DigitalOcean | |
Company type | Public |
NYSE: DOCN | |
Industry | |
Founded | June 24, 2011 |
Founders |
|
Headquarters | , U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | |
Brands |
|
Services |
|
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] |
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. [4] DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, and SMBs with cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms. [5] [6]
DigitalOcean also runs Hacktoberfest, a one-month-long celebration of open-source software held in October. Each year, it partners with different software companies, including GitHub, Twilio, Dev.to, Intel, Appwrite, and Deep Source.
In 2003, Ben Uretsky and Moisey Uretsky, who founded ServerStack, a managed hosting business, [7] wanted to create a new product that would combine web hosting and virtual server and target entrepreneurial software developers. [8] [7]
In 2012, the Uretskys met co-founder Mitch Wainer following Wainer's response to a Craigslist job listing. [9] The company launched their beta product in January 2012. [10] In mid-2012, the founding team consisted of Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman. DigitalOcean accepted the offer of TechStars 2012's startup accelerator in Boulder, Colorado, and the founders moved to Boulder to work on the product. [11] 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. [11] [12] On January 16, 2018, new droplet (virtual machines) plans were introduced. [13] In May 2018, the company announced the launch of its Kubernetes-based container service. [14] [15]
In June 2018, Mark Templeton, former CEO of Citrix, replaced co-founder Ben Uretsky as the company's CEO. [16] In July 2019, Yancey Spruill, former CFO and COO of SendGrid (a fellow Techstars company), replaced Templeton as CEO. [17] Bill Sorenson, former CFO of EnerNOC, was appointed as the company's new CFO. [17]
In September 2021, DigitalOcean announced plans to acquire Nimbella, a serverless startup. [5] In March 2022, the company acquired CSS-Tricks, a learning website for front-end developers. [18] [19]
In May 2022, the company released DigitalOcean Functions. [20] [21] Based on technology acquired from Nimbella and the open source Apache OpenWhisk project, DigitalOcean Functions is a serverless platform that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage servers. [22] [23] [24] [25]
In August 2022, DigitalOcean acquired Cloudways, a Pakistani cloud hosting service provider, for $350 million in an all-cash deal. [26]
On January 15, 2013, DigitalOcean became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to offer SSD-based virtual machines. [27] Following a TechCrunch [27] review, which was syndicated by Hacker News, DigitalOcean saw a rapid increase in customers. [11] In December 2013, DigitalOcean opened its first European data center, located in Amsterdam. [28] During 2014, the company continued its expansion, opening new data centers in Singapore and London. [29] During 2015 DigitalOcean expanded further with a data center in Toronto, Canada. [30] and Frankfurt, [31] Germany. Later in 2016, they continued expansion to Bangalore, India. [32]
The company's seed funding was led by IA Ventures and raised US$3.2 million in July 2013. [33] Its series A round of funding in March 2014, led by venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, raised US$37.2 million. [34] In December 2014, DigitalOcean raised US$50 million in debt financing from Fortress Investment Group in the form of a five-year term loan. [35] [36] 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. [37] In April 2016, the company secured US$130 million in credit financing to build out new cloud services. [38] In May 2020, DigitalOcean raised an additional $50 million from Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz. [39]
On March 24, 2021, DigitalOcean became a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange, [40] with their initial public offering price at $47 per share. [41]
DigitalOcean had been blocked in Iran as a result of an attempt to cut off the use of the Lantern internet censorship circumvention tool. [42]
Under Russian law, any host keeping citizens' personal data needs to be located in Russian territory. That led to a temporary block in April 2018 of Google, Amazon, Azure, and DigitalOcean, among others, in Russia by Roskomnadzor as a hosting provider for Telegram Messenger and VPS services. [43] [44]
DigitalOcean offers virtual private servers (VPS), or "droplets" using DigitalOcean terminology, using KVM as the hypervisor [45] 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] [46] and with various options out of the box, including six Linux distributions and dozens of one-click applications.
