Over the years, DigitalOcean has grown to become a very popular cloud hosting provider. However, people needing to host large sets of data have been relying on third-party solutions like Vultr. DigitalOcean is soon launching a service dubbed ‘Block Storage’ that will enable you keep all your content on their servers.
It is quite simple using DigitalOcean for all your hosting needs. With only a couple of clicks of a button, you can deploy and manage a virtual private server (called ‘Droplet’) on one of DigitalOcean’s data centers located across the globe. What is more, these droplets are quite cheap. For example, you can get a VPS server with 2 processing cores, 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD storage, and 3TB bandwidth for only $20 per month. It is estimated that over 700,000 people have already launched more than 18 million droplets on DigitalOcean’s servers.
But what would happen if you needed to store lots of data but do not need a lot of processing power? In such a scenario, the only solution was to upgrade to a more powerful droplet that had the capacity you needed or use a third-party cloud storage provider.
But now, DigitalOcean is providing a third solution for such cases. You can now attach extra SSD-based storage to your current droplet for only $0.10 per GB per month. This means you can now retain your droplet and attach more storage without having to pay for higher computing power that you do not need.
The data you store in a block storage is independent of your droplet and is replicated across several racks. This means that if need arises, you can upgrade your droplet but maintain the size of your block storage and vice versa. You can have a droplet that ranges from 1GB to 16TB.
Additionally, when compared to other competing companies, DigitalOcean does not charge you for in and out of your block storage or making requests. It is therefore very easy to calculate how much you are expected to pay at the end of every month. For example, hosting a 100GB block storage is going to cost you $10 every month and a 1TB block storage will cost you $100 monthly. What’s more, having a block storage is more like having a hard drive with bigger capacity. You can do whatever you want with it – more than just storing and retrieving files.
It is evident that DigitalOcean’s strategy is quite different and you would need to do some calculations to see if it is what you would need. If you only want block storage to store your data, DigitalOcean’s competitors are Linode and Vultr Block Storage. With this new feature however, DigitalOcean is catching up on its competition by letting you host huge volumes of data. If you plan to host terabytes of data, then DigitalOcean is an excellent choice.
Moving on from cloud hosting, you would be interested to know that James Cariello is no longer the Chief Technology Officer at DigitalOcean. Julia Austin is the new CTO. Also, the company spots a new logo that doesn’t have a cloud.
