Ask HN: Thoughts on DigitalOcean in production now that it's public

3 points by mnehring 5 years ago | 1 comment

So, in the past, I've observed that it's been controversial on HN to use DigitalOcean in production environments. (The same can be said of other cloud platforms as well, but DigitalOcean seems to be the most popular of the cloud platforms not in the big 3.) But now DigitalOcean is a publicly traded company, so it's got more of a here-to-stay feel. Has anyone had new thoughts about using DigitalOcean in production now that they are a publicly traded company?

mnehring 5 years ago |

I'll share some of my first thoughts. It seems that DO might be more stable as a long-term product than, say, Google Cloud. Google is famous for their Google Graveyard, so it's possible that Google may kill Cloud, since they are stuck at a distant 3rd place and Google doesn't like being 3rd.

Also, DO seems to be the only major-ish cloud company that only does cloud services (at least that comes to mind immediately). For Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba, their Cloud products are just one product among many. (Of course, AWS is Amazon's big profit-center, and Microsoft is also betting big on Azure.) RackSpace is publicly traded again, but doesn't seem to really have an identity of its own anymore.

The big thing about DO that I like is that their products seem no-frills and developer-centric. They just make it really easy to be a customer. Everything just seems to work the way you expect, the pricing is what you expect, and their staff seem to understand their customers.