DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (DigitalOcean) operates as a cloud computing platform offering simple, scalable and approachable on-demand infrastructure and platform services for developers at growing technology companies.
The company’s platform simplifies cloud computing, enabling its customers to rapidly accelerate innovation and productivity. The company’s customers include growing technology companies across numerous industry verticals ranging from gaming to fintech to cybersecurity, among man...
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (DigitalOcean) operates as a cloud computing platform offering simple, scalable and approachable on-demand infrastructure and platform services for developers at growing technology companies.
The company’s platform simplifies cloud computing, enabling its customers to rapidly accelerate innovation and productivity. The company’s customers include growing technology companies across numerous industry verticals ranging from gaming to fintech to cybersecurity, among many others, and leverage its platform for a wide variety of use cases, such as building and hosting websites, developing new web and mobile applications, integrating AI into their businesses, and building AI products and applications, among many others. Being simple, scalable and approachable are the company’s key differentiators, driving a broad range of customers around the world whose needs are not being fully met by larger cloud providers to build and grow their businesses on its platform.
The company’s platform is designed to be simple, scalable and approachable by providing a variety of product offerings that were built with the needs of growing technology companies in mind. The simplicity of the company’s platform allows users to focus on building and scaling their business instead of on managing their infrastructure. The company offers mission-critical solutions across Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), including its Droplet virtual machines, storage and networking offerings; Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), including the company’s Managed Hosting, Managed Database, Managed Kubernetes and Marketplace offerings; and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), including its GPU Droplets, Notebooks and GenAI Platform offerings. The company continues to invest in its platform to further penetrate the growing markets in which the company operate.
The company has a highly efficient self-service customer acquisition model, which it complements with a sales force focused on inside sales, targeted outside sales and partnership opportunities to drive revenue growth. The efficiency of the company’s go-to-market model and its focus on the needs of growing technology companies have enabled it to drive organic growth and establish a truly global customer base across a broad range of industries. The company’s customers rely on it for their critical business needs and the company provides all customers, regardless of size, 24/7 customer support. The company is committed to making world-class cloud services approachable by providing attentive support to customers and supporting and investing in the broader developer community. The company’s customer support, coupled with its easy-to-use self-help resources and active developer community, has created tremendous brand loyalty amongst the company’s customer base.
Solution
DigitalOcean is a simple, scalable and approachable cloud, offering customers solutions that are easy to leverage, reliable and scale along with its growing technology companies. Empowered by an easy-to-use self-service model, intuitive control panel and highly predictable pricing, the company’s customers are able to rapidly accelerate innovation and increase their productivity and agility. The key differentiators of the company’s platform are as follows:
Simple
The company’s platform is engineered to take a user from inquiry to deployment within minutes, without any specialized training or heavy implementation. The company abstracts away the complexity that is generally found across legacy cloud providers to provide a compelling, intuitive interface with click-and-go options. In addition, all the company’s products come with detailed product and technical documentation to help its customers quickly and seamlessly deploy to the company’s cloud platform.
Scalable
The company offers a comprehensive portfolio of IaaS, PaaS/SaaS and AI/ML products that are specifically designed to address the needs of growing technology companies. The company’s platform can support a wide range of use cases, including building and hosting websites, developing new web and mobile applications, integrating AI into their businesses, and building AI products and applications, among many others. Customers with any type of use case has the ability to choose from managing their own infrastructure and building their own bespoke solutions using the company’s IaaS or AI/ML offerings, offloading the technical infrastructure entirely through its Managed Hosting offering or delegating certain aspects of management using certain of the company’s other managed PaaS/SaaS offerings or AI/ML offerings. The company’s scalable platform provides the reliability and security so that its customers can rely on the company’s both today and in the future as their projects and businesses grow and their needs expand.
Approachable
Creating solutions for cloud and AI is the focus of the company’s business. The company offers expert technical support and customer service to all customers free of charge on a 24/7 basis to ensure its customers quickly overcome challenges. Customers cite the company’s attentive support as a key driver of their decision to start and grow their businesses on its platform. The company’s platform is easy to use, and it provides extensive guidance on the company’s website through product documentation and numerous high-quality developer tutorials that attract users and reinforce its highly efficient self-service customer acquisition model.
