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.
Yep, this is how marketing is done these days. I'm glad someone on HN is appreciating good marketing. I often see devs refer to marketing as snake oil, simply because they've been exposed to bad marketing. Marketing is just like programming, it can be good or bad.
Thanks! Etel wrote many of the articles herself before building out an amazing team. She works really hard to make the articles engaging, informative, and easy to read.
This works super well. It's also the strategy my company employs. Teaching people is the best kind of marketing you can do in the developer space (and probably most any other space).
I think it was Slicehost that pioneered this approach for VPS hosting companies quite a while ago, although it may also have been Linode as I really didn't become aware of them until Rackspace bought Slicehost and I had to migrate.
Similar story here - signed up for DO after coming across a couple of really helpful articles.
For me, the articles show
1) They're competent. If they're experts at solving all these random problems in managing a Linux server, they probably also know how to run a reliable, high-performant VPS.
2) They care about their customers. They're going the extra mile to help customers (and potential customers) solve their actual day-to-day problems. This is a good sign.
Haven't yet had an actual problem that required me to contact their support (which hints at #1), but it's the impression I (and probably many others) got from the articles.
I'm just glad they actually took that idea from them and anybody that provide any services should have these tutorials... It makes it much more approachable for people with little system admin skills.
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.