DigitalOcean Rapidly Gaining Public Cloud Market Share
DigitalOcean is a cloud platform that is designed for developers. Recent data gathered by Netcraft suggests that DigitalOcean has seen a steep spike in business during 2013. Netcraft’s report says that DigitalOcean created more web facing servers than Amazon in November. The metrics show that DigitalOcean now hosts 818 web facing computers that were formally on Amazon AWS whereas AWS only hosts 88 that were formerly hosted on DigitalOcean. At the beginning of 2013, Netcraft had listed Digital Ocean outside of the top 1,500 public cloud providers in the world. Currently, DigitalOcean is ranked 15th overall with the company boasting on its homepage that it has launched over 900,000 cloud servers since the company launched.
DigitalOcean differentiates itself from public cloud services like Amazon by providing a clean, straightforward method of getting users up and running on cloud computing. The barrier of entry into the public cloud has been seemingly lowered by DigitalOcean’s marketing approach and simple website design. DigitalOcean has effectively communicated what the cloud is and how the general public can make it work for them. DigitalOcean’s website proclaims that within 55 seconds, you can be up and running in the public cloud.
A report by VentureBeat confirms the success of DigitalOcean. Mitch Wainer is one of DigitalOcean’s co-founders and he was quoted when asked about the rapid expansion, “We were adding four (data center) racks a month in the beginning of the year. Now we’re adding them at a two-day clip.” Wainer went on to say that “It’s really been crazy, and our poor data center manager is losing his mind.”
It seems to be an exciting time to be at DigitalOcean. The public cloud company looks to increase its growth as it just opened a new datacenter in Amsterdam. The current trend for DigitalOcean seems to be that they are succeeding at taking clients from existing providers at high rates. The upcoming explosion of cloud services in 2014 could catapult DigitalOcean into the ranks of being a house hold name in the cloud services industry.
