DigitalOcean

Not to be confused with Digital Ocean.
DigitalOcean

The DigitalOcean logo
Web address www.digitalocean.com
Type of site
 Cloud hosting provider
Available in English
Written in Ruby
Owner DigitalOcean, Inc.
Created by Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Jeff Carr, Mitch Wainer
Launched 24 June 2011
Alexa rank
 Increase 2613 (4/2014)
Current status Active

DigitalOcean is an American virtual private server provider based in New York City. The company leases capacity from existing datacenters, including sites in New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, London, Singapore and Frankfurt. It is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), comparable to Google Storage and Amazon S3 online storage services.

History

DigitalOcean was formed in 2011 by Ben and Moisey Uretsky.[1] Mitch Wainer joined the co-founding team in March 2012, by then composed of the Uretsky brothers, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman, to lead the company’s marketing efforts.[2]

In 2012, DigitalOcean was accepted into the TechStars accelerator program.[3]

Shortly after, it obtained its first round of seed funding from IA Ventures.[4] In December 2013, Netcraft released a report that detailed DigitalOcean’s growth as the world’s fastest growing cloud hosting service, surpassing Amazon Web Services in number of web-facing computers.[5] The report states, “Our December 2013 Web Server Survey showed a month-on-month gain of 6,514 web-facing computers,” adding “DigitalOcean is now the 15th largest hosting company in terms of web-facing computers.”[6]

In October 2014, DigitalOcean surpassed Rackspace as the fourth largest hosting provider in the world.[7]

Features

DigitalOcean claims that its “Droplets,” its branded term for cloud servers, can typically be provisioned in 55 seconds.[8] The company also provides Solid-state drives and KVM virtualization.

DigitalOcean Community

DigitalOcean currently offers a Community resource, which provides developer-to-developer forums and tutorials on open source and sysadmin topics. As of August 2014, the Community resource receives 2 million visitors per month and has more than 1000 vetted tutorials.[9]

In partnership with Stripe, DigitalOcean sponsored Libscore to freely provide its developer community with open access to analytics on web development tools.[10]

API V2

On June 24, 2014, Digital Ocean's second version of their API ('API V2') launched in a BETA version. The new API is RESTful, uses OAuth, and supports IPv6.[11]

IPv6

IPv6 was introduced to the Singapore location (SGP1), on June 16, 2014.[12] On July 15, 2014, DigitalOcean released a new location, London (LON1), which had IPv6 at launch.[13]

CoreOS

CoreOS was introduced on September 5, 2014 and is available for use as a droplet's operating system.[14]

FreeBSD

FreeBSD support was announced on January 14, 2015, including the possibility to deploy a custom, user-provided operating system kernel.[15]

Growth

In early 2013, TechCrunch featured DigitalOcean following their graduation from TechStars and the company's switch to SSD servers.[16] After the article, DigitalOcean began adding 100-150 users per day, up from their previous 5-10 users per day.

As a result of this growth, DigitalOcean closed a $3.2 million seed round in August 2013, led by IA Ventures.[17][18]

Shortly thereafter, it opened its first European and Asian datacenters, located in Amsterdam and Singapore, respectively.[12][19]

In December 2013, DigitalOcean hosted more new web-facing servers than Amazon AWS by more than 200, according to Netcraft.[6] It also hosted beyonce.com during the artist's recent album release, which went online first.[2] In March 2014, DigitalOcean raised $37.2 million in a series A funding, led by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz.[20]

DigitalOcean now has more than 100 employees and serves more than 160,000 users.[3] It currently adds 1,000 new users per day.[3] As of August 8, 2014, DigitalOcean overtook Rackspace to become the fifth largest public-facing host, growing 850 percent in the last year.

Reception

Forbes wrote that “DigitalOcean’s differentiator is simplicity” and “DigitalOcean focuses on the developers and provides an easy to use interface that abstracts away the underlying complexities of the infrastructure, thus allowing developers to get the job done faster.”[1] eWeek mentioned that DigitalOcean “has the easiest to understand pricing model.”[21]

DigitalOcean has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Forbes, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, Business Insider, and others.[1][2][16][20]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Reich, Dan. "Startup CEO: Ben Uretsky on Launching Digital Ocean, Raising Money And Joining TechStars". Forbes.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 BORT, JULIE. "These Guys Met On Craigslist And 2 Years Later Their Startup Raised $37 Million And Is Threatening Amazon". Business Insider.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Lardinois, Frederic. "Digital Ocean’s Journey From TechStars Reject To Cloud-Hosting Darling". TechCrunch.
  4. ↑ Farr, Christina. "Developer favorite Digital Ocean nabs $3.2M for its cloud hosting service". VentureBeat.
  5. ↑ Novet, Jordan. "DigitalOcean’s cloud surpasses Amazon Web Services in one category". VentureBeat.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Mutton, Paul. "DigitalOcean now growing faster than Amazon". NetCraft.
  7. ↑ "DigitalOcean - Growth". Netcraft.
  8. ↑ "Digital Ocean -- Technology". DigitalOcean.
  9. ↑ Dillet, Romain. "DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz To Take On AWS". TechCrunch.
  10. ↑ http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/libscore-launches-to-track-the-most-popular-javascript-libraries-on-the-web/
  11. ↑ "API v2.0 Enters Public Beta". DigitalOcean.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 "DigitalOcean Cloud Expands In Europe, Asia". Information Week.
  13. ↑ Kepes, Ben. "DigitalOcean Bucks All The Cloud Hosting Rules - New "London" Facility Included". Forbes.
  14. ↑ "CoreOS Now Available On DigitalOcean!". DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean. Retrieved 5 September 2014.
  15. ↑ DigitalOcean https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/presenting-freebsd-how-we-made-it-happen/. Retrieved 15 January 2015. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Dillet, Romain. "TechStars Graduate DigitalOcean Switches To SSD For Its $5 Per Month VPS To Take On Linode And Rackspace". TechCrunch.
  17. ↑ GUTHRIE WEISSMAN, CALE. "Digital Ocean raises $3.2M, stakes its claim on developer-friendly cloud hosting". PandoDaily.
  18. ↑ "Techstars Grad Takes on the Cloud Space". Bloomberg.
  19. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic. "DigitalOcean Expands In Europe With New Amsterdam Data Center, Singapore Coming Next". TechCrunch.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 ALDEN, WILLIAM. "Andreessen Horowitz Backs DigitalOcean, a Cloud Computing Start-Up". New York Times.
  21. ↑ Lundquist, Eric. "Five Trends Show Why Cloud Computing Is Far From Mature". eWeek.