From DigitalOcean's cofounder on Quora:<p><i>We applied to TechStars in NYC first because we were based in NYC and we got in right before the early app deadline. After meeting David Tisch at TechStars 4 A Day he flat out told us he doesn't understand our space so it would be hard for him to pick us, because part of his decision is to determine how he as the program director can help accelerate our growth.</i><p><i>We did become a finalist but weren't selected and he recommended us to TechStars Boulder. So we flew out there for TechStars 4 A Day and went through the process again.
</i><p>Full post: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Startups/If-youre-rejected-from-an-incubator-is-it-okay-reapply-after-youve-made-more-progress-on-your-product" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Startups/If-youre-rejected-from-an-incu...</a>
Pretty amazing that a company like DigitalOcean can shake-up the market for VP servers prior to even taking funding. Their $5 servers have changed the game for nearly every hosting company that offers virtual servers. And to think they've managed to offer this while bootstrapped, is incredible.
This is really neat. One question: How are these folks able to keep such low prices?<p>For example, I run several servers on rackspace. Their least expensive option (512MB RAM, 1 core, 20GB disk) is $16.00 per month.<p>DigitalOcean's is $5.00 per month. On the face of it, they are identical offerings but triple the price.<p>Rackspace does offer other features (load balancing, cloudfiles, and other useful things which integrate nicely with their servers.) Is that the value proposition of AWS/Rackspace over these other companies, which only give you vanilla servers?
One of my favorite startups. I signed up for a single server some time ago to try them out and was amazed when I saw the control panel, API and the ecosystem that has already built up around the service.<p>To those of you asking what is so special about DO compared to ExyExtraVps.is running stock WHMCS[1] or whatever over at LEB it is that DO are providing the type of features, flexibility and support that Rackspace, AWS and Azure provide but at prices that are close to what the low-end VPS types offer.<p>If you imagine a Gartner-style quadrant for hosting with price on one axis and then features/support/flexibility on another most providers today sit somewhere along a very straight line - you either have a bunch of features and flexibility and are expensive or you are very rigid and cheap. DO is right up in high features but low price, and it seems so obvious in hindsight (Linode were almost there).<p>I now have Vagrant setup with Digital Ocean as a provider[2] so setting up a box is as easy as running 'vagrant up --provider=digital_ocean' and then waiting a minute. There are tons of other tools already built up around their API and the ecosystem is thriving. I have another script setup ready to fire up additional instances of web apps.<p>I'm moving everything I can and that fits from AWS and recommending DO to clients also where it would fit (staging servers, dev servers, backup servers, etc.) There are still some features they need - like load balancing, multiple IP's etc. but this funding means all of that is going to be built sooner.<p>There is a reason why they are one of the fastest growing hosts ever[3]. These guys are destined to get really really big.<p>There is also a great effect wherever digital ocean is mentioned online you find a comment thread with dozens of users saying how awesome they are. You can't buy that type of love.<p>[1] Not to mention that all of that off-the-shelf VPS software running these sites is an absolute security nightmare. The developers rely on hiding their poor code behind ioncube encoding and this has been exposed recently with some big name hacks.<p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/smdahlen/vagrant-digitalocean</a><p>[3] Netcraft: The meteoric rise of Digital Ocean: <a href="http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/13/the-meteoric-rise-of-digitalocean.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/13/the-meteoric-ri...</a><p>edit: forgot to include this earlier, but by way of a disclaimer I introduced Digital Ocean to Crunchfund but don't have a financial stake.
Their support is absolutely amazing. I opened a ticket to ask a question, submitted it, and before I could navigate away from their website, the ticket had been answered (i.e. within 5 min).
I started with Digital Ocean after I saw them on here and have been nothing but impressed. Seems like really good value, and it's great to have such cheap dev environments to work/play with. Great for budding full stack devs. I'm glad it seems they're here to stay.
Congratluations to DO! Sadly there's so much hard work involved in this space and so little money ($5/server/mo) to be made in "hosting" that founders always eye an early exit. Also a $5/server strategy is proof this isn't sustainable in the long run. Revenue isn't enough to cover capex.<p>And this kind of growth almost always means founders are looking for an early exit. Yes it's all a happy ending for the founders but what will happen to the end users?
What about their security? Seem to have been quite a few issues recently.<p>From just two days ago, here on HN:<p><i>"Digitalocean.com has misconfigured their network in a way that allows for anyone to monitor customer network traffic."</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157747" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157747</a>
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.
Congrats to the DigitalOcean team. I moved my personal server from Linode London to DigitalOcean Amsterdam-1 and haven't had any issues at all and latency is only 2-3ms more from London compared to my old Linode box which is completely acceptable for me. Support is also extremely responsive.
Great Now they can accelerate their long list of needed improvement.<p>1. Private Back End Network.
2. Auto Provision Droplet/Instance on different hardware by default
3. IPv6
4. DC in Asia
5. Something Similar to Amazon Elastic IP.<p>Things i would like
Node balancer
More Powerful CPU
Higher Quality Network ( Although it has gotten a lot better in recent months )
I have two rails SaaS apps that generate increasingly fulltime income on heroku.<p>combined costs currently at $140/month
each app has 1 free web dyno, 1 worker, starter postgres DB, ssl, plus a few extras<p>Looking at the new offerings like digital ocean, i'm really tempted to switch over, but a voice in my head keeps telling me it makes no sense as I don't really have strong linux-sysadmin type skills. Even getting rails to work on new macs takes me 1-2 painful days.<p>Anyone have an eta of what it might take someone with limited sysadmin skills to cut over to something like digital ocean from heroku?
I'm thinking about using them for my next project. I'm glad to hear the news that they are getting funding. 3.2M is a pretty big seed round though right?
Anecdotally, I recently moved the primary web server for my DNS hosting service (<a href="https://www.slickdns.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.slickdns.com</a>) from AWS to Digital Ocean and am getting much better performance at 1/3 of the cost.
A lot of people keep asking/questioning what makes Digital Ocean special. I can't speak for other people, but I do track what other people say. I've collected ~1,300 opinions on them and people like them more than any other major hosting provider I track (80% positive).<p>Feel free to read the comments for yourselves: <a href="http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean" rel="nofollow">http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean</a><p>They are obviously doing something right and a huge congratulations for their fund raise.
No offence but why would I put my data on US hosted servers?<p>Privacy violations would make liable under the local (a western european country) Data Protection act<p>no thanks
I looked at Digital Ocean for an alternative and really liked the prices, but it seems to be missing some pieces to cover more elaborate use-cases. For instance, you can't scale <i>just</i> storage, and they don't provide a CDN.<p>I hope they can add more features while staying price-competitive.
We use DO in our projects as a primary infrastructure. Switched to them from Amazon. Very happy with their service.<p>BTW, I'm shocked that this round was SEED. What happens when they get Series A. Will they continue to change game rules? I think yes.
I hope DO would consider have a special add-on like: $5 per month per node for priority support (< 1hr response time), then I think more people would consider moving more production systems to DO.
(Oh how much I hate their ad <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHZLCahai4Q" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHZLCahai4Q</a>)