrive option. To get a large amount of storage is way too expensive.
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bpg_92 11y ago
Well to be sincere, DO is implementing features most people actually care about. Working charms, it still has a long way to go :)
joeyspn 11y ago
I've been with many VPS providers: KnownHost, RackSpace Cloud, OVH, Linode, etccc and DO has been a pleasure to work with because of all the integrations and tooling it has due to the increasing popularity/community. I think this is a great step for a transition from a "developers cloud" to a "production cloud". I hope they continue to go in the same direction and soon offer multi-container blueprints as easy to deploy as their pre-built images. 0.02
usaphp 11y ago
I've been using RackSpace for couple years before moving to DigitalOcean, I've had a good experience with Rackspace when I started but my bills kept growing and server started to have constant issues every now and then, so I've decided to move to DigitalOcean couple years ago. My traffic since then grew quite a lot from 100K/month to around 1 million visitors/month and my bills from DigitalOcean are still not much higher than they used to be at the later stages on RackSpace, and performance is much better for me with DigitalOcean. The only thing I dont like about DigitalOcean droplets is the requirement to shut off the server before resizing, Rackspace allowed me to do it without a need to shut it off.
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rayalez 11y ago
I love DO. I'm a novice/intermediate programmer, and when I knew nothing about what VPS even was I started using Linode(due to many great recommendations). Linode is a great service, but recently I've switched to DO and I like it so much more. As a person who just needs a simple and straightforward way to put several django projects online - DO offers me a simple and beautiful interface, cheaper prices, and a lot of great and extremely useful tutorials. It is much nicer to use and a droplet price starts from $5/mo, which is freakin' awesome, and all I need from VPS service at this point. Thank you guys, you are great, keep it up!

328 points by beigeotter 11y ago

I wonder if the this pushes there valuation over 1B, if so I think that means that Techstars is the first accelerator outside of YC to produce a unicorn. Personally I hope so, Digital Ocean is a great product and I think one of the really smart things they did was be generous with there free credits as it was at least a great way for me to get on there platform and later on drop a fair amount into hosting with them.