In addition, the company’s platform is designed to take advantage of open-source technology, which helps customers to more efficiently write their own integrations. The company has built one of the world’s largest developer communities to foster opportunities for developers to learn, grow and innovate on its platform. The company continues to invest in supporting developers in myriad ways, including through local knowledge-sharing meetings and webinars in cities around the world. The company also host large industry-wide events including Hacktoberfest, a global hackathon, and deploy, a conference for developers, startups and founders. Being approachable also extends into the company’s pricing model, which is transparent and predictable, eliminating surprises for its customers. The company’s approach billing with a customer-first focus, enabling its customers to spend more time developing and deploying innovative applications rather than interpreting and navigating convoluted invoices.
Growth Strategies
The key elements of the company’s strategy include increasing usage by its existing customers; growing its base of higher spend customers; investing in its platform and product offerings; driving increased adoption through its community ecosystem; and augmenting its platform though strategic partnerships and acquisitions.
Platform and Product Offerings
The company designed its global cloud platform to ensure a simple, scalable and approachable cloud computing experience for its customer base of growing technology companies. The combination of these elements enables the company’s customers to focus their time and attention on building and running their applications or businesses rather than managing the underlying infrastructure.
Global Infrastructure & Technology Network
The company’s global infrastructure and technology network, built on the foundation of open-source scalable cloud-native technologies, allows it to deliver an exceptional developer experience and suite of infrastructure and software solutions to its customers spread across the globe. The company’s infrastructure is offered to its customers across 16 data centers worldwide that are connected by a high-speed private backbone, enabling its customers to deploy their solutions across nine different geographic regions. The company’s lease data centers in the New York, San Francisco and Atlanta metropolitan areas in the United States, as well as in Australia, Canada, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Singapore and the United Kingdom. The company’s global data center network allows its customers to choose where best to deploy the solution to optimize performance and minimize latency for their users. In addition, the company utilizes points of presence locations situated across the globe to improve website and application performance by allowing geographically dispersed users to receive content from a location nearest to them.
The company optimizes reliability and performance for its customers by providing physical security and availability for its customers; managing the physical server capacity to ensure that the company is able to meet its customers’ demands; operating the global networking backbone to ensure that it is making the best connectivity peering agreements to get customer traffic to the destination via the best available path; and actively monitoring the cloud environment and responding to network incidents to ensure that customer impact is minimized and service availability is managed.
The company’s focus heavily on securing its network, products and customer data from potential security threats, leveraging a dedicated team of security professionals. The company designs its products with security in mind and build security features to integrate directly with its platform, making it simple for its customers to build the additional security layers required for their use cases, rather than navigating the operational complexity of purchasing, integrating, and managing disparate security tooling into their projects. The company also offers a number of security features to its customers free of charge, including its Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection service and enhanced Role Based Access Control (RBAC) offering.
Product Portfolio
The company provides a variety of cloud products and services that is specifically designed to address the needs of growing technology companies. The company listens carefully to its customers feedback, so its understands what they want and need.
The company offers IaaS, PaaS/SaaS and AI/ML solutions to its customers. The company’s initial product, launched in 2012, was the Droplet, a virtual machine that provides flexibility to build, test, secure and grow customers’ applications from start-up to scale. Since then, the company has successfully launched many new products, which honor its commitment to always provide a simple, scalable and approachable experience for its core customer base. The company has expanded its product portfolio with product innovations such as Dedicated Droplets, Premium Droplets, Spaces, Managed Kubernetes, Managed Databases, App Platform, and, more recently, GPU Droplets and its GenAI Platform, which have proven the company’s ability to successfully launch or acquire new products to market and serve its customers’ needs. Furthermore, the company regularly launch new product features in response to customer needs and requests and to grow the functionality of its platform. The company has developed a product roadmap designed to enhance its ability to offer secure, scalable and reliable solutions for its customers to grow their applications or businesses. The company also provides management and collaboration tools to enable its customers to monitor and manage their usage of its platform.
