 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 |
Digital ocean
editDigitalOcean is New York based company that provides Virtual Private Servers(VPS) for deploying web application. Their claim to fame is the speed of their SSD images and their assertion that it takes only 55 seconds to setup a cloud based server.
History
editDigitalOcean 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.
Business Model and Pricing
editAdditional bandwidth transfer is 2c per GB
The company leases capacity from existing data centers, including sites in New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Singapore and Frankfurt.
Platform supported
editCurrently DigitalOcean supports only Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu, Debian, CoreOS, FreeBSD, Fedora and CentOS. in both 64 bit and 32 bit versions.
Features
editPrivate Networking
editPrivate 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
editThis enables a copy of Droplet snapshot to all its data centers. Once the snapshot is transferred to all regions , the user is able to spin up image snapshot in region from the Droplet create page.
IPv6 Support
editIPv6 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.
How to Setup up a Droplet
editDigital Ocean calls its virtual private servers as droplets which they claim to provide in 55 seconds. These will be available for a customer on some price, data ranging from 512 MB per CPU to 64 GB for 20 CPUs.
Once signing up into the website, create a droplet, naming it according to specifications that becomes the host name of the customer. Selecting the droplet size and the region are followed. Droplet settings include enabling private setting, IPv6 etc.
Later, the customer can deploy the same droplet in any of the available Linux distribution systems, namely Ubuntu, Debian, CoreOS, CentOS either in 32 bit or 64 bit systems. These steps will facilitate to create a droplet. The droplets created were on a host with a 1 gbps ehternet card which is shared among other droplets on that host. However, the droplet size can be increased from within the account settings.
Team Accounts
editDigital 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 his choice as the collaborators.
Competitors
editDigital Ocean has competition from its peer service companies. Common such applications are Heroku, Microsoft Azure, Google App Engine'. Heroku has one more All of these applications sells their services for some fare whereas Heroku offers similar service for free for experimenting with cloud applications in a limited sandbox.
Growth
editDigitalOcean 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.