> it was a product that looked remarkably similar to ours
As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their web UI also has always been miles ahead.
The competition also didn’t have SSD as an option until much later, and that was a HUGE selling point for digital ocean at the time.
As a developer, DO never looked anything like it. Linode was expensive and on the same playfield as Rackspace and a ton of other cloud hosts, very different from the instantly-spin-up-a-tiny-vm-for-five-bucks model. Their web UI also has always been miles ahead.
The competition also didn’t have SSD as an option until much later, and that was a HUGE selling point for digital ocean at the time.