Digitalocean is a virtual private server provider, based in New York City, America, which was founded in 2011 by Ben and Moisey Uretsky. The company leases out its capacity from existing data centers in places like New York, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, Singapore and Frankfurt. It functions as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It can be compared to Google Storage and Amazon S3, for their online storage services. In 2014, it was found that, the company had grown by 850 percent in the previous year and in 8th August, 2014, it was declared to be the fifth largest public-facing host of the year. At present, Digitalocean has over 100 employees and it adds about 1000 new users each day. Presently, the company hosts over 190,000 sites.
♦ Pricing
The company has a very simple pricing system and all its plans are standard with solid state drives (SSD). It offers separate monthly and hourly plans.
Monthly Plans: They offer a set of high volume monthly plans and a set of low volume monthly plans.
Among the low volume ones:
- $5/ month or $0.007/ hour: 512 MB memory, 1 core processor, 20 GB SSD Disk, 1 TB transfer
- $10/ month or $0.015/ hour: 1 GB memory, 1 core processor, 30 GB SSD Disk, 2 TB transfer
- $20/ month or $0.03/ hour: 2 GB memory, 2 core processor, 40 GB SSD Disk, 3 TB transfer
- $40/ month or $0.06/ hour: 4 GB memory, 2 core processor, 60 GB SSD Disk, 4 TB transfer
- $80/ month or $0.119/hour: 8 GB memory, 4 core processor, 80 GB SSD Disk, 5 TB transfer
Among the high volume ones:
- $160/ month or $0.238/ hour: 16 GB memory, 8 core processor, 160 GB SSD Disk, 6 TB transfer
- $320/ month or $0.476/ hour: 32 GB memory, 12 core processor, 320 GB SSD Disk, 7 TB transfer
- $480/ month or $0.714/ hour: 48 GB memory, 16 core processor, 480 GB SSD Disk, 8 TB transfer
- $640/ month or $952/ hour: 64 GB memory, 20 core processor, 640 GB SSD Disk, 9 TB transfer
(Users get to avail digitalocean promo code on the company websites at different times for obtaining discounts and offers.)
♦ Features of Digitalocean
According to the company, its cloud server, which is known to be “Droplets”, can be provisioned in 55 seconds. The company provides the solid-state drives or SSD and KVM virtualization.
DigitalOcean Community: The community resource, which is currently offered by Digitalocean, provides a developer-to-developer forum along with different tutorials on the topics like open source and sysadmin. In 2014, the community resource has received 2 million visitors in each day on an average. When a community is receiving average visitors of 2 millions per day on an average, then you could easily imagine how successful the community is. Presently, the company provides about 1000 vetted tutorials. Millions of people from round the globe have been benefited from these tutorials.
API: It has created a very simple name spaced API, which helps the users to get complete control over their virtual private servers. One can avail all the functionality of the control panel through the API. Through this feature, they support all the major virtual server actions and help their users to build own control interface. In 2014, it has launched its second version of API, i.e. API V2 in a Beta version. This new version of API is RESTful, uses OAuth and supports IPv6.
IPv6: The Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of internet protocol and was introduced in Singapore location (SGP1) on 16th June, 2014 and on 15th July of the same year, it was launched in London location (LON1).
CoreOS: It is an open-source light-weight operating system, which is designed for providing infrastructure to clustered deployments, while focusing on automation, ease of applications deployment, security, reliability and scalability. Digitalocean introduced CoreOS in 5th September, 2014 and it is used as a droplet’s operating system.
FreeBSD: FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system, which has descended from Research Unix via the BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). The company provides this support, including the possibility to deploy a custom, user-provided operating system kernel.
♦ Customer Reviews
Most of the customers of Digitalocean have been highly satisfied with their services. According to them, the company has helped them to keep up with the changing technology. Its competitive pricing, rapid provisioning AVIs, amazing hardware, highly reliable droplet and optimized network connection has provided them an ideal public cloud ‘hub’. View all review: https://www.digitalocean.com/customers/
DigitalOcean provides a developer-friendly way to control the create/ update/ destroy lifecycle of virtual machines at a very competitive price. Digitalocean promo code which are offered every now and then, makes the services even more popular.
