DigitalOcean is a US-based cloud infrastructure provider, offering flexible compute platforms and scalable data applications to software developers. The company is headquartered in New York City and has data centres worldwide.
Founded by Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman in 2011, DigitalOcean was developed with a focus on simplifying web infrastructure for software developers. The idea was to provide a more streamlined and easy-to-use platform for web app deployment, as compared to others at that time which were often seen as complex and hard to navigate.
The main features of DigitalOcean are:
- Droplets: Droplets are scalable compute platforms with add-on storage, security, and monitoring capabilities. They serve as the basic unit of the DigitalOcean cloud, representing a single server or virtual private server (VPS).
- Kubernetes: DigitalOcean offers a fully managed Kubernetes service, which is a popular open-source container orchestration system.
- Spaces: Spaces is an object storage service that makes it easy and cost effective to store and serve large amounts of data.
- Block Storage: This is a scalable, high-performance SSD-based block storage solution.
- Databases: DigitalOcean offers managed databases for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis.
- VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): This provides a private network interface for services within the same DigitalOcean account, offering increased security and network performance.
- Marketplace: DigitalOcean’s marketplace is a platform for developers to create, install, and customize software or services. It offers pre-configured one-click apps and development stacks.
- Load Balancers: Load Balancers distribute incoming traffic to scale applications and increase redundancy and availability.
DigitalOcean’s billing model is quite flexible, with options to pay hourly or monthly. Their pricing is relatively straightforward and competitive, particularly for smaller-scale operations, making them a popular choice for startups and developers running small-to-medium sized projects.
In terms of growth, DigitalOcean has grown substantially since its inception and had more than 500,000 customers across the globe as of 2021. It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2021 under the ticker symbol “DOCN.”
Please note the company may have expanded its offerings or adjusted its strategic direction since this article was written.
