from Hacker News

Digital Ocean’s journey from TechStars reject to cloud-hosting darling

by bjenik on 3/23/14, 8:25 PM with 56 comments

  • by Nux on 3/23/14, 10:55 PM

    Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff.

    You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud standards" in order to succeed.

    You just need to market it and promote it right.

    I'm not even sarcastic or anything. As a techie I always frickin overlook it and this is the single most important element that can help you make serious money/business.

    There's a whole bunch of people out there who don't know shit or don't really care about how great your product is technically (or not ;> ). All you need is it satisfies some basic "need" and a shiny packaging, it's enough to go out there and get some milk flowing in.

    Kudos to the DO folk!

  • by comice on 3/23/14, 8:52 PM

    Article doesn't disclose that Crunchfund has a stake in DO.

  • by larrys on 3/23/14, 9:26 PM

    Totally misleading linkbait title.

    Sure they were "rejected" by NYC (for valid reasons - apparently treated very well) but then went into the Boulder program after applying. And no doubt the reference given by Tisch must have certainly helped I'm guessing.

  • by frakkingcylons on 3/23/14, 10:56 PM

    I know that TechCrunch isn't interested in discussing any actually useful details of what made DO successful...but for me it came down to them doubling the RAM per instance and using SSDs in 01/2013, creating a collection of excellent sysadmin articles, and cheap/free backups and images.

  • by priyankt on 3/24/14, 4:27 AM

    My opinion. I am a DO user and I don't think you can use it for production application. Casual hosting is fine.

    For production servers, deterministic backups are very important. DO does not provide that. I faced a lot of issues when transitioning my server from non-backup to backup mode. To do that, you need to take a snapshot(server shutdown is required for this)of server. Then, you need to destroy it to get the same ip. There is a chance that your ip may go to someone else & any services that are dependent on ip may need changes. I was lucky to loose the ip for a while & get it back after some trial & error.

    Also, you don't have any control on the backup. It is taken by the system and is supposed to be anywhere between 2-3 days.

  • by joshmn on 3/24/14, 3:42 AM

    DigitalOcean is not a cloud or anything that resembles what a "cloud" is.

    If you consider "cloud" hosting backup-enabled virtual private servers with multiple operating-system choices and multiple locations, well, hate to break it to you, but that's has been around since 2005.

    Everyone is hopping on DO because it's marketed as a "cloud" and it's part of a tech accelerator (and maybe because it has SSDs and is so damn cheap). Other than that, there's really nothing special about it.

    Source: me; hosting-industry expert.

  • by teekert on 3/24/14, 12:06 PM

    I really loved DO, that is until they emailed me that my server had to be rebooted and I found it with all the config files being replaced by a bunch of @@@'s (I had to use the browser VNC to log in).

    I asked them what had happened and if it can be fixed, they tell me to make a new droplet. I ask what will prevent this from happening again... no response...

    Bye bye DO.

  • by coreymgilmore on 3/24/14, 1:06 AM

    DO really is a tremendous product. The simplicity, pricing, and speed of setting up an instance is awesome. For setting up a quick dev environment or a simple host for X or Y, it is definitely easier than through AWS.

    I use DO pretty often and I hope they have some cool new offerings in the future. Maybe really simple load balancing?

  • by soci on 3/24/14, 10:12 AM

    I wonder at what scale a business like this is sustainable with this low pricing schemas. Whatsoever, will it ever be?

  • by politician on 3/23/14, 9:02 PM

    "rejection" -- I had to reread that headline 3 times before I figured out what it was trying to say.

  • by computador on 3/24/14, 12:44 AM

    What the HTML is that?!

  • by jaequery on 3/24/14, 4:35 AM

    i dont know why but i'm so tired of these posts