At a dinner last night with local friends, a question came up -- What is Digital Ocean? I mention them in my posts and the nightly email. #
I realllly like that people read my blog even if they don't know what everything means. This is one of the big principles of the net -- ignore what you don't understand. But read it anyway, over time unfamiliar ideas do sink in. I was tired and too much under the influence of White Russians last night to attempt the answer. I'll try now. #
Think of Digital Ocean as a giant warehouse of personal computers. You can rent one of the computers for about $20 a month, and put software on the computer, even stuff that I write myself. This is a big deal because the ability to run software "in the cloud" used to be something only employees of big companies could do. Now anyone can. #
Unlike my house in the woods their computers are less likely to lose power or their net connection. Also their warehouse is in a place where your computers, and your phone, can access it. I don't want thousands of people connecting to the computers in my house. It's a security thing. #
So I pay them money and they run the server for me. #
Over the years, as you might imagine, the cost goes down and the power goes up. A lot. They have competition, so that helps keep the price down and performance up. I like Digital Ocean because their software and docs are good, and I just like the company. They are by far not the biggest company in this space, all the major tech companies compete, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM. #
PS: This is not an ad. I pay full price for my Digital Ocean servers. #
Last update: Sunday December 1, 2019; 12:41 PM EST.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)