Jump to content

DigitalOcean

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Professorteal (talk | contribs) at 17:29, 28 February 2016 (Removing the 'advert' flag as I believe the article has been substantially improved since. No more inappropriate external links, and tone of writing is kept objective.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Not to be confused with Digital Ocean.
DigitalOcean, Inc.
IndustryInternet, Cloud computing
FoundedJune 24, 2011; 13 years ago (2011-06-24)
FoundersMoisey Uretsky
Ben Uretsky
Jeff Carr
Alec Hartman
Mitch Wainer
HeadquartersNew York City, United States
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Ben Uretsky
(Chief Executive Officer)
ServicesInternet hosting service
Websitedigitalocean.com

DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud infrastructure provider that provisions virtual servers for software developers.[1] The company is headquartered in New York City and possesses data centers worldwide.[2] DigitalOcean provides cloud services that help developers deploy and scale applications that run on multiple computers simultaneously.

DigitalOcean was founded in 2011 by Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman.[3] The company received $123.21 million in funding across four venture rounds from Techstars, Crunch Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Access Industries and IA Ventures. It has also raised $50 million in debt from Fortress Investment Group.[4]

As of December 2015, DigitalOcean is the second largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers.[5][6]

History

Ben Uretsky had previously founded a managed hosting business called ServerStack in 2003,[7] and wanted to create a new product that would combine the concept of web hosting with that of virtual servers.[8] Uretsky had surveyed the cloud hosting market and felt that most hosting companies were targeting large scale corporations, and that the market of entrepreneurial software developers was being underserved.[7] In 2011, Uretsky founded DigitalOcean, a company that would provide server provisioning and cloud hosting catered to software developers.[9]

Ben Uretsky and his brother Moisey Uretsky met co-founder Mitch Wainer when Wainer responded to a Craigslist job listing the Uretsky brothers had posted.[10] The company launched their beta product in January 2012.[11] By mid-2012, the founding team consisted of Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman. The founders were accepted into TechStars 2012’s startup accelerator in Boulder, Colorado. They moved from New York to Boulder into a three bedroom house in order to work on the product.[12] By the end of the accelerator program, the company had signed up 400 customers and launched around 10,000 cloud server instances.[12]

Growth

On January 15, 2013, DigitalOcean became one of the first cloud hosting companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines.[13] The news was covered by tech publisher TechCrunch,[13] and later picked up by Hacker News, a social news site focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship, which lead to customer acquisition increasing tenfold.[12]

In December 2013, DigitalOcean opened its first European data center located in Amsterdam.[14] By the end of December 2013, an analysis by Netcraft reported that DigitalOcean became the fastest growing cloud hosting service in terms of number of web-facing computers in the world.[15]

In 2014, the company continued its expansion and opened new data centers in Singapore and London.[16] In May 2015, DigitalOcean became the second largest hosting provider in the world according to a report by Netcraft.[17] In September 2015, DigitalOcean opened its first Canadian data center in Toronto.[18]

Funding

As of December 2015, DigitalOcean has raised US$123.21 million in funding.[19] The company’s seed funding was led by IA Ventures and raised US$3.2 million in July 2013.[20] Its series A round of funding in March 2014, led by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, raised US$37.2 million.[21] In December 2014, DigitalOcean raised US$50 million in debt financing from Fortress Investment Group in the form of a five-year term loan.[22][23] 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.[24]

Reception

In 2014 Eric Lundquist writing for eWeek said that DigitalOcean "has the easiest to understand pricing model.”[25]

Forbes contributor Janakiram MSV praised DigitalOcean’s simple and minimalist API and user interface.[26]

Many reviewers have noted however that DigitalOcean requires its users to have basic experience with sysadmin and DevOps.[27] 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...."[28]

Features

DigitalOcean claims that its “Droplets,” its branded term for cloud servers, can typically be provisioned in 55 seconds.[29] The cloud servers are built on hex core machines with dedicated ECC RAM and RAID SSD storage. DigitalOcean was one of the first companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines for cloud hosting.[30]

IPv6 Support

DigitalOcean's servers can be setup to enable IPv6, which is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP): the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet.[31]

Floating IPs

DigitalOcean's "floating IPs" feature allows users to manually assign a publicly-accessible static IP address to any of one of their cloud servers that are in the same data center. Floating IPs, when properly configured, can make it possible to redirect network traffic between any of one of their cloud servers, and create high availability server structures that help eliminate a single point of failure.[32]

Team Accounts

"Team accounts" is a feature that allows multiple individual users to login into a common account without having to share private information such as username and password. Each individual user possesses their own two-factor authentication login credentials, and can freely manage the account's infrastructure resources. [33]

Shared Private Networking

DigitalOcean's virtual machines can be enabled to communicate with each other when located in the same data center for running database clusters and distributed systems.[34][35]

Third-Party Integrations

Bitbucket

Developers that use Bitbucket as their code hosting service can deploy directly to DigitalOcean's server using Bitbucket's user interface.[36]

Bitnami

Bitnami is a provider of software packages and development environments. DigitalOcean's integration with Bitnami allows users to access Bitnami's library of applications and stacks, and deploy them to their DigitalOcean server. Bitnami's library includes many applications such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Redmine.[37][38]

CoreOS

DigitalOcean supports CoreOS, a lightweight operating system based on the Linux kernel that is optimized for the deployment of server clusters. The integration allows developers to deploy applications run in Docker software containers.[39][40]

