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by joshmn 4478 days ago
DigitalOcean is not a cloud or anything that resembles what a "cloud" is.

If you consider "cloud" hosting backup-enabled virtual private servers with multiple operating-system choices and multiple locations, well, hate to break it to you, but that's has been around since 2005.

Everyone is hopping on DO because it's marketed as a "cloud" and it's part of a tech accelerator (and maybe because it has SSDs and is so damn cheap). Other than that, there's really nothing special about it.

Source: me; hosting-industry expert.
3 comments
ohashi 4478 days ago
>Everyone is hopping on DO because it's marketed as a "cloud" and it's part of a tech accelerator (and maybe because it has SSDs and is so damn cheap). Other than that, there's really nothing special about it.

The marketing is good. The quality of the product is good. It's incredibly easy to get started with. The tech accelerator I don't think plays any factor. I searched my database and there are 24 mentions of TechStars out of 3213 positive mentions. That's 0.7%, I can't imagine it has much impact right now on their growth. To give some other comps cheap is 115, affordable is 36, ssd is 133, fast is 174, amazing 212, easy is 134.

Source: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/company/101/digitalocean

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joshmn 4478 days ago
The marketing is false though.

That would mean I can go ahead and market a Galaxy S6 as an Apple device and watch all the fanboys and teenage girls hop on. But of course I need pretty colors.

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ohashi 4478 days ago
I measure what people are actually saying about them. People seem pretty happy. You can pontificate all you want, but I am looking at thousands of people's opinions on them, the consensus is that it's pretty good.

If your complaint is the marketing about 'cloud' is false, then cloud computing in general is a pretty ambiguous term. It's being used for things as simple as a VPS in the industry. It's pretty meaningless at this point, people will use it to market their products and I don't think they are wrong. I still couldn't tell you where the line is drawn and I've been around this business for ages.

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philtar 4478 days ago
I think the SSDs and the price are why people are jumping on. Not the marketing. Their marketing is horrid.

"You've been developing like a BEAST and your app is ready to go.."

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zaidf 4478 days ago
The biggest reason DO took off has little to do with the reasons you cite. It's got to do with simplicity and hourly billing. AWS had the latter without former. Your typical VPS host has a bit of both but wont tell you launch 20 instances for a few hours for pennies.
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joshmn 4478 days ago
> Your typical VPS host has a bit of both but wont tell you to launch 20 instances for a few hours for pennies.

DigitalOcean limits you to 5 off the bat, but that's just being picky.

RackSpace, Atlantic, Gigenet, VPS.net, Oxeo, HPCloud, Upcloud, Dotblock, StormOnDemand (LiquidWeb) to name a few. And that's off the top of my head.

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