It's considerably less expensive as your application scales: a webapp that needs 3GB RAM costs $50/month on Render; on Heroku you'll pay $250/month for 2.5GB RAM, and $500/month for the next tier (14GB RAM).
And you get free chat support.
One final question: will spaces support proper static site hosting? There was a ticket about it stating it was planned for Q3 or Q4 last year. but there was no follow up.
You I think you could be fine with 3 of the smallest machine types.
Nomad servers may need to be run on large machine instances. We suggest having between 4-8+ cores, 16-32 GB+ of memory, 40-80 GB+ of fast disk and significant network bandwidth
Basically the cost if the Nomad masters would be much greater than the cost of what would run my actual applications. That’s a non-starter for me.
> You I think you could be fine with 3 of the smallest machine types.
Maybe, but if that’s their official stance, it would make me very nervous to run a production system with lower spec machines.
Like, you're not doing "big data" unless we're talking petabytes per day.
We have been running between 100 and 200 Jobs in Nomad, with the quantity of clients doubling then shrinking every day using 3 × t3.micro for the servers since years.
We have yet to see our Nomad usage increase enough to get rid of these machines.
Also, adding at least another US datacenter would be great.
I can see people that would like to use my solution to not need the bells and whistles of aws, azure, etc.
Does DO provide startup assistance like Microsoft, which gives free cloud computing? My goal would be to say something like try DO free for a week and if you like it, continue using them.
But all kidding aside, the numbers just don't make sense. AWS is doing $30B in revenue and has tens of thousands of engineers.
Google which many can argue has some of the best engineering on the planet is going after AWS investing billions in datacenters and again using thousands of engineers.
So to think that DigitalOcean with a $300MM debt line and 250+ people in engineering is going to go after AWS just doesn't add up.
Certainly when you have 500+ people in a company everyone has different opinions and view points on where a company should be headed, or who it is competing with and so forth, but for me the priority has always been clear. Focus on the SMBs, and developer teams, that need the flexibility that AWS offers without the complexity because you aren't managing a $10MM hosting budget.
> So to think that DigitalOcean with a $300MM debt line and 250+ people in engineering is going to go after AWS just doesn't add up.
Lots of Money + Lots of People =/= Guaranteed Success
It’s more a matter of taking on the market from a slightly different angle.
One viable path I see is for DO to ramp up their enterprise appeal by offering services on par with AWS, while cutting down the operational complexity of managing AWS services (using AWS = incredibly high overhead with configuration and everything else).
Absolutely. Getting into AWS, etc can be overwhelming. Getting into DO is incredibly easy.
I'll agree on that.
I won't agree with the rest though, I don't think DO can compete in an enterprise level.
Actually in the longrun I don't see DO ever being viable. AWS and google are going to become simpler as the time passes and they are going to take over that margin that is left on services like DO, ovh etc. I think the only viable business plan for them right now would be to focus on their simplicity and continue building on it hoping they will get bought out by the big players. Obviously thats not good for us -> amazon and google owning everything on the web but unless there is some crazy law that limits them from doing so, they are going to do it.
Google and AWS are NOT going to become simpler, to the contrary, that would defeat their entire proposition. To eliminate the traditional enterprise data center entirely, build sufficient lock-in moats, and then continue to innovate around costs and value requires tons of bespoke capabilities and complexities.
Really? I see them becoming more complex as they add more services.
Doing what they do is complex and takes a certain skill set, but also doing simplicity right is it's own skill set.
I would say that I would be more worried in the past when AWS was more of a single player, but now that Google and Azure are firmly in the picture, AWS has some real competition in their core market which takes their focus away from us which is great.
I think DO is good for the small/average player that doesn't wanna invest time into having his team learning the AWS quirks because his business isn't in heavy need of it.
If AWS or even google ever goes after the small/average user by creating an easier to understand/navigate service for the user that doesn't need all that overhead and time investment of that bizarre learning curve just to setup a simple application, then its just gonna kill DO and other services like that out there.
Lightsail doesn't seem to have killed off DO: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
Currently both AWS and GCE cost is multiple times more per gigabyte served, compared to DO. E.g. AWS S3 is $0.09 per gigabyte served, while Do Spaces is about $0.01.
For certain businesses, traffic is a major cost, and paying many tomes as much for it could make them unprofitable.
So no, a cloud provider of the DO class must be long-term viable, just in a different niche.
Our goal isn't to be bigger than AWS or Google, but simply to provide a great service to our customers and to continue to expand our offering as those needs grow.