IaaS Offerings
The company’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings include its compute, storage and networking products. The company provides flexible server configurations sized for any application, attractive price-to-performance and highly predictable pricing that is the same across regions and usage volumes. The company’s IaaS offerings include:
Droplets
Droplets is the company’s core compute offering. Developers can spin up the virtual machine of their choice in under a minute. The company offers basic Droplets and Dedicated Droplets, such as general purpose, CPU-optimized, memory-optimized or storage-optimized configurations, which provide flexibility to build, test, secure and grow any application from start-up to scale. The company’s Premium Droplet offerings provide enhanced speed and memory performance, while maintaining its commitment to simplicity.
Storage Offerings
The company’s storage solutions allow its customers to store and quickly access any amount of data reliably in the cloud. The company offers several kinds of storage offerings, depending on the customer’s needs, including:
Spaces (Object Storage)
The company’s object storage is a built-in content delivery network (CDN) makes scaling easy, reliable and affordable. The company’s simple and predictable pricing makes this offering very attractive compared to its competitors.
Volumes (Block Storage)
The company’s block storage product allows customers to add more storage space and mix and match compute and storage to suit their database, file storage, application, service, mobile and backup needs. This provides supplemental storage beyond the generous local solid-state drive (SSD) offered with the company’s compute offerings.
Backups and Snapshots
The company’s disk images of Droplets provide peace of mind and a sense of security to its customers. The company’s customers can choose between Backups, which are automatically created disk images of Droplets taken on a daily or weekly basis, or Snapshots, which are manually created disk images taken on demand, providing its customers with the ability to revert to an older state or create new Droplets. The company also provides the flexibility to customize backup windows for disk images, choose retention policies and elect which files to back up.
Networking Offerings
The company provides a suite of networking capabilities to secure and control the traffic to its customers’ applications. The company provides a generous amount of bandwidth with each successive Droplet purchase. The company’s key networking product offerings include:
Cloud Firewalls
The company’s Cloud Firewall offering is a software service that allows customers to quickly secure their infrastructure from common vulnerabilities and define what services are visible on their infrastructure. Cloud Firewalls are free to the company’s customers and are used for staging and production deployments of software.
Managed Load Balancers
The company’s Managed Load Balancer offering is a software service that allows customers to load balance traffic to their software applications located on multiple Droplets, enabling them to scale their applications and improve availability, security and performance across their infrastructure in a few clicks with affordable pricing.
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
The company’s VPC offering is a private network interface for collections of its resources. VPC networks provide a more secure connection between resources because the network is inaccessible from the public internet and other VPC networks, enabling the company’s customers to manage their information and data traffic between applications without exposure to the public internet.
IP Address Management
In addition to IPv4 addresses, the company offers IPv6 addresses, which provide larger address space and increased security, among other benefits. Customers also have the option to use Reserved IP Addresses, which are publicly accessible static IP addresses that can be assigned to Droplets and instantly remapped to other Droplets in the same data center.
Domain Name System (DNS) Management
DNS Management offering allows customers to add domains to their DigitalOcean accounts and manage the domain’s DNS records through the company’s control panel. Managing DNS records through the DigitalOcean platform also allows customers to integrate DNS records with other its offerings, including Load Balancers to manage traffic and Spaces to streamline automatic SSL certificate management.
PaaS/SaaS Offerings
The company’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings provide a complete development and deployment environment. PaaS/SaaS offerings include infrastructure, as well as database management systems, application platforms, development tools and other services designed to support the complete web application lifecycle. The company’s PaaS/SaaS offerings include:
Managed Hosting
The company’s Managed Hosting offering provides simple onboarding and day-to-day management for hosting that is purpose-built for growing technology companies looking to outsource their on-ramp to the internet and offload the complexities of cloud infrastructure so they can spend more time running and scaling their businesses. This offering is particularly attractive for growing technology companies without the knowledge or resources to fully manage their hosting infrastructure, including digital agencies, entrepreneurs creating eCommerce sites, bloggers, freelancers, and other users hosting on WordPress, PHP and Magento.
