DigitalOcean Seeks $800M in Funding

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.

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.

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!!

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 say this having used DO since... 2012?

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.

[0] They never got back to me, sadly.

Just to share something positive, I've had a ttrss instance running forever on digitalocean in NY. I like them for side projects too.

$ 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

What's the DigitalOcean of Europe, where I can get API-based provisioning for VPSes?

Long are the days of DO being a super hoster imho. Hetzner and many other "cheap" clouds ate their breakfast and their reaction was pretty much zero.

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.

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)

Mistral AI just raised $830M to spend on datacenters, you guys should talk to them

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.