DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding(digitalocean.com) |
DigitalOcean Raises $83M in Series B Funding(digitalocean.com) |
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.
Linode, on the other hand, can remain a company focused on just being a long term business forever. They might move a little more conservatively, but they have owners with skin in the game and customers to keep happy. I use both DO and Linode, but Linode for my most critical stuff simply because I "feel" they're more likely to remain basically the same in 5 years' time and I value that consistency as a business.
I think DO is superb, I have great admiration for them and I recommend them a lot, but I also feel they're the riskier horse to back even if the potential upside is so much greater.
And that's exactly what Slicehost did, years ago.
I wonder if Rackspace ever courted Linode. Slicehost always seemed to be the inferior one in price and performance.
The way it's behaving it's as if it was acquired and kept on life-support.
We are currently considering moving to dedicated machines but only because of 2), otherwise we would happily be their customer for life.
Perhaps users mostly want performance and value which have been greatly improved by their substantial infrastructure upgrades?
I didn't really need anything shinier. Is it super-cloudy? Not so much, but also nice that you don't have to think about it.
They have a long history of withholding information from customers in the face of security incidents and outages. The last time they were hacked I found out from Reddit that it happened and even when they bothered to tell me they failed to say (a) what actually happened or (b) what steps they took to prevent it occurring again. And many, many outages had information communicated on the IRC hours before website was updated.
It is the culture and professionalism that differentiates one VPS provider from another. Linode gets a massive thumbs down for me.
It's been terrible for years. And it's not like you have a lot of choices when it comes to Linode data centre.
I'm sure your experience has been good, but there's a huge swathe of ex-Linode customers with pretty negative memories.
So perhaps you're correct that lack of funding is making Linode lazy now, but that doesn't mean that getting bought or accepting a bunch of money would solve the problem.
Side note: the original slicehost founders grew to regret their decision of selling to Rackspace, see: http://37signals.com/founderstories/slicehost
Jason sits on the board of DigitalOcean. :)
There's absolutely nothing wrong with bootstrapping and making a good living, but the stuff that goes big and wants to scale quickly usually has to raise a bunch of money to get there.
The pressure to expand is a negative indicator when I'm a user of a service.
>> And yet the biggest development in recent years at Linode has been a proprietary stats and monitoring system
>> Linode is now switching their entire platform from Xen to KVM, a curious move which will create risk
>> I have been a huge supporter of Linode over the years
Uh huh, right.
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.
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.
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.
I would say $500m valuation, tops. Most likely <$400m.
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.
Think Linode, but specifically for FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Plan9/TempleOS/MinuetOS/etc.?
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
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".
Real private networking and object shared storage are both huge for sure though.
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.
I ask because they have all the same features as DO + way more (e.g. dedicated hosting w/ same great panel, BYO ISO, etc).
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.
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?
https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/gophercloud/
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.
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!
Does this mean that they are operating at a loss?
For example, there have been a really big demand for NixOS for two years now but still no announcement whatsoever.
One of the highest voted customer feedback on their official forum.
DO is closer to competing with just Elastic Beanstalk and maybe RDS (from the standpoint of a managed RDBM service, not the feature set).
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.
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...
But congrats to the DO team. They will only get better.
EDIT: had no idea about the planned downtime. Maybe that explains the random chaos issues I had.
There's no reason to fear virtualization, and the automation is definitely one of the best aspects of running in a major cloud.
I also build things that are heavy on the network side, and virtualization drops networking performance a great deal (this may be changed these days, not sure).
Don't get me wrong. I don't fear virtualization. I use virtualbox and vmware heavily for development, and yes they do have a purpose, but it's a bad fit for the type of projects I build.
I just find that anything in life that just continues to add features for the sake of adding features, and create more and more "magic" push buttons to solve your problems eventually goes to crap and becomes a fragmented dependency hell that I would rather not deal with. And yes, I do love Golang.
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.
It's a much more complex problem than most people think.
Edit: Found this http://blog.due.io/2014/linode-digitalocean-and-vultr-compar..., which seems to portray it quite favorably.
Vultr is a brand of this company -- https://www.choopa.com -- and they've been around for a while.
Definitely recommend them, although I use DO exclusively for the Github student credit.
Benchmarks:
Vultr: https://gist.github.com/bobobo1618/0972fc51f49d90fb37af
DigitalOcean: https://gist.github.com/bobobo1618/81aa3f413b99aaab1f0d
I've got Vultr instances in all of their EU locations and haven't had any issues (connectivity wise or uptime wise). One note for Vultr: new accounts are limited to max 5 VPS instances by default until you open a support ticket and request the limit be raised (which they were happy to do, at least for me).
If nothing else, we all benefit from the prices. AWS is so cheap I barely have to think about it.
Thing of the googles and facebooks making their own servers instead of buying from off the shelf guys...
