DigitalOcean adds FreeBSD, explores cloudy Windows

Cloud operator DigitalOcean has added an option to run Free BSD in its cloud and is considering adding Windows servers. The company glories in the position as the world's second-or-third-largest operator of web-facing servers, with Netcraft rating only Amazon Web Services as its numerical superior. The overwhelming majority …

[thames]

Wait a minute? "The company glories in the position as the world's second-largest operator of web-facing servers, with Netcraft rating only Amazon Web Services as its numerical superior."

Wasn't El Reg just telling us a few months ago that Microsoft Azure was number 2, and poised to overtake Amazon? "Can Microsoft Azure sales beat Amazon's cloud? - Bezos behemoth is tottering at the top" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/28/azure_catching_up_on_aws/

Digital Ocean didn't even rate a mention in that story. But now Digital Ocean is number 2?

Let me guess, for the first story, some PR flack from Microsoft parsed and sliced the numbers over and over to find a way in which MS Azure came in second. He then took some IT industry journos out to lunch and got them sufficiently lagered to publish his rubbish.

Six months later, some PR flack from Digital Ocean parsed and sliced the numbers ... etc.

All I'm taking out of these stories is that Amazon is number 1 no matter how you care to count it, and even the most shameless PR flack knows that nobody will believe otherwise.

[admiraljkb]

@thames - Well, Digital Ocean has been growing very quickly. I didn't realize it had been growing quickly enough to get on the radar like this though, but at the same time it would not completely surprise me if it passed Azure in the last 6 months. I've got one VM with them. Pretty nice service, my VM runs FAST, and its quite affordable to boot. No complaints on my side.

[Graham 24]

Apples and Oranges

The AWS to Azure comparison is based on revenue. The AWS to DigitalOcean comparison is based on web-facing server count.

There's probably little correlation between the two. DigitalOcean will be running lots of cheap lower-end Linux boxen just hosting a simple LAMP web site, whereas I expect the Azure stuff is probably a more enterprise-oriented workload with high-spec databases, financial orgs running VAR calcuations and so on, that typically wouldn't be web-facing, so invisible to Netcraft, but still commanding a much higher total revenue that DigitalOcean

[Anonymous Coward]

You're certainly right on the Microsoft side. Their Azure reporting is essentially 'fake it until you make it'. I think the reg reported recently that they now bundle a bunch of windows server licensing revenue as part of the azure number and they also throw out amazing amounts of free credit to almost anyone (100,000 hours of free use a month for Infosys is a credible number I've heard).

How much usage they have at normal commercial rates would be fascinating to know.

Digital ocean can't do all that as they're much smaller and this is their product (whereas azure is just a way for Microsoft to protect its software business from an existential threat and so current profitability is a distant secondary goal to growing mindshare).

That being said I'm sure the digital ocean server volume is mostly tiny single Linux servers as that's currently their core market. Volume won't translate into mega revenues just yet and they have lots of aggressive competition so they ll need to keep making smart decisions.

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, even if Windows was adequate, I wouldn't bother with it due the licencing issues. I really like being able to whip out extra instances during busy periods, provide "appliance"-like copies to customers for demos or self-hosters, and not having to piss about with licencing - not just for cost, but it's just an arse ache to manage.

[Graham 24]

But one of the plus points of any "cloud" server is that you don't have to worry about that - you just start up an instance and pay number-of-hours x cost-per-hour.

For everyone apart from Azure, the cost-per-hour for Windows is generally higher than that for Linux, since you do ultimately pay for the licence, but not in any way that requires any additional involvement from you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I see what you mean.

But we can copy the Windows instance into our own (or a customer's) "cloud" without any licencing issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

My problem with that is all the related licenses (CALs per device, or per user, sometimes both or perhaps neither for that matter) you have to have for compliance. And that's under SA. Don't even think about trying this with individual licenses, even if you can get them, as some have no equivalent.

I don't even want to think about my pet virtualisation project. Pardon me. Me and a bottle of vodka are about to get up close and personal.

[hasan.raza]

The thing I always admire about DigitalOcean is its reliability, but they need to work to make it user friendly, other than that its just perfect