Managed Databases
The company’s Managed Databases offering, a fully managed database solution, provides its customers with the application performance they need without the operational demands that come with building and running a database server. The company offers managed offerings for relational databases (SQL) such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, as well as NoSQL databases such as Redis. In addition, the company offers its Managed MongoDB, a fully managed database as a service offering in partnership with MongoDB, and Dedicated CPU Managed MongoDB to boost the performance of MongoDB and enable users to migrate databases from any source to DigitalOcean Managed MongoDB with minimal downtime. Finally, the company’s Managed Kafka offering provides its customers with the ability to build high-throughput, low-latency data streams of Kafka without the complexity of managing their infrastructure.
Managed Kubernetes and Container Registry
The company’s easy-to-use Managed Kubernetes service provides scalability and portability for cloud-native applications. Customers can get started quickly and cheaply with the company’s free control plane, inexpensive bandwidth and its free egress gateway, which give the company’s customers even more confidence in leveraging its Kubernetes offering to deploy their code in the cloud. Alternatively, customers have the option to scale-up with the company’s high availability control plane, which increases control plane availability and uptime. The company’s Managed Container Registry offering lets customers easily store and manage private container images for rapid deployment to its Managed Kubernetes service.
App Platform
The company’s App Platform offering allows customers to build, deploy and scale applications quickly using a simple, fully managed solution. The company handles the infrastructure, application runtimes and dependencies so that developers can push code to production in just a few clicks, enabling them to deliver applications to market faster and on a global scale.
Functions
The company’s Functions offering is a serverless compute solution that leverages its App Platform product. The company’s Functions offering runs on-demand, which simplifies the cloud programming experience and helps customers focus more on application development and business outcomes and less on managing the underlying infrastructure.
Uptime
The company’s Uptime offering provides real-time uptime and latency alerts, allowing customers to quickly recover from incidents before their own customers are impacted. Alerts are triggered when customer assets are slow, down, or vulnerable to attack.
Marketplace
The company’s Marketplace is a platform where developers can find pre-configured applications and solutions that are optimized to run on its infrastructure quickly. The DigitalOcean Marketplace contains highly curated everyday applications and cutting-edge technologies, providing customers access to the most efficient tools to build their businesses while removing the time and expense of research, configuration and manual setup. The company works closely with partners to deliver a truly seamless experience for customers, creating the ability for developers to deploy thoroughly tested app environments with the click of a button on Droplets and Kubernetes clusters. The DigitalOcean Marketplace also offers add-ons that run in the cloud and are available on demand. More than 350 preconfigured one-click applications are available in the company’s Marketplace, including WordPress, LAMP, Docker, Grafana, and Plesk, among others.
AI/ML Offerings
The company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) offerings enable customers to more easily test, develop and deploy AI/ML applications or augment and enhance existing AI/ML applications. The company’s AI/ML offerings include:
GPU Droplets
The company’s GPU Droplets provide similar functionality to its core CPU offerings, but with the extra power of GPUs, and come pre-configured with pre-installed drivers, software and one-click models, allowing AI developers to simply and quickly run AI experiments, train large language models, and scale AI projects. The company’s GPU Droplets provide fast, easy and affordable access to high-performance GPUs without requiring upfront investments in hardware.
GenAI Platform
The company’s GenAI platform is a comprehensive solution for deploying AI applications. The platform provides access to third party foundational models out-of-the-box so that customers can easily put together an AI application without requiring specific AI expertise.
Bare Metal GPUs
The company’s Bare Metal GPU offering provides customers with access to a GPU server without any virtualization layer, to give developers with an entirely customizable server for their use case.
Jupyter Notebooks
The company’s Jupyter Notebooks offering provides customers with a simple cloud workspace that runs on GPUs, providing a managed interactive development environment for exploring data and training and building machine learning models.
Sales and Marketing
The company’s sales and marketing teams work together closely to drive awareness and adoption of its platform, accelerate customer acquisition and expand its revenue from existing customers. These teams focus on customer acquisition, its self-service acquisition funnel, customer support and success, community education, inside sales, targeted outside sales, and partnership and channel development.
The company attracts visitors to its website through a combination of high-quality content, developer outreach and highly targeted paid demand generation campaigns.
