Ideas for Digital Ocean’s CEO Ben Uretsky

7 min readAug 8, 2015

I’ve been using Digital Ocean for little under a year now — I’ve been running multiple projects on it and found that even with their 5$ servers you can do wonders.

Although I think they are doing a great job there was a couple of things that bothered me from the start.

Direct (Notifications, E-mail, Messages, etc.)

Here’s a problem I encountered while working with my droplet that could have easily avoided with good communication.

I have a droplet running Ubuntu 14.04 x64

The moment I had my droplet online it had around 12 bots scanning my page ( by looking at the logs I saw that most of them were trying to brute force my ssh root account).

So I found a solution and made changes to my SSH config file (/etc/ssh/ssh_config), changed the port number, removed permitrootlogin without-password

also I Installed fail2ban and configured it.

My root password was strong to begin with, but I noticed that malicious by third party activity(bots,hackers) made my CPU and processes go up and in essence they were slowing down my server.

This could be an issue for the user and more work for you (tickets,complaints…etc.)

The thing is that this could be easily avoided by sending out an e-mail or giving a short message at end of the droplet creation…. something like this :

Hey Rene!
You’ve successfully set up your droplet with Ubuntu on it, please do the following to ensure your droplets safe future — as you probably know there a lot of bad guys lurking in the vast world of internet, trying to ruin your day. Keep safe by following these tips, tutorials,webinars…… — or reach out to our support team for some help.

DigitalOcean has a e-mail that is kinda warning you of this stuff…but not quite.

Keep in mind — developers are not system admins. Application security isn’t network /server security a typical developer will not know about ssh configuration or fail2ban (most of them do — but that’s only because we’re so awesome)

DigitalOcean….follow your own advice… check out this video (why came out of your own work shop)called “develop strategies together”

You need to be Jay the Sysadmin guy from the video to the girl(developer) approaching.

These are some of the stuff that needs improving

Lack of nice looking graphs

I’m not a spoiled brat but it definitely need some more work — I know that this is a recent feature…but nevertheless.

Lack of status page for my droplet

Don’t get me wrong — they have an API for it , but being able to access it using only a web interface would be a great feature

Some inconsistency in the UX/UI department

let me give you an example — take a look at the resize option

So If I want to for example just get the info about the cost and specification?
Then I have to go to https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing, and why don’t I have the “Power Off” option right there?Same goes with the Snapshot option, Access Option…etcThey recommend powering off your droplet through the command line, as this action is the same as hard resetting the server and may cause data corruption…ok…why don’t you a Console Access option right beneath it?

What’s up with the 3,2,1? What valuable info do I get on what is the best choice? Does it even matter?

Tell me if it does!

— — — —

I got response from the DO support team about the difference in choosing 3,2,1

— — — — — -

This seems off — it seems as though this has been put here because a guy from support told the guys from product development that they’ve been getting a lot of tickets about data corruption problems, and the product development team reacted in a way that they told the front-end guys the usually response support guys give out to the customers ….and I completely understand — obviously there a bunch of smart girls and guys working in DO but maybe they are really tight on time?

Let’s go on….

It would be great to have a “Access Console here” button

Tell me how to do it with my current droplet ( add something like take a snapshot of the current one…rebuild a new one?)

Another thing….

Sometimes I feel a bit anxious about using some of the features…especially snapshot where you have this loading bar that isn’t showing you what is really going on…you can just sit and wait…biting your fingernails…

Like this one…

-It would be great to have just a little loader…or something else to see if it is alive. Almost every-time I do a snapshot — I go out to take a walk because looking at it makes me feel like something is stuck, and I’ll have to hard-reset the server…and the data will be corrupted, and my client will go berserk on me…etc…

You have the Snapshot which is a excellent feature.

So why aren’t you making it more accessible for the developers?
Would it be wrong to have a small wizard that asks you when to do it, how often…etc.
You could incorporate a information about when the bandwidth of your droplet is the lowest — therefore suggesting when to do it….that would be cool right?

Some extra stuff that is missing:

Making an “expert” or “stat for nerds” option (similar like the one on youtube) — this would be great on “Status page for my droplet”

Notifications about over capacited or under capacited droplets

Digital ocean already has this type of communication with a client implemented — take a look at the e-mail I receive monthly about billing. It’s a really neat and simple e-mail ending with “Just looking out”.If my server is hitting a high of 90% of CPU usage (during the last 90 days) it would be a really great feature to get a small notification from the DO guys …something like this…

Hey Rene, we’ve noticed that your droplet is really under pressure during the last 90 days,(check out your user settings) do you know that studies have shown that decreasing page load time can drastically increase conversions…. Just looking out

and send me a link to a blog that is inspired by this
great kissmetric blog post
or
or this other great kissmetric blog post
or build an infographic like this (also from kissmetric)

Turbo mode…yeah you’ve read it right

This isn’t a joke…hear me out on this…Let’s say that you have a client that is running a e-commerce site on your server/droplet…and that client is having a huge sale (delivery costs for free! 48h offer!), he’s expecting huge traffic — and you are worried because you have her/him on a 20$ server.
You could power down…and then resize the CPU/RAM…etc…to a 160$ droplet which will cost you a 11.48 $ for that period.Why not make it a cool feature to have a TURBO button(it’s cool for everyone that have own a PC that had one of those) that will ask you
“are you sure?”
“are you really really really sure??”
If yes…it will power down…and present itself in turbo mode, that will last 12/48/72 hours.