DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud infrastructure provider[1] headquartered in New York City with data centers worldwide.[2] DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers. DigitalOcean also runs Hacktoberfest which is a month-long celebration (October 1-31) of open source software run in partnership with GitHub and Twilio.

This article is about the cloud infrastructure provider. For the now-defunct maker of wireless products, see Digital Ocean.
DigitalOcean, Inc.
TypePrivate
IndustryInternet, cloud computing
FoundedJune 24, 2011 (2011-06-24)
FoundersMoisey Uretsky
Ben Uretsky
Jeff Carr
Alec Hartman
Mitch Wainer
Headquarters
New York City, New York
,
U.S.
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Yancey Spruill
(CEO)
ServicesInternet hosting service
Revenue $250 Million(2019)
Number of employees
530 (July 2020)
Websitewww.digitalocean.com

History

In 2003, Ben and Moisey Uretsky who had founded ServerStack, a managed hosting business,[3] wanted to create a new product which would combine the web hosting and virtual servers.[4] The Uretskys, having surveyed the cloud hosting market felt that most hosting companies were targeting enterprise clients leaving the entrepreneurial software developers market underserved.[3] In 2011 the Uretskys founded DigitalOcean, a company which would provide server provisioning and cloud hosting for software developers.[5]

In 2012 the Uretskys met co-founder Mitch Wainer following Wainer's response to a Craigslist job listing.[6] The company launched their beta product in January 2012.[7] 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.[8] 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.[8][9] On January 16th, 2018, new droplet (virtual machines) plans were introduced on their blog.[10] In May 2018, the company announced the launch of its Kubernetes-based container service.[11][12]

In June 2018, Mark Templeton, former CEO of Citrix, replaced co-founder Ben Uretsky as the company's CEO.[13] In July 2019, Yancey Spruill, former CFO and COO of SendGrid (a fellow Techstars company), replaced Templeton as the CEO.[14]

Growth

On January 15, 2013, DigitalOcean became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines.[15] Following a TechCrunch[15] review, which was syndicated by Hacker News, DigitalOcean saw a rapid increase in customers.[8] In December 2013, DigitalOcean opened its first European data center located in Amsterdam.[16] During 2014, the company continued its expansion, opening new data centers in Singapore and London.[17] During 2015 DigitalOcean expanded further with a data center in Toronto, Canada.[18] and Frankfurt,[19] Germany. Later in 2016 they continued expansion to Bangalore, India.[20]

Funding

As of December 2020, DigitalOcean has raised US$493 million in funding.[21] The company's seed funding was led by IA Ventures and raised US$3.2 million in July 2013.[22] Its series A round of funding in March 2014, led by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, raised US$37.2 million.[23] In December 2014, DigitalOcean raised US$50 million in debt financing from Fortress Investment Group in the form of a five-year term loan.[24][25] 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.[26] In April 2016, the company secured US$130 million in credit financing to build out new cloud services.[27] In May 2020, Digital Ocean raised an additional $50 million from Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz.[28]

Blocking in Iran and Russia

DigitalOcean had been blocked in Iran, as a result of an attempt to cut off use of Lantern internet censorship circumvention tool.[29]

Because of Russian law, any host keeping citizen's personal data need to be located in national territory, that led to a temporary blocking in April 2018 of Google, Amazon, Azure and DigitalOcean among others in Russia by Roskomnadzor as a hosting provider for Telegram Messenger and VPS services.[30][31]

Corporate affairs

Leadership

DigitalOcean is managed by CEO Yancey Spruill.[32]

Products / business model

DigitalOcean offers virtual private servers (VPS), or "droplets" using DigitalOcean terminology, using KVM as the hypervisor[33] and can be created in various sizes (divided in 2 classes: standard, and optimized), in 13 different data center regions (as of December 2020[34]) 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.[35]

DigitalOcean can be managed through a web interface or using doctl command line.[36]

DigitalOcean also offers block and object-based storage and since May 2018 Kubernetes-based container service.[37][12]

In 2014, Eric Lundquist's article on eWeek noted that DigitalOcean "has the easiest to understand pricing model."[38]

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 ...."[39]

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.[40]

In partnership with Stripe payment processing company, DigitalOcean sponsored Libscore tool to freely provide its developer community with open access to analytics on web development tools.[41]

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.[42]

Digital Ocean was widely criticized for its role in creating a perverse incentive when it promoted Hacktoberfest 2020 with free t-shirts, resulting in massive spurious pull requests on open source GitHub repositories, amounting to an unintentional "corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community".[43] [44][45][46]

