GitLab Partners with DigitalOcean to make CI more affordable (opens in new tab)

If people are looking for a way to use up credit and want to support something useful, run an Archiveteam Warrior. Helps to archive (soon-to-be) dead websites and and isn't too resource-intensive on the provider.

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior

I got the mail in early april, and it, in fact, even violates German law (promotional coupons and promotional credit, if not otherwise specified, is valid for 3 years, and can not be revoked via ToS changes).

But I do not wish to sue, as it would just cause me a lot of trouble, and I’d rather spend the money on a hoster I can actually trust. Instead of a hoster violating laws and frauding customers out of their legal credit.

To compare I currently have $8,194.54 credit with Linode which I received through referrals. I've had most of them for over 6 years[1].

[1] http://uggedal.com/journal/vps-performance-comparison/

Do it, they're incentivizing you to bring up 8 VMs or 1 really big VM.

I received this email as well and a friend recommended I donate the server uptime to boinc[1] which can make better use of it than trying to find something to use it on.

[1]: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Did you try asking for an exception?

I see others in this discussion have done.

Also based on my experience with DO (small ex customer, on aws now) it absolutely wouldn't seem out of character for them to fix that.

> I didn't get this March 2015 email or any reminders since

I checked my emails as well when I got that. There was no notification in March or since of that change.

Oh, this is what I'm (currently) doing. I got the same message, and it most assuredly was surprising.

Admittedly, having that many boxes has been kind of fun...

The solution to me is to not provide free credit, but to credit the creation of a new droplet for existing users. Many will scale up and not scale back down. If im on the edge if i need to throw another droplet behind the loadbalancer and your like DO IT, you've been a great customer so we'll give you a month free for the new capacity, am i going to risk removing it.... not if my product is doing well. its a WIN WIN. an offer like this would be awesome to roll out to loyal customers with semi-produciton work loads (2-4) medium+ droplets already. It solves the problem of incentivizing loyal exisiting customers, along with driving business needs of not burning money without a return. Also HMU if your looking for a SVP of Product or something like that, I clearly have some good ideas for you.

This is an awesome thing to do, and I think if people knew that was the case they wouldn't be upset by not being able to use another promo. I started using DO with a $10 credit years ago, and still love the service. Thanks guys!

Hi! I think when people use openings like that in comments, emails, etc., it comes off as pretentious because you are in fact not excited to talk to me and are doing so out of pure necessity.

> Yeah, I know what you mean. Existing customers are left in the dark, which is definitely not a great feeling as a paying user of DO.

You get the (new) additional services being provided in part by DO. You're literally NOT in the dark. As an analogy my parents have a house alarm system. It was installed 5+ years ago and they pay a monthly fee. You can bet that the newer television ads for this nationwide company (cough ADT *cough) show WiFi enabled controls and whizbang stuff on the master panel -- their alarm master panel is the same panel for the last 5+ years and has never been touched by a technician.

I can give the same example for my Comcast cable box. It's the box I got when i got the initial subscription. Typically promo codes are for new customers, OR new promotional offers wherein you'll migrate your whole account to a new tier of service.

They aren't going to hand you $10 to simply continue to use their (updated) service for them. While you benefit from the new services anyways.

Sorry that's a cop out. The complaint is that promo codes for a brand new, very useful integration are limited to people who statistically are less likely to use them (new users on a new platform). "We hope you continue to enjoy paying for great boot times and UX" is... not a reply worth typing, honestly.

I'm a small DigitalOcean customer. If you want the promo to be cost effective, limit it to the first 250 users or whatever. I don't think anybody here would give you a hard time about protecting the financial integrity of a program. But don't hide behind that if it's really just a way to get a few new users in the door (which is fine!) - just be honest about it.

This does not sound like point of view, just a generic, corporate style message that does not address the issue in any way.

Rewarding only new customers is mobile phone operators style bite that decreases value of the brand and product. In this situation hosting company knows its not easy to move the servers to different host (at most cases) and uses that as an advantage to milk the customers more.

If they ever would actually release promo on their anniversary or something and give $5 to all registered members, they would get more good press than they could have ever dream of.

i love DO and I have just started using gitlab. they're both great. it even makes sense to offer existing customers a credit in this industry because with redundancy and just private/personal deployments ect people often have accounts at DO, AWS, Azure and Google, maybe even rackspace or an IaaS provider like heroku or engineyard.

