[Nux]

Every day, working with customers' products or witnessing stories such as DO's I realise that success is 90% marketing and 10% actual technical stuff.

You don't have to have the greatest features or too many of them or even all of them working as advertised. You don't need to take security very seriously (hello DO, WhatsApp!) or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!) or any existing "cloud standards" in order to succeed.

You just need to market it and promote it right.

I'm not even sarcastic or anything. As a techie I always frickin overlook it and this is the single most important element that can help you make serious money/business.

There's a whole bunch of people out there who don't know shit or don't really care about how great your product is technically (or not ;> ). All you need is it satisfies some basic "need" and a shiny packaging, it's enough to go out there and get some milk flowing in.

Kudos to the DO folk!

[stormbrew]

I think you're kind of wrong here. DO's biggest thing for me is that it's incredibly easy to use while providing all the baseline features I actually need for casual hosting. I guess you could count this as 'marketing', but I think there's a strong technical element to knowing your market and how to make what they want to do as easy as possible. DNSimple occupies a very similar niche.

In fact, part of the appeal may be that they don't use openstack, because openstack implementations to date have all been quite limited and complicated so far.

[hyp0]

Yes. Two parts of business: engineering and marketing.

Two parts of marketing: promotion and meeting needs.

The key "marketing" of DO was:

  Existing providers offered pricing plans that were too complicated and platforms
  that weren’t always meeting the needs of their users.

It's not enough to make a "better" product, technically. You have to make a product that better meets user needs (relative to existing alternatives).

[redwall_hp]

For me, it's all the pricing-reputability ratio. They've always seemed like a stand-up company, while offering a comparable product to Linode and similar...at a fraction of the price.

I jumped over to them around the time NewsBlur wrote that post about scaling to meet the new demand when Google Reader shut down. I had never heard of DO before that, checked them out, and made a the switch after a bit of research.

[Nux]

Yeah, I guess the line between marketing and technical is not very clear all the time.

Re Openstack, indeed it has failed the "VPS" market which is still going strong.

[jedrek]

I use DO as a private little always-on server, I don't actually host anything worthwhile with them.

I signed up mostly because of the $5/month price and the $10 credit. That's half of what I pay for my main hosting account (over at WebFaction) and year, is about what a nice meal out costs. It's nice, quick enough for all my needs and took minutes to set up.

[donniezazen]

That seems so now a days. Folks like easy things. Plain and simple.

[jonesetc]

> or use buzz-stuff such as OpenStack (hello Rackspace, HPCloud!)

Maybe I misread the tone of this post or I'm fuzzy on the history, but it sounds like you're saying Rackspace is trying to be hip by jumping on the hype-train. My understanding is that Rackspace co-created [1] Openstack and let it out into the wild.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack#History

[Nux]

What I meant is Rackspace (also RedHat, HP, Mirantis etc) would have you believe that if you're not running Openstack then your "cloud" is shit and has no future. DO clearly demonstrated otherwise.

They're inflating the hype because they generate $$$ this way - from their public cloud, private deployments, training, certifications etc etc. Nothing wrong with that I guess, it's business.

[gaadd33]

Does Digital Ocean's "cloud" offer all the same things that OpenStack does? I've been looking for another file storage provider (like S3/CloudFiles/Azure Files) but wasn't aware there were any other options than OpenStack based.

[mjn]

Joyent has one as well (not OpenStack-based), with an interesting "integrated compute" option where you can send code to run over stored objects without spinning up an explicit compute instance: http://www.joyent.com/products/manta

I don't think DO offers any kind of a-la-carte cloud storage, though.

[nl]

OpenStack is working on a "send the code to the data" thing too. That's what Rackspace bought ZeroVM for.

If you want to try very alpha code you can kinda get it working yourself now (I think - based on mailing list discussion anyway)

[Nux]

Check https://www.greenqloud.com/storageqloud/

They run Cloudstack for compute, but not sure what they run for storage.

[bananas]

Agree with your assertion here. We've been approached by a couple of vendors to try and sell us OpenStack but it doesn't really buy us much.

DO is what we need, except self hosted and supporting windows.

[pbreit]

I disagree with your post in general but was particularly confused by this point. Aren't openstack and buzzyness exactly the thing you're deriding?

And I disagree that DO is missing technical chops.

[dmourati]

I actually think they are right. If you are not AWS (Google or Microsoft), and you are not embracing OpenStack, you are an also ran and you will be irrelevant.

[mbesto]

Totally agree.

People who are going to argue against you are going to say "But what about products that are so great that they go viral, people share them and your customer acquisition goes through the roof!". This is marketing. Making frictionless experiences that satisfy needs very quickly is a great way to market your product. Note - Many of these experiences are frictionless because the security sucks. Security is accessibility's worst nightmare.

WhatsApp did this by making it easy for my parents living in the US to download the app, add my UK phone number and voila, I can IM them for free.

DO did this by making the interface on a VPS provider "not suck" and the pricing in line with all of the junk shared providers out there.

What I've noticed about "Bubble 2.0" is that making great, frictionless products is the new marketing. It is still marketing, and I feel it's best that people recognize it then pretend it simply doesn't exist.

[straws]

If this kind of "marketing" is truly the thing you overlook when making things, are you making valuable tools that are hard or frustrating to use? What are the parts of your products that have nothing to do with the friction in using them?

[pbreit]

I think he way you are explaining it may give the wrong impression that the technical aspects are easy or unimportant which couldn't be further from the truth. In fact the technical aspects (and a compelling offering) are difficult and critical but merely a baseline to get in the game. Then, all being equal, the winners are those that figure out how to gain customers (marketing, for lack of a better term).

[giulianob]

I think at the end it came down to price. No one else was offering SSDs at the time for that cheap. Sure you get what you pay for but for a lot of people I guess it's good enough.

[alien3d]

Yes.because it cheap and i want to test ssd. I want to test how include or require in php can be speed up.

[tim333]

In my case DO succeeded more through the product than the marketing. I signed up after reading several 'who's the best hosting service' discussions and the consensus was DO was the best for small developer stuff, Linode and AWS being sometimes better for larger stuff. I've never seen an ad for DO. It's all been user recommendation.

[solve]

Alternatively: all the ways that it could fail don't matter if there's at least one way it could succeed.