[re-thc]

The I pretend I know what I'm doing strategy.

Most acquisitions fail. It's a difficult path unless it fits a very specific need.

Yet a common management / product strategy is to buy random companies as though they are ingredients of a dish and think it'll just work.

Digital Ocean to me has lost their core focus and appeal. They aren't upgrading their hardware, software and other crucial pieces of their infrastructure. There's been gimmicks, acquisitions and marketing.

Someone said the executives there don't believe they can compete with the big cloud providers and so are poking at different areas to see what works.

[gizmo]

> Yet a common management / product strategy is to buy random companies as though they are ingredients of a dish and think it'll just work.

Acquisitions are an easy way to juice top line growth. Acquisitions also offer ample opportunity to put lipstick on your finances. After all, any acquisition has many one-time costs and you can use this to juice your margins. You also forecast substantial cost savings by eliminating redundant positions. All in all, your gross margins and YoY growth look a lot healthier after the acquisition even when nothing has fundamentally improved about your business.

Repeated acquisitions really muddy the water and make it even harder for analysts to figure out how well your core business is doing. Especially when growth in your core business is stalling it makes a lot of sense to obfuscate your finances while you purchase top line growth.

All the while the stock price stays high and the executives get to enjoy their option packages. Eventually the music stops, but clever executives jump ship before that happens.

[sh34r]

By the time the music stops, they’ll have grown too big to fail, and it’ll also likely be a sector-wide downturn, so they’ll just get another bailout from Uncle Sam. Moral hazard is endemic in Sillycon Valley.

[AYBABTME]

DO is just at 3.4B$ market cap; far from becoming too big to fail.

[FredPret]

I love DO as a user and not an investor, but their main value to me is that they have public-facing IPs. I could easily host all my sites on a single AMD machine under my desk, if only I had a good way of routing from the internet to my desk.

I would be closer to nine fives than five nines, but that's good enough even for many commercial sites, including mine.

[z3t4]

Just contact your ISP to get a public IP. You might not get a static IP, but you can configure a dhcp client to request your old IP when reconnecting after a power outage. Set DNS TTL reasonably low like 12 hours so that you can recover if you do get another IP.

Another way is to signup for a cheap VPS and use a tunnel to your home server. There's lots of really cheap VPS's with 128MB of memory that is plenty if you just want a tunnel.

[SteveNuts]

It's not really a silver bullet nowadays, residential plan ISPs are very wary of allowing inbound connections in my experience

[z3t4]

The problem is the lack of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 addresses are ridiculous expensive. And most people don't need a public address so ISP save a ton of money by using NAT. I don't know if they must give you one or not if you ask, but I think a public IP address should be a human right, or you should at least be able to change to an ISP that can provide one.

[nicolas_17]

How can a public IPv4 address be a human right while at the same time "we ran out of them" and there aren't anywhere near enough for everybody?

[graton]

One option you could try is using a CloudFlare tunnel.

[thejazzman]

I love this option. Doubles as a way to VPN-into your home network remotely (Warp Client) without opening any ports

[FredPret]

Thanks to you both. I'll look into it.

You can buy a computer that is 1000x more powerful than a droplet for a fraction of the ownership cost, especially if you only get occasional visitors.

I'm excited by the idea of completely decentralized hosting; now we just need decentralized payments - that take USD.

[noonething]

Sorry if I'm not getting something, but wouldn't dynamic dns help in your instance?

[FredPret]

You mean like No-IP? I used that to SSH into my own servers for a while, but I found it to not be 100% reliable.

[AYBABTME]

So your IP changes and your DNS entries are all invalid across the www until they TTL. And then you're back online.

Doesn't sound very useful for hosting anything public.