[seiji]

Is unicorn just a billion dollar non-public startup? Isn't there some other magic sauce required like supernormal margins or superfew employees or exploiting toothless regulations?

DO seems to be almost a too straight forward business model (buy servers, rent servers in sub-units) to be considered in the modern startup pool of wishful thinking. I mean, it's not like they're an iPhone app for renting other people's idle server space on demand. Now that would be a game changer.

[proksoup]

DO's UX is a game changer, I personally think is why they have been so successful in what seemed like a crowded market with the "same" business model as the others.

[seiji]

Yeah, the simplicity is great. AWS has 80 products and it takes months to figure how how they all work together. DO's click-n-go for $5 month helps just from a mental clarity point of view.

At this point AWS is so complicated they should be offering an official Cisco-like series of certifications.

[samhoggnz]

I'm not sure they're at the level of Cisco, but they do have certifications.

http://aws.amazon.com/certification/

[seiji]

Oh, great to know. They are really cheap too ($150, $300, $75 re-up).

Amusingly, that page demonstrates the need for an AWS certification in the first place: the page has over 100 things trying to grab your attention with no focus or clear direction at all. Amazon as a corporate entity seems to go for "maximum information + maximum confusion" in their UX at every turn.

Always worth a re-read: https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

[res0nat0r]

AWS is an inherently complex product. It has far and away more features than any other competitor, so there is obviously going to be more confusion. I think the AWS dashboard is getting better and better and relatively easy to use if you keep each product isolated. There being 40+ products to choose from is overwhelming if you don't know what you are looking at, but that is the nature of the beast.

[twistedpair]

Why fear a complicated cloud? I tried DO. It was cute, then I kept using AWS. DO is very simple, for simple things. But where do I get my GPU optimized Droplet, or one with 10GB internet connection and 244GB of ram to computer that graph problem with 3B edges? DO's only got relatively small, simple instances.

Further, DO is MORE expensive than AWS. What you say? Well right now I can grab a spot request for a box with 8 cores and 30GB ram for $0.066/hr or $48/mo compared to $160/mo on DO. That's ~1/4 the cost. Also, most "AWS Sucks" benchmarks are naive at best, failing to use the local disk, rather than the NAS, and this only requires 3 bash lines to mount.

[mooreds]

Awesome, thanks for the pointer.

[hibala]

well said! most of the AWS products are literally have minor diff. point and literally over complicating things. I feel they want to keep it that way.

[gsharma]

Serious question - What part of their UX do you think is game changer? I use DO and Linode. They both look similar to me. DO does have better UX than AWS, but I think DO is comparable to Linode rather than AWS.

On the other hand, I think DO's content guides as a marketing tool is a great asset for them. I haven't seen any other provider do that. Linode had a few guides, but nothing as DO's scale.

[sbarre]

You said it yourself when you mentioned the marketing and the community and the customer guides. User Experience is not just web interfaces, it's the whole user experience (man....) and that includes onboarding, self-service, support, learning and all the other small touches that make it a satisfying experience to be a DO customer.

[welanes]

Yes. Moved from AWS to DO and it's like night and day. Sample of great UX that spring to mind:

1. No noise on the dashboard and intuitive process flow.

2. Very good forum and documentation. Site:digitalocean.com whatever-your-problem-is and you'll most likely get it resolved.

3. Little features like auto-populating the Gmail MX record values.

[proksoup]

It's a lot of little details.

Just looking at the pricing pages only for a minute, not because I think the pricing page is the differentiator, but because I think the effort in details DO put there is evidenced across the experience: - One green sign up button instead of 8 - One option emphasised more than the others - A toggle to see hourly pricing, instead of small print monthly - 4 stats instead of 6

In general, in DO, I find myself not distracted and finding what I need. Less information to process, the right things emphasized.

Linode has improved greatly from the last time I reviewed it ... but still it seems to be a cargo cult of what DO did as opposed to really understanding the value of those details.

[contingencies]

+1: insightful. Honestly though, despite the sarcasm, that's not a bad idea.