DigitalOcean
Industry | Internet, cloud computing |
---|---|
Founded | June 24, 2011 |
Founders |
Moisey Uretsky Ben Uretsky Jeff Carr Alec Hartman Mitch Wainer. |
Headquarters | New York City, New York, U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
Ben Uretsky (co-founder and CEO) |
Services | Internet hosting service |
Website |
www |
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. As of December 2015, DigitalOcean was the second largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers.[3][4]
History
In 2003, Ben and Moisey Uretsky who had founded ServerStack, a managed hosting business,[5] wanted to create a new product which would combine the web hosting and virtual servers.[6] The Uretskys, having surveyed the cloud hosting market felt that most hosting companies were targeting enterprise client leaving the entrepreneurial software developers market underserved.[5] In 2011 the Uretskys founded DigitalOcean, a company which would provide server provisioning and cloud hosting for software developers.[7]
In 2012 the Uretskys met co-founder Mitch Wainer following Wainer's response to a Craigslist job listing.[8] The company launched their beta product in January 2012.[9] 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.[10] By the end of the accelerator program, the company had signed up 400 customers and launched around 10,000 cloud server instances.[10]
Growth
On January 15, 2013, DigitalOcean became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines.[11] Following a TechCrunch,[11] review which was syndicated by Hacker News, DigitalOcean saw a rapid increase in customers.[10] In December 2013, DigitalOcean opened its first European data center located in Amsterdam.[12] 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.[13] During 2014, the company continued its expansion, opening new data centers in Singapore and London.[14] By May 2015, DigitalOcean became the second largest hosting provider in the world according to a report by Netcraft.[3] During 2015 DigitalOcean expanded further with a data center in Toronto, Canada.[15] Later in 2016 they continued expansion to Bangalore, India.[16]
Funding
As of December 2015, DigitalOcean has raised US$123.21 million in funding.[17] The company's seed funding was led by IA Ventures and raised US$3.2 million in July 2013.[18] Its series A round of funding in March 2014, led by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, raised US$37.2 million.[19] In December 2014, DigitalOcean raised US$50 million in debt financing from Fortress Investment Group in the form of a five-year term loan.[20][21] 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.[22]
Reception
In 2014 Eric Lundquist writing for eWeek noted that DigitalOcean "has the easiest to understand pricing model."[23] 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 ...."[24]
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.[25]
In partnership with Stripe, DigitalOcean sponsored Libscore to freely provide its developer community with open access to analytics on web development tools.[26]
References
- ↑ Iskold, Alex. "How DigitalOcean Won Over Investors". Entrepreneur.
- ↑ "Company Overview of DigitalOcean, Inc.". Bloomberg Business.
- 1 2 "DigitalOcean - Growth". Netcraft.
- ↑ Metz, Cade. "Amazon Isn't the Only One Killing It With Cloud Computing". Wired.
- 1 2 Luenendonk, Martin. "DigitalOcean | Interview with its CEO – Ben Uretsky". Cleverism.
- ↑ Reich, Dan. "Startup CEO: Ben Uretsky on Launching Digital Ocean, Raising Money And Joining TechStars". Forbes.
- ↑ Hamilton, David. "DigitalOcean: The Startup that's Shaking Up Web Hosting". The Whir.
- ↑ Bort, Julie. "These Guys Met On Craigslist And 2 Years Later Their Startup Raised $37 Million And Is Threatening Amazon". Business Insider.
- ↑ Duskic, Goran. "Fast Growing DigitalOcean Is Fueled By Customer Love". WhoAPI.
- 1 2 3 Lardinois, Frederic. "Digital Ocean's Journey From TechStars Reject To Cloud-Hosting Darling". TechCrunch.
- 1 2 Dillet, Romain. "TechStars Graduate DigitalOcean Switches To SSD For Its $5 Per Month VPS To Take On Linode And Rackspace". TechCrunch.
- ↑ Lardinois, Frederic. "DigitalOcean Expands In Europe With New Amsterdam Data Center, Singapore Coming Next". TechCrunch.
- ↑ Mutton, Paul. "DigitalOcean now growing faster than Amazon". Netcraft.
- ↑ "DigitalOcean Cloud Expands In Europe, Asia". InformationWeek.
- ↑ Galang, Jessica. "DigitalOcean Launches First Canadian Data Centre in Toronto". BetaKit.
- ↑ "Introducing Our Bangalore Region: BLR1 | DigitalOcean". DigitalOcean. Retrieved 2016-06-03.
- ↑ "DigitalOcean". CrunchBase.
- ↑ Farr, Christina. "Developer favorite Digital Ocean nabs $3.2M for its cloud hosting service". VentureBeat.
- ↑ Kerner, Sean Michael. "DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M in New Funding to Build Cloud". eWeek.
- ↑ Vanian, Jonathan. "With a $50M line of credit, DigitalOcean will build more data centers". GigaOm.
- ↑ Chernova, Yuliya. "DigitalOcean Arms With $50 Million in Debt for Big Data-Center Battle". Wall Street Journal.
- ↑ Vanian, Jonathan. "This fast-rising cloud startup just raised $83 million". Fortune.
- ↑ Lundquist, Eric. "Five Trends Show Why Cloud Computing Is Far From Mature". eWeek.
- ↑ Laden, Greg. "Setting up a Digital Ocean remotely hosted WordPress blog". ScienceBlogs.
- ↑ Dillet, Romain. "DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz To Take On AWS". TechCrunch.
- ↑ http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/libscore-launches-to-track-the-most-popular-javascript-libraries-on-the-web/