Growth

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]

Funding

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]

Blocking in Iran and Russia

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]

Products and business model

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]

Hacktoberfest 2020 controversy

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]}