Area served Worldwide CEO Ben Uretsky (Jun 2011–) Founded 24 June 2011 COO Karl Alomar | Website www.digitalocean.com Headquarters New York City CTO Julia Austin | |
Industry Internet, cloud computing Key people Ben Uretsky
(co-founder and CEO) Services Internet hosting service Founders Jeff Carr, Moisey Uretsky, Alec Hartman, Mitch Wainer, Ben Uretsky Profiles | ||
Creating a cloud server on digitalocean 1
DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud 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 December 2015, DigitalOcean was the second largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers.
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Creating a cloud server on digitalocean 2
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 client 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, the company had signed up 400 customers and launched around 10,000 cloud server instances.
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.
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.
Reception
In 2014 Eric Lundquist writing for 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 1000 vetted tutorials.
In partnership with Stripe, DigitalOcean sponsored Libscore to freely provide its developer community with open access to analytics on web development tools.