Most acquisitions fail. It's a difficult path unless it fits a very specific need.
Yet a common management / product strategy is to buy random companies as though they are ingredients of a dish and think it'll just work.
Digital Ocean to me has lost their core focus and appeal. They aren't upgrading their hardware, software and other crucial pieces of their infrastructure. There's been gimmicks, acquisitions and marketing.
Someone said the executives there don't believe they can compete with the big cloud providers and so are poking at different areas to see what works.
Acquisitions are an easy way to juice top line growth. Acquisitions also offer ample opportunity to put lipstick on your finances. After all, any acquisition has many one-time costs and you can use this to juice your margins. You also forecast substantial cost savings by eliminating redundant positions. All in all, your gross margins and YoY growth look a lot healthier after the acquisition even when nothing has fundamentally improved about your business.
Repeated acquisitions really muddy the water and make it even harder for analysts to figure out how well your core business is doing. Especially when growth in your core business is stalling it makes a lot of sense to obfuscate your finances while you purchase top line growth.
All the while the stock price stays high and the executives get to enjoy their option packages. Eventually the music stops, but clever executives jump ship before that happens.
I would be closer to nine fives than five nines, but that's good enough even for many commercial sites, including mine.
Another way is to signup for a cheap VPS and use a tunnel to your home server. There's lots of really cheap VPS's with 128MB of memory that is plenty if you just want a tunnel.