In early 2017, DigitalOcean expanded their feature set by adding load balancers to their offering. [47] 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. [48]
DigitalOcean can be managed through a web interface or using doctl command line. [49]
DigitalOcean also offers block and object-based storage and since May 2018 Kubernetes-based container service. [14] [15]
Reviewers have noted that DigitalOcean requires users to have some experience in sysadmin and DevOps. In his review for ScienceBlogs, writer Greg Laden warned: "DigitalOcean is not for everybody. You need to be at least a little savvy with Linux ... " [50]
In 2021, DigitalOcean launched a managed MongoDB database service. [48]
As of 2021, [update] DigitalOcean is hosting publicly available community forums and tutorials on open source and system administration topics. As of August 2014, [update] the service claimed to have over 1,000 vetted tutorials. [51] [ failed verification ]
In 2017, in partnership with Stripe, DigitalOcean sponsored the Libscore tool to freely provide the developer community with open access to analytics on web development tools. [52]
DigitalOcean Marketplace provides facilities to quickly deploy popular software bundles. Internally it's run by DigitalOcean Kubernetes, OpenChannel for the catalog API and data warehouse and Cloudflare for CDN and load-balancing. [53]
DigitalOcean was widely criticized for its role in creating a perverse incentive when it promoted Hacktoberfest 2020 with free t-shirts for contributions to open source projects, resulting in massive spurious pull requests on open source GitHub repositories, amounting to an unintentional "corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community". [54] [55] [56] [57] 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. [58] [59] [60] [ better source needed ]
Airware was an American venture-funded startup that provided commercial unmanned aerial vehicles for enterprises. The company ceased operations on September 14, 2018.
GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
Bain Capital Ventures LLC is the venture capital division within Bain Capital, which has approximately $160 billion of assets under management worldwide. The firm's early-stage investments have included Attentive, Bloomreach, Billtrust, Docusign, Flywire, LinkedIn, Justworks, Turbonomic, Rent the Runway, Twilio, Rapid7, and Redis. Bain Capital Ventures manages $10 billion of committed capital, has over 400 active portfolio companies, and has offices in New York City, Palo Alto, and San Francisco.
Linode, LLC was an American cloud hosting provider that focused on providing Linux-based virtual machines, cloud infrastructure, and managed services.
AppScale is a software company offering cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, but AppScale GTS source code remains freely available to the open-source community.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $35 billion as of March 2022.
Twilio Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.
Domo, Inc. is an American cloud software company based in American Fork, Utah, United States. It specializes in business intelligence tools and data visualization.
Pantheon Systems, Inc. is a privately held San Francisco-based corporation founded in 2010 by Zack Rosen, David Strauss, Josh Koenig, Matt Cheney. The company's flagship service, Pantheon, is a WebOps platform for websites powered by open-source Drupal and WordPress CMS, as well as NextJS and GatsbyJS Jamstack front-ends. It is an app-specific PaaS provider, sold on a monthly subscription basis, with several support tiers available.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning, alongside a set of management tools. It runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, and Google Docs, according to Verma, et.al. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details.
Databricks, Inc. is a global data, analytics and artificial intelligence company founded by the original creators of Apache Spark.
GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package that can develop, secure, and operate software. The open-source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmytro Zaporozhets and Dutch developer Sytse Sijbrandij. In 2018, GitLab Inc. was considered to be the first partly-Ukrainian unicorn.
Mirantis Inc. is a Campbell, California, based B2B open source cloud computing software and services company. Its primary container and cloud management products, part of the Mirantis Cloud Native Platform suite of products, are Mirantis Container Cloud and Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. The company focuses on the development and support of container and cloud infrastructure management platforms based on Kubernetes and OpenStack. The company was founded in 1999 by Alex Freedland and Boris Renski. It was one of the founding members of the OpenStack Foundation, a non-profit corporate entity established in September, 2012 to promote OpenStack software and its community. Mirantis has been an active member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation since 2016.
Pluralsight, LLC is an American privately held online education company that offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website. Founded in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams, the company has its headquarters in Farmington, Utah. As of July 2018, it uses more than 1,400 subject-matter experts as authors, and offers more than 7,000 courses in its catalog. Since first moving its courses online in 2007, the company has expanded, developing a full enterprise platform, and adding skills assessment modules.
Ben Uretsky is the cofounder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure provider.
This is a timeline of Amazon Web Services, which offers a suite of cloud computing services that make up an on-demand computing platform.
Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers. However, developers of serverless applications are not concerned with capacity planning, configuration, management, maintenance, fault tolerance, or scaling of containers, VMs, or physical servers. Serverless computing does not hold resources in volatile memory; computing is rather done in short bursts with the results persisted to storage. When an app is not in use, there are no computing resources allocated to the app. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application. It can be a form of utility computing.
Netlify is a remote-first cloud computing company that offers a development platform that includes build, deploy, and serverless backend services for web applications and dynamic websites. The platform is built on open web standards, making it possible to integrate build tools, web frameworks, APIs, and various web technologies into a unified developer workflow.
IBM Cloud is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was started in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution.