NEW YORK — Fast-growing cloud provider DigitalOcean might not have hundreds of thousands of servers the way Amazon, Google, and Microsoft do to run its high-profile public clouds. But no matter. Ben Uretsky, the company’s chief executive, believes his startup has quite a few things going for it.
Perhaps most importantly, according to Uretsky, the company refuses to deprioritize user experience unlike the cloud giants that he sees as competitors.
“These providers focus on the technical features, and what we focus on is this is why were highly differentiated is we’re focused on people, and in this specific case, we’re focused on developers,” Uretsky said in an interview with VentureBeat at DigitalOcean headquarters here last week. “We are a product-driven company, whereas these other businesses are more technically driven, I guess.”
Whatever DigitalOcean is doing, people seem to like it. Netcraft now considers it the third-largest web-hosting company, and developers regularly name-drop DigitalOcean as an option for hosting sites, often citing the fast solid-state drives backing up the startup’s server slices, or droplets, in company parlance, and the prices, which start at $5 per month.
Sure, it lacks some of the popular services available from larger cloud providers, like an object-storage service and server load balancing. And it hardly brings in the revenue that, say, Amazon Web Services does. Nevertheless, the company does have developer cred. And one day, the developers who prefer DigitalOcean for side projects may want to choose it for a new application at work. Which is why DigitalOcean must be paid attention to.
Plus, feature announcements are on the way.
This year, following a $37.2 million funding round, the startup has worked to expand its global data center footprint and start hiring more people. The startup now has 110 employees.
“If 2013 was about growing the physical infrastructure, 2014 has been about growing the organizational structure and the people,” Uretsky said. “We’re in the best shape that we’ve been in in terms of team size, process, and things of that sort, so hopefully 2015 is finally a year where we can really make progress on our mission, which is to bring additional products and features to market that customers are asking for, while maintaining a simple, easy-to-use product, which is also really challenging.”
DigitalOcean has been looking to upgrade its networking hardware and centralize management across switches, and eventually roll out networking capabilities for customers, Uretsky said. DigitalOcean also plans to get compliance certificates to meet certain kinds of IT standards. Graphs for RAM and disk usage should be coming down the pipe soon, too.
But even as the startup adds features and keeps prices low “I don’t think anyone really focuses on price,” Uretsky said the directive is to ensure DigitalOcean remains user-friendly.
“We need to provide simple, powerful solutions, and that’s a complex problem,” Uretsky said. “It’s almost like a noble pursuit. It is so challenging to walk that fine line between being able to deliver something easy and yet retain its nature.”
DigitalOcean raised $83M and you don’t even know what it is. Allow me to explain
There is a very interesting company in New York called DigitalOcean. Today it announced that it has raised $83 million in new funding.
You might have heard of the company developers you know have probably mentioned it in passing but you might not know what it actually does. If that is the case, do not fear. I will explain everything.
DigitalOcean maintains and provides cloud infrastructure that applications to run on. Instead of making available a long and dizzying list of instance types and storage services for developers to choose from and tie together like top cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure DigitalOcean offers convenient “droplets” of compute and storage power for rent by the hour.
More than 6 million of these droplets have been deployed, atop tens of thousands of servers, by more than 500,000 developers, the startup says.
About 100 of the Fortune 500 have tried out DigitalOcean, the startup discovered through a recent survey. Customers include Compose, Flywheel, Ghost, InfluxDB, Pertino, and TaskRabbit.
Two months ago, DigitalOcean became the second largest hosting company in the world (second only to Amazon), at least by one metric. Last year, thanks to $50 million debt facility, the company was able to go from merely leasing servers to buying them outright. It’s growing up, in other words.
But Ben Uretsky, chief executive and a cofounder of DigitalOcean, doesn’t want to give up sacrifice the company’s simplicity in his quest to make DigitalOcean a part of many companies’ IT architectures.
“Do we really need 31 flavors of ice cream?” Uretsky asked me in an interview.
To be fair, Uretsky knows the company is missing some important features, namely an object storage service that’s comparable to the widely used Simple Storage Service, or S3, from Amazon. Uretsky wants to add advanced networking features, too.
Just because DigitalOcean’s portfolio is limited doesn’t mean companies are eventually migrating to other clouds, or their own data centers, as they mature. “That’s not what’s happening,” Uretsky told me. “Our customers don’t leave us. They don’t outgrow us. Our churn rate is the same as industry average. Infrastructure is inherently sticky. Switching costs are still very high.”
DigitalOcean is definitely not bringing in as much money as Amazon Web Services — the market leader is now doing more than $5 billion in revenue annually. And DigitalOcean operates considerably less infrastructure than Amazon Web Services, which may well be running more than 1.4 million servers at this point. But. But! If there is one cloud infrastructure startup to watch, it is, without question, DigitalOcean.
“There is no competition,” he told me. “We don’t think about the competition.”
That means no battling in the cloud price wars, no feature matching (DigitalOcean has not rushed to come out with a Docker container management service, for example), and no mad rush to set up a data center in every country. All DigitalOcean has to do is just keep it simple.
Access Industries led the new round in New York-based DigitalOcean, with existing investor Andreessen Horowitz also participating. The startup employs 150 people, and Uretsky wants to double that number.
Credit to - venturebeat
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