seiji 11y ago
Is unicorn just a billion dollar non-public startup? Isn't there some other magic sauce required like supernormal margins or superfew employees or exploiting toothless regulations? DO seems to be almost a too straight forward business model (buy servers, rent servers in sub-units) to be considered in the modern startup pool of wishful thinking. I mean, it's not like they're an iPhone app for renting other people's idle server space on demand. Now that would be a game changer.
- proksoup 11y ago
  DO's UX is a game changer, I personally think is why they have been so successful in what seemed like a crowded market with the "same" business model as the others.
  - seiji 11y ago
    Yeah, the simplicity is great. AWS has 80 products and it takes months to figure how how they all work together. DO's click-n-go for $5 month helps just from a mental clarity point of view. At this point AWS is so complicated they should be offering an official Cisco-like series of certifications.
    - samhoggnz 11y ago
      I'm not sure they're at the level of Cisco, but they do have certifications. http://aws.amazon.com/certification/ http://aws.amazon.com/certification/
      - seiji 11y ago
        Oh, great to know. They are really cheap too ($150, $300, $75 re-up). Amusingly, that page demonstrates the need for an AWS certification in the first place: the page has over 100 things trying to grab your attention with no focus or clear direction at all. Amazon as a corporate entity seems to go for "maximum information + maximum confusion" in their UX at every turn. Always worth a re-read: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
        res0nat0r 11y ago
        AWS is an inherently complex product. It has far and away more features than any other competitor, so there is obviously going to be more confusion. I think the AWS dashboard is getting better and better and relatively easy to use if you keep each product isolated. There being 40+ products to choose from is overwhelming if you don't know what you are looking at, but that is the nature of the beast.
        twistedpair 11y ago
        Why fear a complicated cloud? I tried DO. It was cute, then I kept using AWS. DO is very simple, for simple things. But where do I get my GPU optimized Droplet, or one with 10GB internet connection and 244GB of ram to computer that graph problem with 3B edges? DO's only got relatively small, simple instances. Further, DO is MORE expensive than AWS. What you say? Well right now I can grab a spot request for a box with 8 cores and 30GB ram for $0.066/hr or $48/mo compared to $160/mo on DO. That's ~1/4 the cost. Also, most "AWS Sucks" benchmarks are naive at best, failing to use the local disk, rather than the NAS, and this only requires 3 bash lines to mount.
      - mooreds 11y ago
        Awesome, thanks for the pointer.
  - gsharma 11y ago
    Serious question - What part of their UX do you think is game changer? I use DO and Linode. They both look similar to me. DO does have better UX than AWS, but I think DO is comparable to Linode rather than AWS. On the other hand, I think DO's content guides as a marketing tool is a great asset for them. I haven't seen any other provider do that. Linode had a few guides, but nothing as DO's scale.
    - sbarre 11y ago
      You said it yourself when you mentioned the marketing and the community and the customer guides. User Experience is not just web interfaces, it's the whole user experience (man....) and that includes onboarding, self-service, support, learning and all the other small touches that make it a satisfying experience to be a DO customer.
      - welanes 11y ago
        Yes. Moved from AWS to DO and it's like night and day. Sample of great UX that spring to mind: 1. No noise on the dashboard and intuitive process flow. 2. Very good forum and documentation. Site:digitalocean.com whatever-your-problem-is and you'll most likely get it resolved. 3. Little features like auto-populating the Gmail MX record values.
    - proksoup 11y ago
      It's a lot of little details. Just looking at the pricing pages only for a minute, not because I think the pricing page is the differentiator, but because I think the effort in details DO put there is evidenced across the experience: - One green sign up button instead of 8 - One option emphasised more than the others - A toggle to see hourly pricing, instead of small print monthly - 4 stats instead of 6 In general, in DO, I find myself not distracted and finding what I need. Less information to process, the right things emphasized. Linode has improved greatly from the last time I reviewed it ... but still it seems to be a cargo cult of what DO did as opposed to really understanding the value of those details.
- contingencies 11y ago
  +1: insightful. Honestly though, despite the sarcasm, that's not a bad idea.
timdorr 11y ago
Probably not. Their previous round was $37.2m on a $153m post, so about 25% equity. Hosting is very low margin, so valuations trend lower than other businesses. I would say $500m valuation, tops. Most likely <$400m.
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buckbova 11y ago

I've got two droplets now, one for email/owncloud and another for personal projects with automated backups. It's pretty easy to use, but I worry I don't have the sysadmin chops to keep it secure. Edit: I followed tutorials on auto-updating packages through cron, securing ssh, and setting up ufw for only services needed when I set it up. It's been about 2 years now so maybe I shouldn't worry.

jdoss 11y ago
Honest question. How much would you pay to have something that manages the updates and setup for you and give you the sysadmin help when you need it?
- worklogin 11y ago
  That's what Rackspace does. I haven't used them in a while, but it looks like it's ALL they do now. (moved to DO, since it was half the cost and I /do/ have enough sysadmin chops to keep two linux servers patched). http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/compare-service-levels http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/compare-service-levels
  - jdoss 11y ago
    Yea but what if it was vendor agnostic? Rackspace has always been super expensive compared to the rest.
  - dougbarrett 11y ago
    Rackspace doesn't actively maintain the servers by applying updates, etc. You can go to them if 3rd party software breaks on your servers and they will help you out, but I know for a fact that they don't actively update the servers, and that's a good thing considering you'd want to probably roll that into doing a release where you take that server out of rotation.
- duggan 11y ago
  Judging by the general implosion of the PaaS industry, not enough to make it worthwhile. It's a much more complex problem than most people think.

vruiz 11y ago

> The $83 million is going directly into growing our team and expanding our product offerings with networking and storage features. Great to hear. Real private networking, object/shared storage and most importantly HA (IP failover/load balancing) is all DO is missing to start really competing with AWS for "big business".

