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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>Just my 2 cents, I know others who use DO and love it.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>0.02
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.
> The $83 million is going directly into growing our team and expanding our product offerings with networking and storage features.<p>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".
> expanding our product offerings with networking and storage features<p>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.<p>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.
Has anyone used Vultr.com?<p>I ask because they have all the same features as DO + way more (e.g. dedicated hosting w/ same great panel, BYO ISO, etc).
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.<p>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.
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?<p>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?)<p>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.<p>Anyone aware of comprehensive location based benchmarking of all the VPS's?
I love DO.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>Thank you guys, you are great, keep it up!
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.<p>Does this mean that they are operating at a loss?
I love DO, they are doing great work. The only thing I regret is the relatively poor choice of platforms they support.<p>For example, there have been a really big demand for NixOS for two years now but still no announcement whatsoever.
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.