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.
https://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/
You can't prevent 0 days, and the informations hacked were encrypted.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=8646073
The issue here is not the 0 days occurred but how you deal with them and what systems you have in place to prevent them. Linode has consistently been sloppy at notifying customers and their auditing systems are/were clearly inadequate since their positions changed over the few days. Sure their data is encryptable but if you are sloppy about the process you're likely pretty sloppy about the implementation. It's trivial to decrypt data if you haven't encrypted it properly.
For me :-
* Excellent reliability (no unscheduled downtime in 6 years from 3 to at one point more than a dozen nodes)
* Excellent hardware - when I've benchmarked real production systems on Linode on a $/perf ratio beats DO hands down
* Excellent support - tickets are generally answered in under 30 minutes and staff are knowledgeable
* It just works(TM)
* Straightforward interface and pricing
* Rock solid network, like bulletproof
* I trust them (after 6 years of the above they have earned it)
a) Average reliability - had numerous incidents at their London and Fremont DCs. And the complete inability to tell me what was happening in a timely manner was pretty unacceptable.
b) Average support - they will answer the simple questions very quickly. But anything reasonably complex they will actually not bother responding at all.
Edit: Their support is top of the line.
Would you rather eat in a restaurant where all the chairs are creaky, where the tables are wobbly, and where the wait staff is doing their best to get by with broken equipment, or would you instead visit down the street to a place where everything may not be new but it's well maintained? If the food quality was the same, why would you insist on going to the place with crappy, broken stuff?
Linode just doesn't seem to care about their site at all. If they did they'd listen to user feedback and improve things once in a while. You know, like at least once every six years.
YMMV, but I've had zero issues with DigitalOcean's reliability. This is a VM that has been running since I spun it up.
Even when it was hacked multiple times and customer VPSs compromised e.g.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/03/bitcoins-worth-22800...
Nothing is worse than spending weeks securing every aspect of your VPS only to have incidents like this appear. And worst of all ? To this day Linode never clearly said what happened or what they did to prevent it happening again.
If GitHub had never improved their site since they launched it would be awful. Every time they move things forward I'm happier to be a paying customer. With Linode I reluctantly use them, but for new projects I'm using other services that work 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.
I have tried Azure, AWS, and DO, and by far the most stable and usable one is Azure. I thought I was the only one who thought Azure was good...
They have linux VMs which is cool, but still not sure I would pick them.
Wow, just wow.
Their IP Failover is really badly documented and hard to work with.
Their Nodebalancers are noticeably slow, the interface is alright, but you are better off setting up your own loadbalancer.
I feel that static networking could be made easier, and more automatic when I am adding a new node.
Their stackscripts should be able to receive parameters for when it is running, and the error-reporting should be better. I had issues where my scripts wouldn't run and I had no idea why.
Other than that, I am a happy customer.
I'd love to see them offer a storage solution as other commenters have mentioned.
I know Digital Ocean's control panel has improved several times since their launch, and their ability to launch instances with a complete stack is extremely useful. Linode has done nothing here. They point to their badly documented StackScripts system and shrug.
There's a hundred things Linode could do to make user's lives easier and they've done maybe two or three of them.
At this point AWS is so complicated they should be offering an official Cisco-like series of certifications.
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
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.
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.
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.
I do remember it being quite lacking back in the day.
I've recently switched from DO to Scaleway and would never go back.
It was literally 10x slower than Linode even after playing around with Go's concurrency level to find the fastest runtime, and even with the dataset in memory. :( ARM just wasn't the right arch for what I was doing.
I ended up going with Vultr because it has the $5 pricepoint for hosting tiny websites and tons of datacenter locations. Their CPU performance and network speed were great in my tests.
[1] https://github.com/robinsonstrategy/go_backtesting_simulator...
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.
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.
Your browser will also cache the result of the DNS lookup, and if that server goes down it will not try to do another DNS lookup for another host and your service will be unavailable.
It will also be unavailable for any new customer that gets the "faulty" IP address.
Specifying multiple DNS records will just cause your DNS server to use one of those, usually in a round robin fashion.
I am simply giving a list of servers that can answer a request.. clients know to keep trying till one works. (Which they all do. Try it!)
Among other things, IE7 will pin IPs for 30 minutes, non-browser clients may have serious issues, etc.
In my use case, I don't support IE7 (won't work at all on my SAAS app), and I only support browser clients.
I have simulated LB failures by killing nginx, and watched traffic flow over to the other LB without a big delay (in 30 seconds everyone was over).
Fancier IP failover is nice for sure, and would let some more enterprisey people in.. but for a lot of apps out there, DNS failover works great. Surprised from above how many people don't realize it exists or works so well (for so little effort).
What, regardless of TTL? That's gross.