brianwawok 11y ago
I don't think HA is really on the needed list, seeing as you can roll your own load balancer in 5 minutes using provided tutorials. I mean I guess they could make an image for it to make it a little easier.. The AWS elastic load balancer is really nothing fancy. Real private networking and object shared storage are both huge for sure though.
- vruiz 11y ago
  Have they implemented IP failover already? I haven't heard anything. Having your own LB without being able to fail over the IP is not HA. If the LB does down so does your business.
  - brianwawok 11y ago
    What? You use DNS failover and multiple load balancers. FOO.COM A record -> 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6 Then at 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, and 1.2.3.6 you put a load balancer that splits loads between all of your clients. Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. If any backend server goes down, your LB will deal with it. Using this pretty successfully at digital ocean right now. What is the downside? I guess client DNS retries takes a few seconds, but for a rare case of a load balancer dying, seems not a deal breaker.
    - vruiz 11y ago
      > Any LB goes down, and DNS client retries will deal with it. How? How does the DNS client know that the IP no longer works? do browsers today have this mechanism? I'm not a network guy so perhaps I'm wrong but it's my understanding the problem with DNS load balancing is that you can not invalidate the TTL on the client.

3pt14159 11y ago

> expanding our product offerings with networking and storage features I'm so excited for this. I'd previously commented about how the lack of non-SSD storage meant I had to screw around with S3 when I really just wanted to keep everything on DO. Great company. Been with them for two years now, and couldn't be happier. Combined with Cloud66 I worry less about deployments and servers and backups, and more about just getting the code out.

gshakir 11y ago

If all goes well, looks like they might be competing directly with AWS soon.

TodPunk 11y ago
AWS doesn't target the same audience or have the same product line. They're related, but not at all the same product market. To illustrate this, AWS is infrastructure management tools, and DO is infrastructure management. The fact that AWS has infrastructure management as well (built on top of their own tools) is only relevant for the people that build out the rest of their infrastructure. DO is for folks that don't want to have to learn and understand infrastructure much at all. That's very doable these days for a lot of aspects of development, but it's also not at all what AWS is going for. DO is closer to competing with just Elastic Beanstalk and maybe RDS (from the standpoint of a managed RDBM service, not the feature set).
- wspeirs 11y ago
  > DO is closer to competing with just Elastic Beanstalk Hu? DO is like EC2, a box on the net with an IP address. Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS that will auto-scale for you.
brianwawok 11y ago
But do they want to? AWS is going for a high price for a super super deep stack of 600 little services. I kind of like that DO focuses on their core VM thing. Obviously you can't fake some things with just VMs (rolling your own VPC for example is kind of hard to do), but a lot of people don't need Redshift or SQS or any of the amazon SAAS things...
nosequel 11y ago
They aren't even in the same ballpark. Hell, Google isn't even in the same ballpark as AWS and Google made $83million in the time it took me to read the article. DO is great, but doesn't belong in the same sentence as AWS.
- 11y ago

dotBen 11y ago

DO has really benefitted from Linode stalling over the past few years. I admire Linode for remaining a bootstrapped business but it feels as though the owners lost their fighting spirit and energy... Perhaps because the small pool of Linode owners felt they made enough money already. DOs announment talks about a storage product, which is strategically important and crucially something Linode has sorely needed for a long time. And yet the biggest development in recent years at Linode has been a proprietary stats and monitoring system built as an upsell, which doesn't really do anything distinctive that Nagios or another package couldn't provide. Instead Linode is now switching their entire platform from Xen to KVM, a curious move which will create risk and cost velocity that could have been spent on product development. I have been a huge supporter of Linode over the years, and the startup I co-founded is one of their biggest customers, but at this point DO seems like the winning horse to back.