The company’s focus on building a large, highly engaged community that can connect and educate developers across the globe. The company’s developer community enables new and experienced developers to learn new skills and technologies and create and deliver new applications. The DigitalOcean community is based on forging genuine relationships through a series of meaningful and memorable interactions. The company’s focus on community drives brand loyalty amongst a fast-growing developer community and spurs its community followers to become advocates for the company and its platform.
The company’s community education websites contain high-quality technical tutorials and a forum with tens of thousands of questions and answers that guide developers in creating and delivering modern applications—not just focused on DigitalOcean products and services, but relevant to any cloud service. The company continues to grow the high-quality developer content on its websites, including through the creation of new content and product demonstrations, alongside continuous maintenance and refreshes of its legacy content, while making its education website easier to navigate by integrating its own GenAI platform on its education websites so its customers can get the answers they need more seamlessly and efficiently.
The company hosts a number of events to further build its community, including Hacktoberfest with over 65,000 developers participating in 2024 and deploy, a conference for developers, startups, founders, and others to learn from experts, connect, and be inspired. The company’s focus on expanding its developer engagement efforts by hosting regular in-person meetings and creating innovative knowledge-sharing hubs in cities around the world. In addition, the company operates the ‘Hatch by DigitalOcean’ program to support entrepreneurs and startups more directly as they begin their journey by providing them with a robust set of benefits to help them succeed. Many attendees at the company’s meetings and events and participants in its Hatch program have learned about DigitalOcean through these developer engagement efforts and have not only become loyal its customers but have become advocates of the company’s platform, drawing others to DigitalOcean.
The company’s sales team includes experienced engineers who fashion technical solutions for customers to convert and migrate their workloads from other cloud providers. The company’s customer success professionals focus on customer retention and customer expansion by adding value throughout the customer lifecycle as customers scale and expand their usage of its product portfolio and directly contact customers to determine if there are ways to augment their usage of its platform with additional services. The company also focuses on partnership opportunities that introduce new avenues for customer growth. As the company continues to evolve its sales motion, it has introduced a high-touch approach for retaining and expanding top customers and securing new cloud and AI business from outbound efforts — all to help augment it is highly-efficient self-service customer acquisition model and accelerate growth.
The company is committed to providing robust customer support to all customers, which it has been a strategic differentiator for it. Developers and engineers are a key part of the customer support team, and the company offers technical support free of charge to all its customers. In addition, the company offers paid support plans, which allow customers to choose the paid support option that best suits their needs and provide customers with faster response times and dedicated support from technical managers. Customer engagement with the company’s customer support team also serves as an important feedback loop to its product and technology teams, helping it better understand the specific needs of its customers. This feedback has influenced, and continue to influence, the company’s product roadmap, the content strategy for its community tutorials and other business decisions. The company closely track various metrics to ensure it is providing exceptional customer support. The company internally monitors its customer satisfaction score (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS) to gauge the quality of the company’s interactions with customers and its ability to increase loyalty. The company also has specific service-level objectives (SLOs) for response and resolution times to ensure it maintains a high level of customer satisfaction.
Competition
The company’s AI/ML offerings compete with providers of AI/ML infrastructure and services, including the same large, diversified technology companies, Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), and Google (GCP), and smaller more infrastructure-focused companies such as Coreweave and Lambda Labs.
Finally, the company’s Managed Hosting offering competes with digital agencies and other managed hosting providers, including Kinsta and WP Engine.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company owned thirteen registered trademarks in the United States and ten registered trademarks in various non-U.S. jurisdictions. The company has filed applications for registration for two additional trademarks in non-U.S. jurisdictions. In addition, the company owns one International Registration through the World Intellectual Property Organization, which has been extended to registrations in seven additional jurisdictions. As of December 31, 2024, the company owned five issued patents and had one patent that is published in the United States.
Governmental Regulation
The company is also subject to U.S. and foreign laws and regulations that govern or restrict its business and activities in certain countries and with certain persons, including the U.S. Commerce Department’s Export Administration Regulations and economic and trade sanctions regulations maintained by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
History
DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2012. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2012.
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