When Colorado passed the wage disclosure law and Digital Ocean decided not to hire in Colorado anymore despite being founded in Colorado is when I decided to never use them. I dont care if they eventually started hiring people in Colorado again.
God forbid people have a sense of their potential compensation before spending hours applying to a job! Good for Colorado passing that law. Shame on Digital Ocean for skirting around it.
I hope they don't bet too much on AI, but I do think they deserve to grow more as a cloud provider, they need to focus strongly on following up on people's complaints about their existing services. I have seen many threads of people with complaints about their S3 compatible storage being very limited in its design, and potentially wildly insecure. If they are serous enough to be asking for roughly a billion dollars, they should really consider fixing up their current offering either first or at the same time. It's only a matter of time before some giant scandal has customers running away.
I love DigitalOcean to the point where I actually applied for a job there[0]. The UI is leagues better than AWS and there are really useful API endpoints to control common things. I've been a paying customer for something like 12 years and I've never had an issue.
I had a job interview with one of the founders. The whole process was, by far, the worst experience I ever had in my life, and a complete waste of my time. (I interviewed for maybe 25-30 jobs in my life overall).
The UI is simpler because the product is simpler. If all you want is 1-2 VMs in the cloud and to not think about the rest, its great. For any actual business that's moved from 'hobby'/'seed' phase, its not the right platform.
Their interview process sucks. They expect PhD-level experience for basic cloud operations. And since they started outsourcing to Hyderabad, they’ve gotten even worse.
As a long time paying customer of DO, I don't know how I feel about this. I've been unbelievably happy with the products I rely on (App Platform and Managed Postgres). I worry this is an attempt to play catch up in the AI space and everything else will lose focus.
Used to have a dual atom box in NYC that had over 3000 days of uptime. The hard drive died and they messaged me saying I had the last atom box in their datacenter. They gave me a dual e5 with 64gb ram for the original price of my 2gb atom box. This is how you generate loyalty. I will never leave them.
I've been a loyal digital ocean customer for years, I switched away from Linode way back when (for reasons I don't even remember.) I'm extremely happy with the DO service, so here's to hoping they don't screw it all up!!
Let's just hope this helps their service and doesn't lead to them making it worse. I love Digital Ocean. The UI and the service itself is great. API is nice too.
I just migrated my personal servers to Scaleway due the big EU migration that's happening. I did love using them as a service though, lovely interface and decent pricing. Back in the day we didn't have Claude but their documentation for setting up servers and implementing services was super useful. Wish them well in raising money.
For many personal uses something like AWS is a bit too sophisticated when you just want to spin us some instances and have a clean interface with little noise.
One thing that's not super obvious, but is happening - 'AI' is increasing demand for 'normal' (e.g cpu) compute. People are building more apps because the cost of software has reduced, these need deploying somewhere. More commits == more CI runs, then there's then the 'agent' usage, things like openclaw instances etc. Just because they are expanding, it might not mean they're betting the house on more GPUs (though likely a part of it)
A little late to get in on the "AI"-based hype train in order to raise money, if you ask me. I guess they've fallen victim to the investors saying "What's your AI strategy?"
Don't risk or trust DigitalOcean with production grade stuff, it disappears and doesn't get fixed and the support stops responding or escalating when their own information clearly outlines the gaps that have occurred in their systems.
I don't trust any of the cloud providers enough to store a single copy of important data. I always have backups go to two separate S3 style endpoints in different providers, and my infrastructure is setup with scripts of some sort.
I've run production setups on DO for 12 or 13 years now though. My last company, after it was acquired, was forced into Azure. Both stability and performance tanked, while spending a little over 2x compared to what it was in DO.
Still an awesome service and platform.. but no longer worth it price wise as it once was. Same with Vultr..
I guess at some point all investors just pressure these companies into price matching AWS and other pay-for-every-single-thing-ever companies.
I say this having used DO since... 2012?
Based on DO's monthly newsletters, all it cares about anymore is AI.
I don't think its written a single bullet point in two years that wasn't about AI.
It's as if some wave of amnesia came over DO and it forgot it has thousands of existing customers who are not AI wantrapreneurs.
[0] They never got back to me, sadly.
$ uptime
16:06:14 up 2802 days, 15:03, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
$ uname -a
Linux myinstance 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u1 x86_64 GNU/Linux
For many personal uses something like AWS is a bit too sophisticated when you just want to spin us some instances and have a clean interface with little noise.
Regardless, I believe you can provision VPS on Hetzner Cloud via their API.
I've run production setups on DO for 12 or 13 years now though. My last company, after it was acquired, was forced into Azure. Both stability and performance tanked, while spending a little over 2x compared to what it was in DO.