I mean, it's all sheer speculation, but I think it is equally likely that Digital Ocean is having a hard time vs. just restructuring to do some housekeeping... I don't know how any 600 person cloud company survives in the same world as AWS these days.
They aren’t competing in the same space
Easiest way to compare is bandwidth costs: AWS/Azure/Google Cloud charge around $0.05/GB at their cheapest prices. DigitalOcean/Linode/Vultr charge around $0.005/GB (and it comes with a VPS bundled).
If you’re doing anything bandwidth intensive (several PB a month), one is viable, the other is not
Having used both daily for years now I can certainly see why DO will have an appeal to some over something as large as AWS.
It is way less confusing and their docs are much easier to get through. I always recommend people starting out with cloud VMs to go DO instead of AWS
Obviously DO has a lot less features than AWS or Azure, but they do add features every couple of years, and their interface is so much simpler to navigate.
I feel DO/Linode/etc are more closely related to a hosted vSphere + f5, than a "cloud provider" in the same vein as AWS/Azure.
The old mantra, change or die, is ringing true here. I personally want to see the success of DO because only having good experiences for my pet projects. Sadly no professional prod environments for me.
When you’re courting investor it’s not uncommon to look at your finances and do some work to make the balance sheet look better. You goose your margins a percent or three. But it’s kinda gaming the numbers because you can’t keep doing it without hurting your revenue. You’re putting a little S-curve on the graph of your margins and what? Hoping some people see the beginning of a hockey stick instead? If the round closes successfully you probably will get a hockey stick soon afterward. But this isn’t when it started.
They have only raised around 100M in equity investment from VCs. The last being 83M in 2015. This is the money which requires multiples.
If they're close to being profitable (likely given their past fund raising, and how long its been), why would they want to sell more of their business?
They may also want to finally go public. 8 years is a long time to wait for a return. And it seems to me the stock market is tired of these unprofitable unicorns doing IPOs (at the moment anyway).