DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round

Re:DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round by snewman on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @01:42PM (#6174312)

I keep hearing great things about DigitalOcean, but the critical price parameter for me is flash storage, and they don't seem to be beating AWS here. The larger DigitalOcean plans are $1 / GB / month for flash. An EC2 hi1.4xlarge instance has 2TB of flash. At on-demand pricing, $3.10/hr x 24 hours x 30 days == $2232/month, which is slightly more expensive. But reserved instances bring that down very quickly. A "Light Utilization" instance only costs $3884 upfront for a three-year term. Even if you amortize that over just 12 months, it works out to $1152/month, almost 2x as cost-effective as DigitalOcean. (Of course, with DigitalOcean you're getting a lot more CPU and RAM per GB of SSD, but only compared to the h1.4xlarge which is deliberately flash-heavy.)

This is not to run down DigitalOcean, but if you take reserved instances into account then they don't necessarily beat EC2 pricing. Or am I missing something?

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Re:DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round by rismay on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @02:06PM (#6174473)

For me, they are really good on the low end. I love the fact that they offer a $5 per month instance size. Plus, since I joined during the beta period I get unlimited bandwidth for free. This beats the $15 per month AWS instance sizes or the lowest Google option of like $30 bucks. Also, it's like 2x faster than AWS. Finally, for hacking you can easily use a $5 server to replace a service like Cloudant as your backend during testing. I've had cases where I would have been charged hundreds of dollars for API calls which a $5 DigitalOcean server handled marvelously. Or you can use it host a high performance blog: http://jasonormand.com/2012/07/20/introducing-lempress-super...

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Re:DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round by Kudos on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @03:45PM (#6175131)

I thought the unlimited bandwidth thing was only until they start measuring it?

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Re:DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round by jeffasinger on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @04:53PM (#6175548)

I think customers that signed up a long time ago get unlimited bandwidth forever so long as they don't do certain things (Tor, Bittorents, run a CDN)

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Re:DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round by ampsonic on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @04:41PM (#6175473)

Correct

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Re:DigitalOcean raises $3.2M Seed Round by toomuchtodo on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @07:13PM (#6176300)

Why would I take reserved instances into account when I don't have to reserve them with Digital Ocean? They're still kicking AWS' ass on pricing. Sure, big boys are still going to go with AWS (i.e. the CIA), but for small/mid-sized shops? Digital Ocean ahoy!

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