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by stormbrew 4478 days ago
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.
5 comments
hyp0 4478 days ago
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).
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redwall_hp 4478 days ago
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.

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Nux 4478 days ago
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.

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jedrek 4478 days ago
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.

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donniezazen 4478 days ago
That seems so now a days. Folks like easy things. Plain and simple.
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