I really like the content marketing approach DO took.
If you google for some standard server maintenance problem (e.g. migrating from Apache to nginx), it's usually DO which is ranked first. Their posts are relatively high quality, and there are a lot of them, enough to cover many common problems. For example: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-migr...
It doesn't show annoying pop ups, anything like that, but after visiting those pages many times you might decide to give DO a go. Well, that's what I did.
Also, some people say that similar cheap VPS providers exist for a long time and what DO did was put a nice simple UI. That proves that to create a successful product, you don't need some new complicated features that your competitors do not offer. Making interactions with the system easier, improving user onboarding process by reducing friction can go a long way.
If you google for some standard server maintenance problem (e.g. migrating from Apache to nginx), it's usually DO which is ranked first. Their posts are relatively high quality, and there are a lot of them, enough to cover many common problems. For example: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-migr...
It doesn't show annoying pop ups, anything like that, but after visiting those pages many times you might decide to give DO a go. Well, that's what I did.
Also, some people say that similar cheap VPS providers exist for a long time and what DO did was put a nice simple UI. That proves that to create a successful product, you don't need some new complicated features that your competitors do not offer. Making interactions with the system easier, improving user onboarding process by reducing friction can go a long way.