I know your comment was in favor of DO, and mine is as well in a dif light. Winning a primary customer or "engagement" is big.

Digital Ocean retired a bunch of credit I had. I emailed support and asked for ot back amd they gave it to me. Sort of a hassle, but you know what? Digital Ocean is going against the biggest providers and provides simplicity and community and I love them for it.

They help new devs learn. They're acquisition strategy was hiring a content creator as a 1st hire to write tutorials and build a community.

Another credit and better integration reminds customers why they stay with them (and gitlabs why they are a great offering).

I like gitlabs and digital ocean. As an intermediate dev, it is a perfect ecosystem. I jave heard there are some security or package issues, but for me, I can get what I need done.

Simple API.

Simple Pricing.

Amazing Support.

Great Community.

So i use them. They're credits keep me saying great things about them because I rarely have money so this goes an extra bit.

Its prob worth $10 to them that I tell every beginner to use DO and regularly tweet thanks to then

Thanks for your post spdustin, I greatly appreciate it.

GP is a general response to the other commenters below who are existing DO customers complaining that they can't take advantage of this promo.

At the time, the comments page was filled with venting about existing DO customers getting the $10 shaft.

Everything announced by a company on their website, every feature list, every display video, every write up by the press, every review, is promotional activity. Anyone that is pissed at this particular instance because it's disguised as "normal" when it's actually dirty "marketing" should have a good hard think about how they believe the incentives behind information sharing work.

No, it isn't. The HN post is about CI being more affordable thanks to DO. And with Gitlab.com, it's free, can't get much affordable than that.

Many posts which land on Hacker News are for self-promotion purposes. That doesn't mean they lack good content.

SMTP does both the sending and receiving for the server side. Email clients only use SMTP for sending, though, which is probably why you were confused.

This is super nice. After the "Dear Github" letter I moved to gitlab and have not looked back. Its great to see this project grow in a manner that respect the community that adopts it.

Just my 2 cents, but how gitlab has constantly improved over all other features, I would really love to see issues get the same treatment. The current issues system is simple, easy to use and works fine but we really didn't find it to be scalable when moving to bigger teams. Labels as a primitive method of categorization is fine, but it very soon becomes unmanageable. Getting to a feature set like JIRA is too much to ask I guess, but a middle ground would really help keep everything in gitlab.

Stability, it's made leaps and bounds in the last 9 months, but every time you push a new feature make sure it "just works" and doesn't break other things. Thanks!

The Community Edition also has merge requests and all the major and essential features. For the feature differences please see https://about.gitlab.com/features/#compare

That's great to hear. Let us know if you need any help moving or get stuck somewhere.

The thing is that I would enjoy it as well if I just signed up. I actually feel offended by that.

Customer retention is as valuable as new customers.

Eat what? Other people? Not sure what you're getting at, because I'm paying my membership dues, and I'm quite sure you're not living on less than $1/day either.

That's great to hear. Thanks.

You're correct, we fixed this issue, the new warning will be: "Shared runners execute code of different projects on the same Runner unless you configure GitLab Runner Autoscale with MaxBuilds 1 (which it is on GitLab.com)."

Good suggestion, if this gets abused we'll look at ways to prevent this, limiting the number of runner hours per user account is one of the ways we're thinking about.

Thanks -- didn't realize they added an artifacts key to the CI yaml.

I'm also interested in compose support.

What do you mean by "reference"? I was talking about corporate environment of dozens or so F500 where I participated in various projects personally, and saw myriads of archaic in-house development tools that would embarrass even prehistoric. DO was used in a couple of cases, not too widespread, but I had a feel it's one of the places it could really make a difference. And introducing Git to that would just make the whole deal so much better. Consider that an average Global 2000 enterprise has over 10,000 in-house apps, and a lot of them are being developed in a dedicated environment.

BuildKite is really nice, they also support pipelining and are acting as glue between CI and Github.

I can't answer your question about GitLab since I haven't used your product. A plus for us was also that they are willing to support Gogs if we need it.

Glad you found the answer in our docs, thanks for updating your comment.