Do you actually have evidence of this or is this an off the cuff statement?

Having worked for some big hosts myself, i know how hard it can be to make changes once you have people using your platform. I suspect DO are in a similar situation and are looking to make a big leap forward with new growth leveraging their existing brand. I have no real evidence of this, but it feels like a sensible course of action.

No one likes giving up equity and taking money unless there is a damn good reason for it.

Amongst other obscure jobs I've been employed to dig people out of the crap many a time in the hosting sector so yes I'm pretty close to this sort of stuff.

Normally in these situations, much as they do with DO already with disparate DC capabilities, you deploy infrastructure side-by-side and slowly port it over from one system to another. Developing the capabilities isn't really a big problem even if you build it versus buy as the total developer / administrator / server ratios on these sorts of companies are pretty favourable to massive automation.

I suspect they really do just want the money. Either than or they've short-sold themselves as a bargain host and now have trouble generating revenue and will lose too many customers if they crank prices so they're riding the investor's crack pipes via hype.

The latter is all too common unfortunately. One of the UK's "leading" hosts I did some consultancy for in the mid 00's actually relaunched with just under 50 CentOS servers with shared hosting/cPanel stuff on them but priced too low. They got customers but not enough to pay for the cage. Spent a couple of months moving their shit into a single 42U and consolidating their billing and provisioning system. They're still around now and can pay the bills. I did it for cash - I wouldn't want the equity myself.

Hosting veteran here. +1.

What's your thoughts on entrants like buyvm and ramnode. Although small, they seem to be doing things right.

Buyvm - not tried.

Ramnode absolutely sucks. I can pull maybe 100k/sec off them if I'm lucky from UK in their US and NL data centres which is abysmal. Cancelled my account the day after opened it.

Thanks dude, working on it and I'm really happy with the core after two years of building and testing. We've just finished building our own data centre, a nice steady influx of customers are buoying us up, and we recently hired two new developers to fix up our various front-ends. It's definitely looking more presentable by the week.

It looks interesting but as a potential customer, here are the my thoughts going through it (feel free to ignore me, I know you didn't ask):

- The site doesn't look good on my Retina MacBook Pro, mainly due to the extensive use of low resolution images for things like gradients and text (I don't understand that at all).

- Only pricing is in GBP, it'd be nice to have something else as a reference (a little "roughly $16 USD" in brackets would be nice)

- Straight up asks for my full address and phone number, without stating a reason why they're necessary or how they're used

- Takes me to a payment page and asks for my credit card number on a plain looking page served with a Class 1 SSL certificate (no organization validation) and again, with no indication how it'll be used

I was actually looking to give it a try after filling the address fields and phone number with "Nopenopenope" but lost it at the (subjectively) dodgy looking payment page.

A redesign and some explanations on signup pages would do you a lot of good I think :)

Great stuff. Glad to hear it. You could really knock all these companies on the head with your offering!