DigitalOcean, Inc. is an Americancloud infrastructure provider headquartered in New York City with data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers. As of January 2018, DigitalOcean was the third-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers.
History
In 2003, Ben and Moisey Uretsky who had founded ServerStack, a managed hosting business, wanted to create a new product which would combine the web hosting and virtual servers. The Uretskys, having surveyed the cloud hosting market felt that most hosting companies were targeting enterprise clients leaving the entrepreneurial software developers market underserved. In 2011 the Uretskys founded DigitalOcean, a company which would provide server provisioning and cloud hosting for software developers. In 2012 the Uretskys met co-founder Mitch Wainer following Wainer's response to a Craigslist job listing. The company launched their beta product in January 2012. By mid-2012, the founding team consisted of Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman. After DigitalOcean was accepted into TechStars 2012's startup accelerator in Boulder, Colorado, the founders moved to Boulder to work on the product. By the end of the accelerator program in August 2012, the company had signed up 400 customers and launched around 10,000 cloud server instances. On January 16th, 2018, new droplet plans were introduced on their blog. In May 2018, the company announced the launch of its Kubernetes-based container service. In June 2018, Mark Templeton, former CEO of Citrix, replaced co-founder Ben Uretsky as the company's CEO. In July 2019, Yancey Spruill, former CFO and COO of SendGrid, replaced Templeton as the CEO.
Growth
On January 15, 2013, DigitalOcean became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines. Following a TechCrunch review, which was syndicated by Hacker News, DigitalOcean saw a rapid increase in customers. In December 2013, DigitalOcean opened its first European data center located in Amsterdam. By the end of December 2013, Netcraft reported that DigitalOcean was the fastest growing cloud hosting service in the world in terms of web-facing computer count. During 2014, the company continued its expansion, opening new data centers in Singapore and London. By May 2015, DigitalOcean became the second largest hosting provider in the world according to a report by Netcraft. During 2015 DigitalOcean expanded further with a data center in Toronto, Canada. Later in 2016 they continued expansion to Bangalore, India. As of July 2017, the company has 12 data centers in various parts of the globe.
Funding
As of December 2015, DigitalOcean has raised US$123.21 million in funding. The company's seed funding was led by IA Ventures and raised US$3.2 million in July 2013. Its series A round of funding in March 2014, led by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, raised US$37.2 million. In December 2014, DigitalOcean raised US$50 million in debt financing from Fortress Investment Group in the form of a five-year term loan. In July 2015, the company raised US$83 million in its series B round of funding led by Access Industries with participation from Andreessen Horowitz. In April 2016, the company secured US$130 million in credit financing to build out new cloud services. In May 2020, Digital Ocean raised an additional $50 million from Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz.
DigitalOcean offers virtual private servers, or "droplets" using DigitalOcean terminology, using KVM as the hypervisor and can be created in various sizes, in 12 different data center regions and with various options out of the box, including 6 GNU/Linux distributions and dozens of one-click applications. In early 2017, DigitalOcean expanded their feature set by adding load balancers to their offering. DigitalOcean can be managed through a web interface or using doctl command line. DigitalOcean also offers block and object-based storage and since May 2018 Kubernetes-based container service. In 2014, Eric Lundquist's article on eWeek noted that DigitalOcean "has the easiest to understand pricing model." Reviewers have noted that DigitalOcean requires users to have some experience in sysadmin and DevOps. In his review for ScienceBlogs, writer Greg Laden warned: "Digital Ocean is not for everybody. You need to be at least a little savvy with Linux...."
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 1,000 vetted tutorials. In partnership with Stripepayment processing company, DigitalOcean sponsored Libscore tool to freely provide its developer community with open access to analytics on web development tools. DigitalOcean Marketplace provides a platform to distill operational knowledge into sharable and repeatable software through community collaboration. Through three core components, DigitalOcean Kubernetes for the core infrastructure, OpenChannel for the catalog API and data warehouse, Cloudflare for CDN and load-balancing.
