It's an Infrastructure as a Service offering like Amazon's EC2, Linnode, Microsoft Azure, or Rackspace. Digital Ocean[1] has seen a sharp rise in popularity lately from developers due to ease of use and high performance VM's.
Given that it's a fairly new project and DigitalOcean is a relatively unknown cloud (relative to EC2 the other cloud-based builder in Packer.io), I wondered if they had also perhaps contributed heavily to the project. That's another good way to see a sharp rise in popularity from developers!
They differentiate themselves by offering SSDs for all instance sizes + offering a very cheap level ($5). While SSDs won't improve all workloads, I think "high performance" claims compared to the typically IO-weak alternative isn't unreasonable.
Also, they're popular enough now that I'm surprised people haven't heard about them (especially after recent funding)...
Yes, at least. For one I believe all DigitalOcean boxes have SSDs. I've found their boxes much better per $ than an EC2 VM. EC2 has a much wider tool suite and is possibly better if you regularly spin machines up and down. YMMV, but for just 'a box' they compete pretty well IMHO.
Marketing... I've seen people converting (catastrophic) human errors in that kind of marketing, where you look so professional dealing with "the attack". Now each time I see DDoS news, I question myself about it.
While people might laugh at what you are saying in the mid to late 90's many of the well know dot coms of today (ebay for example) got publicity because of bad things happening. People trying to sell things they shouldn't on ebay "my virginity for sale" etc. Always made the news.
I don't believe this was the intent here for sure but I do note that they say: "There is an on-going DDOS attack against digitalocean.com. No hypervisors or customer virtual servers should currently be affected by this attack."
But yet it is on the front page of HN. And now more people know about digitalocean (which has gotten a fair amount of press on HN it's where I heard of them).
As a DigitalOcean customer, I don't see it as a marketing campaign, I see it as them letting their customers know that they are being DDoS'd incase their main site is down or something due to it and the customer thinks their VPS is down too. Just because someone posted it on HN and a few others upvoted it doesn't mean it's marketing.
[1] - https://www.digitalocean.com/