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.[29]

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

DigitalOcean has also partnered with GitHub, a web-based code repository hosting service, in their education program that aims to bring free developer tools to students. As part of the partnership, DigitalOcean offers a $100 credit to student accounts.[42]

References

  1. ^ Iskold, Alex. "How DigitalOcean Won Over Investors". Entrepreneur.
  2. ^ "Company Overview of DigitalOcean, Inc". Bloomberg Business.
  3. ^ "DigitalOcean". AngelList.
  4. ^ https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/digitalocean
  5. ^ "DigitalOcean - Growth". Netcraft.
  6. ^ Metz, Cade. "Amazon Isn't the Only One Killing It With Cloud Computing". Wired.
  7. ^ a b Luenendonk, Martin. "DigitalOcean | Interview with its CEO – Ben Uretsky". Cleverism.
  8. ^ Reich, Dan. "Startup CEO: Ben Uretsky on Launching Digital Ocean, Raising Money And Joining TechStars". Forbes.
  9. ^ Hamilton, David. "DigitalOcean: The Startup that's Shaking Up Web Hosting". The Whir.
  10. ^ Bort, Julie. "These Guys Met On Craigslist And 2 Years Later Their Startup Raised $37 Million And Is Threatening Amazon". Business Insider.
  11. ^ Duskic, Goran. "Fast Growing DigitalOcean Is Fueled By Customer Love". WhoAPI.
  12. ^ a b c Lardinois, Frederic. "Digital Ocean's Journey From TechStars Reject To Cloud-Hosting Darling". TechCrunch.
  13. ^ a b Dillet, Romain. "TechStars Graduate DigitalOcean Switches To SSD For Its $5 Per Month VPS To Take On Linode And Rackspace". TechCrunch.
  14. ^ Lardinois, Frederic. "DigitalOcean Expands In Europe With New Amsterdam Data Center, Singapore Coming Next". TechCrunch.
  15. ^ Mutton, Paul. "DigitalOcean now growing faster than Amazon". Netcraft.
  16. ^ "DigitalOcean Cloud Expands In Europe, Asia". InformationWeek.
  17. ^ "DigitalOcean - Growth". Netcraft.
  18. ^ Galang, Jessica. "DigitalOcean Launches First Canadian Data Centre in Toronto". BetaKit.
  19. ^ "DigitalOcean". CrunchBase.
  20. ^ Farr, Christina. "Developer favorite Digital Ocean nabs $3.2M for its cloud hosting service". VentureBeat.
  21. ^ Kerner, Sean Michael. "DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M in New Funding to Build Cloud". eWeek.
  22. ^ Vanian, Jonathan. "With a $50M line of credit, DigitalOcean will build more data centers". GigaOm.
  23. ^ Chernova, Yuliya. "DigitalOcean Arms With $50 Million in Debt for Big Data-Center Battle". Wall Street Journal.
  24. ^ Vanian, Jonathan. "This fast-rising cloud startup just raised $83 million". Fortune.
  25. ^ Lundquist, Eric. "Five Trends Show Why Cloud Computing Is Far From Mature". eWeek.
  26. ^ MSV, Janakiram. "Five Reasons Why Developers Love DigitalOcean". Forbes.
  27. ^ Rice, Daniel. "Rails Hosts: Amazon AWS vs. Digital Ocean vs. Heroku vs. Engine Yard". AirPair.
  28. ^ Laden, Greg. "Setting up a Digital Ocean remotely hosted WordPress blog". ScienceBlogs.
  29. ^ a b Dillet, Romain. "DigitalOcean Raises $37.2M From Andreessen Horowitz To Take On AWS". TechCrunch.
  30. ^ Dillet, Romain. "Graduate DigitalOcean Switches To SSD For Its $5 Per Month VPS To Take On Linode And Rackspace". TechCrunch.
  31. ^ Kepes, Ben. "DigitalOcean Adds Floating IPs". Forbes.
  32. ^ Seroter, Richard. "DigitalOcean Adds Floating IPs". InfoQ.
  33. ^ Novet, Jordan. "Cloud provider DigitalOcean adds team accounts as company adoption grows". VentureBeat.
  34. ^ "Introducing Private Networking". DigitalOcean.
  35. ^ MSV, Janakiram. "Five Reasons Why Developers Love DigitalOcean". Forbes.
  36. ^ Lardinois, Frederic. "Atlassian Now Helps Developers Deploy Code From Bitbucket Directly To AWS, Azure and DigitalOcean". TechCrunch.
  37. ^ Lardinois, Frederic. "DigitalOcean Teams Up With Bitnami, Now Lets You Install Over 100 Web Apps With A Few Clicks". TechCrunch.
  38. ^ Deutscher, Maria. "DigitalOcean taps Bitnami's self-updating app marketplace to expand developer choice". siliconAngle.
  39. ^ Kepes, Ben. "DigitalOcean Finds Some Docker Love Via CoreOS". Forbes.
  40. ^ Seroter, Richard. "Docker Fans Rejoice! CoreOS Added to DigitalOcean". InfoQ.
  41. ^ http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/libscore-launches-to-track-the-most-popular-javascript-libraries-on-the-web/
  42. ^ Larson, Selena. "How Students Can Get Free Developer Tools Through GitHub". ReadWrite.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigitalOcean&oldid=707400675"