astrodust 11y ago
For all the money Linode has on hand, and the size of their technical team, it's absolutely insulting they haven't made any tangible improvement to their management front-end in at least five years, if not more. The way it's behaving it's as if it was acquired and kept on life-support.
- EugeneOZ 11y ago
  If we talk about DO in comparison, then DO's interface is just ugly and almost unusable. Every time I use it, I want to leave their site as soon as possible.
  - astrodust 11y ago
    If you think Digital Ocean is ugly and almost unusable I have to wonder what you think is better. Their one page instance creator where you pick size, location, and distribution is extremely convenient. This is three separate steps with Linode that happens over the course of six screens, plus two more if you want to enable private networking. Eight steps vs. one. They also don't offer the ability to install a system with an SSH key pre-installed avoiding the need for password authentication when bootstrapping your system. Even on a technical level Linode is way behind here.

curiousjorge 11y ago

it's pretty amazin what they've managed to do, what was essentially an over saturated market, they've managed to pull ahead of incumbents like linode.

pki 11y ago
how much do you think giving away huge amounts of free credits helped?

Killswitch 11y ago

Great work Ben and team! I've been a customer for 2 years now, absolutely love the service and see no reason to leave it.

alberth 11y ago

Has anyone used Vultr.com? I ask because they have all the same features as DO + way more (e.g. dedicated hosting w/ same great panel, BYO ISO, etc).

username 11y ago
I am also curious about this. The fact that Vultr accepts Bitcoin as payment further piques my interest. Can anyone shed some light on their performance and convenience vs. DigitalOcean? Edit: Found this http://blog.due.io/2014/linode-digitalocean-and-vultr-comparison http://blog.due.io/2014/linode-digitalocean-and-vultr-compar..., which seems to portray it quite favorably.
- alberth 11y ago
  This doesn't compare against DO but it does compare performance against Rackspace and AWS. https://www.vultr.com/benchmarks/ https://www.vultr.com/benchmarks/
  - grigev07 11y ago
    Slightly objective performance comparison if you ask me. Obviously Vultr is going to say they're better than the competition.
dubcanada 11y ago
I've used them. Their control panel is not as pretty, and their community is not as large. But the product is arguably better, they offer things that DO doesn't offer like DYO ISO, daily backups for the same cost as DO's weekly (seriously DO, only weekly backups???), and a ton more.
- alberth 11y ago
  So if you had to choose between using DO or Vultr, which would it be and why?
  - 11y ago

lsc 11y ago

hm. Interesting. From what I know of the industry, their size and pricing, I would have thought they would be profitable enough that raising this sort of money wouldn't be particularly interesting. Does this mean that they are operating at a loss?

carbocation 11y ago
There are many reasons to raise money. They may be operating at a loss but with growth in recurring revenue such that they expect to become profitable in a few years. But I wouldn't be surprised if they are raising this money to fuel an already growing fire, either by enhanced sales teams or even building out new capital projects that will open new revenue channels or create barriers to future competition.
Mahn 11y ago
I would be surprised if they didn't have a positive cash flow by now. It's probably more about growing faster than about having money per se.

ablation 11y ago

I'm pleased for DO. Seems like a decent company doing things well. I've never had a complaint with their services.

r0naa 11y ago

I love DO, they are doing great work. The only thing I regret is the relatively poor choice of platforms they support. For example, there have been a really big demand for NixOS for two years now but still no announcement whatsoever.

nailer 11y ago
Really? Do you have some stats on NixOS growth to support that?
- r0naa 11y ago
  https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/4349028-support-nixos-image https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea... One of the highest voted customer feedback on their official forum.
- deleted 11y ago
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arca_vorago 11y ago

Slightly offtopic, but I am curious if anyone has any insights into the legal side of hosting profit seeking services on top of VPS's in general. Is the boilerplate contract(s)/eula/tos good enough generally or do you seek to actually make changes to a custom one? What about hosting websites vs reselling access for some other purpose (eg. similar to game hosting services that allow full customer control of the instance?) It seems to me like there is a lot of room for a tool that can spin up an instance over multiple VPS providers, because sometimes one will have a colo close to where you want and sometimes another will. Anyone aware of comprehensive location based benchmarking of all the VPS's?

muraiki 11y ago
There are some libraries you can use to abstract away differences between VPS providers: https://jclouds.apache.org/ https://jclouds.apache.org/ https://libcloud.apache.org/ https://libcloud.apache.org/ https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/gophercloud/ https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/gophercloud/ http://www.openstack4j.com/ http://www.openstack4j.com/ For playing with JVM stuff I found openstack4j easier to use from Scala and Clojure than jclouds. I didn't downvote you, but I figure someone thought you were too off topic.