References
  1. Iskold, Alex (2015-08-14). "How DigitalOcean Won Over Investors". Entrepreneur.
  2. "Company Overview of DigitalOcean, Inc". Bloomberg Business.
  3. Luenendonk, Martin (2015-01-03). "DigitalOcean | Interview with its CEO – Ben Uretsky". Cleverism.
  4. Reich, Dan. "Startup CEO: Ben Uretsky on Launching Digital Ocean, Raising Money And Joining TechStars". Forbes.
  5. Hamilton, David. "DigitalOcean: The Startup that's Shaking Up Web Hosting". The Whir.
  6. Bort, Julie. "These Guys Met On Craigslist And 2 Years Later Their Startup Raised $37 Million And Is Threatening Amazon". Business Insider.
  7. Duskic, Goran (2013-12-26). "Fast Growing DigitalOcean Is Fueled By Customer Love". WhoAPI.
  8. Lardinois, Frederic. "Digital Ocean's Journey From TechStars Reject To Cloud-Hosting Darling". TechCrunch.
  9. "Techstars Demo Day: Boulder 2012". Techstars. 2012-08-09. Retrieved 2018-04-27.
  10. Schaechter, Ben (2018-01-16). "Kicking Off the New Year with New Droplet Plans". The DigitalOcean Blog.
  11. "DigitalOcean launches its container platform – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com. Retrieved 2018-05-11.
  12. "DigitalOcean launches Kubernetes-based container service". ETtech.com. Retrieved 2018-06-27.
  13. Novet, Jordan (2018-06-20). "Former Citrix chief Mark Templeton takes over at cloud start-up DigitalOcean". CNBC. Retrieved 2018-06-22.
  14. "DigitalOcean gets a new CEO and CFO". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2019-07-31.
  15. Dillet, Romain. "TechStars Graduate DigitalOcean Switches To SSD For Its $5 Per Month VPS To Take On Linode And Rackspace". TechCrunch.
  16. Lardinois, Frederic. "DigitalOcean Expands In Europe With New Amsterdam Data Center, Singapore Coming Next". TechCrunch.
  17. "DigitalOcean Cloud Expands In Europe, Asia". InformationWeek.
  18. Galang, Jessica (2015-09-23). "DigitalOcean Launches First Canadian Data Centre in Toronto". BetaKit.
  19. https://www.digitalocean.com/press/releases/digitalocean-opens-new-data-center-in-germany
  20. "Introducing Our Bangalore Region: BLR1 | DigitalOcean". DigitalOcean. 2016-05-31. Retrieved 2016-06-03.
  21. "New York's Newest Unicorn: DigitalOcean Raises $50M At $1.15B Valuation". CrunchBase.
  22. Farr, Christina (2013-08-07). "Developer favorite Digital Ocean nabs $3.2M for its cloud hosting service". VentureBeat.
  23. Kerner, Sean Michael. "DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M in New Funding to Build Cloud". eWeek.
  24. Vanian, Jonathan (2014-12-09). "With a $50M line of credit, DigitalOcean will build more data centers". GigaOm.
  25. Chernova, Yuliya (2014-12-09). "DigitalOcean Arms With $50 Million in Debt for Big Data-Center Battle". Wall Street Journal.
  26. Vanian, Jonathan. "This fast-rising cloud startup just raised $83 million". Fortune.
  27. "DigitalOcean Gets Mo' Money To Build its Cloud". Fortune. Retrieved 2018-06-22.
  28. Wilhelm, Alex (2020-05-14). "DigitalOcean raises $50M more from Access Industries and a16z". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2020-05-15.
  29. "January 3, 2018 Episode Transcript". The Current. CBC. Retrieved 4 January 2018.
  30. "Russia bans Google Cloud, Amazon, Azure, Digital Ocean, Online.net, Hetzner, OVH, others". LowEndTalk. Retrieved 2020-08-30.
  31. Skymmer (17 January 2019). "Problem while trying to access 7-zip.org on some ISPs". SourceForge (in English and Russian). Retrieved 17 January 2019.
  32. "Leadership at DigitalOcean". DigitalOcean. Retrieved 2020-02-06.
  33. "DigitalOcean vs Linode - Detailed Comparison". iTekHost.net. Retrieved 2018-04-19.
  34. "DigitalOcean: Regional Availability Matrix". HostAdvice. 2017-11-06. Retrieved 2020-12-10.
  35. Warren, Justin. "DigitalOcean Adds Load Balancers". Forbes. Retrieved 2017-08-29.
  36. Mudrinić, Marko (2018-01-08). "How To Use Doctl1, the Official DigitalOcean Command-Line Client".
  37. "DigitalOcean launches its container platform – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com. Retrieved 2018-05-11.
  38. Lundquist, Eric. "Five Trends Show Why Cloud Computing Is Far From Mature". eWeek.
  39. Laden, Greg. "Setting up a Digital Ocean remotely hosted WordPress blog". ScienceBlogs.
  40. Dillet, Romain. "DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz To Take On AWS". TechCrunch.
  41. Kia Kokalitcheva (2014-12-16). "Libscore launches to track the most popular JavaScript libraries on the web". VentureBeat.com. Retrieved 2017-01-18.
  42. Antonio Rosales (2019-10-25). "How we launched our Marketplace using DigitalOcean Kubernetes – Part 1". DigitalOcean.com. Retrieved 2019-10-25.
  43. "Hacktoberfest 2020". Laravel News. 2020-09-25. Retrieved 2021-01-31.
  44. Portfolio, Hwee's. "#Shitoberfest: How free T-shirts ruined #Hacktoberfest2020". ongchinhwee.me. Retrieved 2021-01-31.
  45. "How One Guy Ruined #Hacktoberfest2020 #Drama". joel.net - JavaScript, ReactJS, and Node. Retrieved 2021-01-31.
  46. "DigitalOcean's Hacktoberfest is Hurting Open Source". blog.domenic.me. Retrieved 2021-01-31.
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