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.
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.
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.?
It's a much more complex problem than most people think.
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).
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).
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...
