 | |
| DigitalOcean | |
| Company type | Public |
| Industry | |
| Founded | June 24, 2011; 14 years ago (2011-06-24) |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | , U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | |
| Brands |
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| Services |
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| Revenue |  US$692.9 million (2023)[1] |
 −US$26.2 million (2022) | |
| US$19.4 million (2023)[1] | |
| Total assets | US$1.82 billion (2022) |
| Total equity | US$51.1 million (2022) |
Number of employees | 1,204 (2022) |
| ASN | |
| Website | www.digitalocean.com |
| Footnotes / references [2][3][4] | |
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is anAmerican multinational technology company andcloud service provider. The company is headquartered inBroomfield, Colorado, US, with 15 globally distributeddata centers.[5] DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, andSMBs with cloudinfrastructure-as-a-service platforms.[6][7]
DigitalOcean also runs Hacktoberfest, a one-month-long celebration of open-source software held in October. Each year, it partners with different software companies, includingGitHub,Twilio, Dev.to,Intel, Appwrite and Deep Source.
In 2003, brothersBen and Moisey Uretsky, who founded ServerStack, amanaged hosting business,[8] wanted to create a new product that would combine web hosting andvirtual server and target entrepreneurial software developers.[9][8]
In 2012, the Uretskys met co-founder Mitch Wainer following Wainer's response to aCraigslist job listing.[10] The company launched their beta product in January 2012.[11] In mid-2012, the founding team consisted ofBen Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman. DigitalOcean accepted the offer ofTechStars 2012's startupaccelerator inBoulder, Colorado, and the founders moved to Boulder to work on the product.[12] At the end of the accelerator program in August 2012, the company had signed up 400 customers and launched around 10,000 cloud server instances.[12][13] On January 16, 2018, newdroplet (virtual machines) plans were introduced.[14] In May 2018, the company announced the launch of itsKubernetes-based container service.[15][16]
In June 2018,Mark Templeton, former CEO ofCitrix, replaced co-founder Ben Uretsky as the company's CEO.[17] In July 2019, Yancey Spruill, former CFO and COO ofSendGrid (a fellow Techstars company), replaced Templeton as CEO.[18] Bill Sorenson, former CFO ofEnerNOC, was appointed as the company's new CFO.[18] Spruill left DigitalOcean in February 2024.[19]
In September 2021, DigitalOcean announced plans to acquire Nimbella, a serverless startup.[6] In March 2022, the company acquired CSS-Tricks, a learning website for front-end developers.[20][21]
In May 2022, the company released DigitalOcean Functions.[22][23] Based on technology acquired from Nimbella and the open sourceApache OpenWhisk project, DigitalOcean Functions is a serverless platform that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage servers.[24][25][26][27]
In August 2022, DigitalOcean acquiredCloudways, a Pakistani cloud hosting service provider, for $350 million in an all-cash deal.[28]
In March 2025, Flexential announced a partnership with DigitalOcean to expand itsGPU infrastructure.[29] The partnership involves a phased deployment of high-density GPU servers at Flexential'sAtlanta-Douglasville data center, aimed at supportingAI andmachine learning workloads.[30] This expansion is expected to provide additional GPU Droplets powered byNVIDIA H200 andAMD Instinct GPUs.[31]
On January 15, 2013, DigitalOcean became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines.[32] Following aTechCrunch[32] review, which was syndicated byHacker News, DigitalOcean saw a rapid increase in customers.[12] In December 2013, DigitalOcean opened its first European data center, located inAmsterdam.[33] During 2014, the company continued its expansion, opening new data centers inSingapore andLondon.[34] During 2015 DigitalOcean expanded further with a data center inToronto, Canada.[35] and Frankfurt,[36] Germany. Later in 2016, they continued expansion toBangalore, India.[37]
The company's seed funding was led byIA Ventures and raised US$3.2 million in July 2013.[38] Itsseries A round of funding in March 2014, led by venture capitalist firmAndreessen Horowitz, raised US$37.2 million.[39] In December 2014, DigitalOcean raised US$50 million in debt financing fromFortress Investment Group in the form of a five-year term loan.[40][41] In July 2015, the company raised US$83 million in itsseries B round of funding led byAccess Industries with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.[42] In April 2016, the company secured US$130 million in credit financing to build out new cloud services.[43] In May 2020, DigitalOcean raised an additional $50 million from Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz.[44]
On March 24, 2021, DigitalOcean became a publicly traded company on theNew York Stock Exchange,[45] with their initial public offering price at $47 per share.[46]
Digital Ocean was blocked throughout Iran as part of its attempt to cut off use of theLanterninternet censorship circumvention tool.[47]
According to Russian law, any host keeping its citizens' personal data needs to be located in Russian territory. This law led to a temporary block in April 2018 of Google, Amazon, Azure, and DigitalOcean, among others, inRussia byRoskomnadzor as a hosting provider forTelegram Messenger andVPS services.[48][49]
DigitalOcean offersvirtual private servers (VPS), or "droplets" using DigitalOcean terminology, usingKVM as the hypervisor[50] and can be created in various sizes (divided in two classes: standard and optimized), in 13 different data center regions (as of December 2020)[update][51] and with various options out of the box, including sixLinux distributions and dozens of one-click applications.
In early 2017, DigitalOcean expanded their feature set by adding load balancers to their offering.[52] Their platform is an alternative cloud offering and the company targets smaller developers, allowing them to spend as little as five dollars on their platform.[53]
DigitalOcean can be managed through a web interface or usingdoctl command line.[54]
DigitalOcean also offers block andobject-based storage and since May 2018Kubernetes-based container service.[15][16]
Reviewers have noted that DigitalOcean requires users to have some experience insysadmin andDevOps. In his review forScienceBlogs, writer Greg Laden warned: "DigitalOcean is not for everybody. You need to be at least a little savvy with Linux ... "[55]
In 2021, DigitalOcean launched a managedMongoDB database service.[53]
As of 2021,[update] DigitalOcean is hosting publicly available communityforums and tutorials onopen source andsystem administration topics. As of August 2014,[update] the service claimed to have over 1,000 vetted tutorials.[56][failed verification]
In 2017, in partnership withStripe, DigitalOcean sponsored the Libscore tool to freely provide the developer community with open access to analytics on web development tools.[57]
DigitalOcean Marketplace provides facilities to quickly deploy popular software bundles. Internally it's run by DigitalOcean Kubernetes, OpenChannel for the catalogAPI and data warehouse and Cloudflare for CDN and load-balancing.[58]
DigitalOcean was widely criticized for its role in creating aperverse incentive when it promoted Hacktoberfest 2020 with free t-shirts for contributions to open source projects, resulting in massive spuriouspull requests onopen sourceGitHub repositories, amounting to an unintentional "corporate-sponsored distributeddenial of service attack against the open source maintainer community".[59][60][61][62] DigitalOcean was quick to respond, and issued updates to Hacktoberfest to help prevent this, by allowing open source maintainers to specifically opt into Hacktoberfest, updating the Hacktoberfest process to allow maintainers to mark content as spam, and preventing repositories set up just to game the system from participating.[63][64][65][better source needed]
