User:Abzter623594/sandbox/DigitalOcean

Not to be confused with Digital Ocean.

DigitalOcean

The DigitalOcean logo
Type of site	Cloud hosting provider
Available in	English
Owner	DigitalOcean, Inc.
Created by	Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Jeff Carr, Mitch Wainer
URL	www.digitalocean.com
Launched	24 June 2011
Current status	Active

DigitalOcean is New York based company that provides Virtual Private Servers (VPS) for deploying web application(s). DigitalOcean's claim to fame is the speed of their SSD images and the assertion that it takes only 55 seconds to setup a cloud based server.

History

DigitalOcean was born out of the idea that web infrastructure is generally complicated - hosting companies often have complex control panels, and an ideal hosting environment requires a good understanding of ideas like load balancing,distributed file systems, etc. Instead of building a service, founders of DigitalOcean decided to build a product to deliver the simplest possible virtual private server.

“ Virtualization enabled a new way of doing business and because customers needed to scale, a hosting company would also need to be able to scale easily to support them. I wanted to combine these two concepts of virtualization and hosting and build a company that was not just fully virtualized but also made virtualization simple.” - CEO, Ben Uretsky, DigitalOcean

Droplet

A virtual private server on DigitalOcean with a set of RAM, number of CPU's, storage and bandwidth constitutes as a 'Droplet'.

Features

Private Networking

Private Networking allows Droplets to talk with other Droplets in the same data center. Traffic sent between Droplets across the private will not count towards the bandwidth costs and can be used for database replication, file storage, and similar host to host communication.

Global Transfer

This enables a copy of Droplet snapshot to all its data centers.Once the snapshots are transferred to all regions , the user is able to spin up image snapshot in region from the Droplet create page.

IPv6 Support

IPv6 addresses are now available for all Droplets in the Singapore Region, users can enable IPv6 during Droplet creation or on existing virtual servers without the need to reboot.

Team Accounts

Digital Ocean also allows team usage, useful for organizations where the billing info will be maintained by the owner(s). The owner can include software developers or system administrators or any other of their choice as the collaborators.

Platform supported

Currently DigitalOcean supports only Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu, Debian, CoreOS, FreeBSD , Fedora and CentOS in both 64 bit and 32 bit versions.

Comparison

The following table briefly compares different virtual private server providers for deploying Ruby on Rails application:

	Amazon Web Services	DigitalOcean	Heroku	Engine Yard
Benefits	Scalable, starts off free, easy to provision new servers.	Easy to deploy a prebuilt image for various development stacks. Not necessarily a Rails-specific company. Offers a lot more flexibility and freedom to tweak the environment to your needs. Great for migrating on-premise systems into the cloud. All SSDs means the images run very quickly.	A new server instance can be created in as little as 10 seconds using the Heroku command line interface. Deploys are automated using Git Push. Add-ons make it easy to provision additional resources and infrastructure, such as Redis, Solr, or log analysis. Free when using a single web thread. No bandwidth limits!	Easy to create a Ruby on Rails application server that runs in the cloud. Started as a Rails-only hosting company, so brings a lot of experience to the table. Can provide application-specific support and 24x7 monitoring. Provide developer friendly tools, such as the “engineyard” RubyGem.
Tradeoffs	Need to know basic Unix administration to be able to work with the platform successfully. For a startup, this usually entails hiring a Ruby on Rails developer with Amazon AWS DevOps experience as well. This can make your talent search more nuanced, and therefore more difficult.	Requires sysadmin and DevOps experience. Bandwidth limits.	Must deploy with Git. Scaling is not automated.	Requires sysadmin and DevOps experience. Bandwidth limits.
Pricing	Hard to argue with the free tier, but it does ramp up as resource requirements grow. Each service has its own pricing structure, so sometimes it can be hard to figure out how much Amazon EC2 and a bunch of other services will really cost each month until the invoices start to arrive.	Very affordable, but no free tier. Starts at $5/month and goes up from there.	Starts off free, but can grow quickly with the number of threads and Add-ons required to run the application.	Starts at around $80/month and goes up from there depending on server resources and support requirements.
Ease of Use	Medium to Advanced.	Advanced	Beginner	Medium

How to Set up a Droplet

A user can have as many Droplets he needs,incurring a cost with each new Droplet.A Droplet's size can be increased with increasing workload from the account settings. The following screencast describes how a Droplet can be setup:

[Credits : OceanCasts]

Growth

DigitalOcean today hosts more than 163,000 web-facing computers, according to Netcraft's May 2015 Hosting Provider Server Count and has grown to become the second-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers, followed by Amazon AWS.

Pricing model

A Droplet can be purchased on per hour or per month basis, with the pricing dependent on the RAM , processor power, SSD storage space and bandwidth usage. Each additional bandwidth transfer is charged at 2 cents per GB. The company leases capacity from existing data centers, including sites in New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Singapore and Frankfurt. Following are the current price configurations available:

See Also

• Microsoft Azure
• Rackspace
• Linode