NiftyFifty 11y ago

My only question, is the investment rounds the new form of private equity bubble fixing? How diversified are these investments and how does the interoperations of a company get changes to meet the revenue influx to ROI? I never really got this jist and how culture DOES change by these rounds. The pitches must damn near printing money kind of stuff made of magic Mike XXL and pixie dust to stick.

chrismarlow9 11y ago

I used digital ocean for a while. My experience was bad reliability and random technical issues. I had various very experience ops people verify with me that it wasn't an issue I introduced into the systems running. I went back to dedicated servers at a smallish provider and forgot how nice it can be to not have all the cloud virtualization stuff get in the way. It's just too fragmented among providers in the way they setup for me to use the service and not have a fear of lockin. Does it take me 3 or 4 days to get new boxes? Yes. Is it causing a massive headache for me? No, because I plan things and order them ahead of time. Just my 2 cents, I know others who use DO and love it.

jdoss 11y ago
Who do you use for a dedicated provider?
- chrismarlow9 11y ago
  joesdatacenter.com I do not work for joes or have any affiliation. It's a very "non-automated" setup. You file a ticket with a rep to get new servers and describe what you want (I need 5 more servers just like X), no forms online to automate it or any of that. The plus side of that is you never get a canned response or ignored. Very quick and professional.
  - joshmn 11y ago
    Anyone else reading this, they're not a bad budget provider at all. A good analogy to make would be they're like a small pizza place in your hometown, versus Limestone or FDC. If you don't mind me piggy-backing, I have a non-affiliated love affair with ReliableSite.net. Yes - weird name, but I've had nothing but amazing, amazing experiences with them. The quality is 5x what you get for paying 1/5th the price. Before anyone thinks about getting into hardware on this kind of level, please do your research @ webhostingtalk.com. Yes, $5 can go a long way with DigitalOcean because they're funded (and kind of got lucky); but that other $5 VM? Good luck.
stephen-mw 11y ago

ape4 11y ago

I'd like a harddrive option. To get a large amount of storage is way too expensive.

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bpg_92 11y ago

Well to be sincere, DO is implementing features most people actually care about. Working charms, it still has a long way to go :)

joeyspn 11y ago

I've been with many VPS providers: KnownHost, RackSpace Cloud, OVH, Linode, etccc and DO has been a pleasure to work with because of all the integrations and tooling it has due to the increasing popularity/community. I think this is a great step for a transition from a "developers cloud" to a "production cloud". I hope they continue to go in the same direction and soon offer multi-container blueprints as easy to deploy as their pre-built images. 0.02

usaphp 11y ago

I've been using RackSpace for couple years before moving to DigitalOcean, I've had a good experience with Rackspace when I started but my bills kept growing and server started to have constant issues every now and then, so I've decided to move to DigitalOcean couple years ago. My traffic since then grew quite a lot from 100K/month to around 1 million visitors/month and my bills from DigitalOcean are still not much higher than they used to be at the later stages on RackSpace, and performance is much better for me with DigitalOcean. The only thing I dont like about DigitalOcean droplets is the requirement to shut off the server before resizing, Rackspace allowed me to do it without a need to shut it off.

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rayalez 11y ago

I love DO. I'm a novice/intermediate programmer, and when I knew nothing about what VPS even was I started using Linode(due to many great recommendations). Linode is a great service, but recently I've switched to DO and I like it so much more. As a person who just needs a simple and straightforward way to put several django projects online - DO offers me a simple and beautiful interface, cheaper prices, and a lot of great and extremely useful tutorials. It is much nicer to use and a droplet price starts from $5/mo, which is freakin' awesome, and all I need from VPS service at this point. Thank you guys, you are great, keep it up!