Have you tested this in all the browsers? According to this ServerFault post[1], it could take minutes for an IP address to be considered "down" in Chromium before it cycles to the next one; Firefox apparently waits 20 seconds[2]. Those posts are dated 2011 but I can't imagine the behavior would've changed a whole lot since then. A user is not going to wait multiple minutes or even 20 seconds for a web page to render - it's effectively down.
IP failover with heartbeat or keepalived seems like a much better solution to me when feasible.
Hacker news takes > 20 seconds to load all the time. You mash reload and go on with your life.
I think people get too hung up on "I must have the most optimal HA setup in the history of the world" they end up having no HA, or spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to make some elaborate AWS rube goldberg device that lets you checkoff a bunch of HA boxes. I know a lot of people who did that, and their fancy AWS HA contraption totally fails in the real world because the entire US-EAST region went down and operation depending on at least one availability zone of it working to stay up. Look how much effort Netflix puts into HA, and how many hours a year they are totally broken.
For each application, you have many competing desires. You can have a HA website or web application without using IP failover. IP failover is cool, but not without it's own problems. Every solution has pros and cons. DNS round robin is not a bad solution for many classes of apps that want dead simple failover.
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.
TTL does not matter here because I am not yanking or adding to my DNS record. I am simply saying "Here are 3 servers.. try them in order until you find one that works".
In practice, a helpful feature is
a) Most clients try them in order from top to bottom b) Most DNS servers (including Digital Oceans) randomize the return order.
So if you do 2 dns requests, the first will return 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6, and the second will return 1.2.3.5, 1.2.3.6, 1.2.3.4
This has the double benefit of splitting traffic more or less evenly between my load balancers, and dealing with things with one or more is dead.
You can simulate IP failover with something like Elastic Network Interfaces / Elastic IPs in AWS... it's just not going to be on the same level of speed as doing it in, say, your own rack in a datacenter. It's also subject to weirdness where you could have some sort of split brain, nodes trying to take over interfaces in a loop. The health checked "multiple load balancers behind a single DNS record" approach has flaws but also simplifies a lot of things.
Edit: My Google skills are poor, but I found it here: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3857-when-disaster-strikes
Like I said in previous posts, I don't think it the end all rock solid load balancer answer. But I like to sleep through the night, and if having a short pause the one night a year a load balancer crash happens, my uptime is way higher than most of the internet.
> if no response in ~30 seconds, try the second
That is not HA. Most people will not wait 30 seconds for a page to load. If your business looses money with every minute of downtime this is certainly not adequate. It's certainly not recommended https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_DNS#Drawbacks
How about services you use a lot. How many hours has hacker News been down in 2015 (yet you are still on it right now)? How many hours has netflix been down in 2015? How many hours has entire chunks of AWS been down in 2015?
Every business is a spectrum. A HFT trading shop may decide that 1 second downtime per day is their max outage. A webpage advertising a pet adoption event may decide that 6 hours of downtime per day is the most they can tolerate. You have to make this decision for each product, and even better -each part of each product.
The entire point of this post thread was the idea behind "I can not use DO for serious stuff until they implement load balancing"... which is silly for most businesses. And even those businesses that need high uptime, I offered (and still believe) that DNS round robin is a decent way to get HA for almost no money.
You link to an article about it, but miss the boat. What other solution can I implement in a few minutes to provide available load balancing between any two servers in the world (same or different host provider, same or different datacenter, same or different continent).
Sometimes the relatively simple solution is "good enough". Sure you can find a wikipedia page saying where it is not perfect. I would not DNS round robin a HFT trading app. I have no problems on it for 99.99% of the web though. So much of the web has NO failover of any kind, stupid simple DNS round robin would be a vast improvement for most websites.
It's not a 30 second outage! Your domain will keep resolving the bad IP. Even with an extremely low TTL (also not recomendable) ISP's DNS will cache it and even some will ignore your TTL. A big portion of all new users will keep hitting the bad IP.
Anyway, I won't try to convince you to change your setup if you are happy with it, but it's obvious from the comments that I'm not the only one thinking it's a suboptimal solution, so at least some of us won't be considering DO for HA systems given the circumstances.
So with 5 load balancers, 1/5 of customers see a one time hit of 30 seconds (after which they return to full speed).
What better solution for the same price do you propose to get HA on a budget cloud provider?
Nothing, your solution is obviously better than having none and it's enough for your needs. But the original discussion was about what's needed for DO to become a competitor for big business, not low budget, there they are already king.
Normally you want at least IP failover, meaning that you get an IP and can be rerouted to a different server with an simple API call. At work we use hetzner, which is not exactly a high-end provider but offers it: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Failover/en
Then, can be even better if the provider offers this HA-load balancer as a service, so you don't have to setup anything.
You might still need DNS failover to recover from a full datacenter going offline.