eWEEK has started a new IT products and services section that encompasses most of the categories that we cover on our site. In it, we will spotlight the leaders in each sector, which include enterprise software, hardware, security, on-premises-based systems and cloud services. We also will add promising new companies as they come into the market.
Company Name: DigitalOcean (enterprise cloud platform provider)
Company description: DigitalOcean, a privately-held company headquartered in New York, provides a relatively easy cloud platform to deploy, manage, and scale applications of any size, removing infrastructure friction and providing predictability so developers and their teams can spend more time building software that customers love. DigitalOcean has 12 data centers globally in 8 regions. The company is led by Chief Executive Officer Mark Templeton.
Markets: Cloud Infrastructure/Enterprise
International Operations: DigitalOcean has data centers in:
- Toronto, Canada
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Amsterdam, Netherlands
- London, England
- Singapore, Malaysia
- Bangalore, India
- Domestic data centers are located in New York City and San Francisco.
Product and Services:
The company’s nickname for cloud servers, this is the core DigitalOcean product. It offers software developers high-performant Linux Servers at market-leading prices, with a hyper-focus on simplicity and user experience. It comes packaged with compute-heavy resources, bandwidth, and memory with the option to add resources like storage on demand as needed. 2018 pricing update here.
Highly available and scalable SSD-based offering that enables developers and businesses to easily attach extra disk space to Droplets.
A highly available product that enables developers and businesses to distribute traffic across their infrastructure to achieve 100 percent uptime for their production workloads.
A free, opt-in service that provides insight into resource usage across your infrastructure. Monitoring is composed of a few different components which, together, increase visibility into the operational health of your servers.
A free service that secures Droplets by reducing the surface area of a potential attack. Developers can deploy the service in seconds without installing or configuring any software and define what ports are visible on their Droplets to minimize risk.
Our object storage product, Spaces, provides a scalable and cost-effective way to address even the most complex storage needs within the same developer-friendly and easy-to-use UI that DigitalOcean is known for.
In May 2018, the company announced the early access of its managed Kubernetes product, which it claims is the easiest way to run containerized applications in the cloud. Designed for developers and businesses who want a simple way to deploy and manage container workloads, DigitalOcean Kubernetes removes the headache involved in setting up, managing and securing Kubernetes clusters while incorporating our trademark simplicity and ease of use.
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Insight and Analysis
Gartner Peer Insights has a half-dozen reviews of DigitalOcean’s software here.
ServerGuy.com has a comparison of DigitalOcean vs. AWS here.
Key excerpts:
“DigitalOcean sells standard VPS servers with a very flexible provisioning and billing. The majority of the audience is developers who want to deploy ‘servers’ and applications to test it out.
“DO focuses on selling cheap compute droplets, which is one of AWS’s many products.
“Since AWS has the ‘everything for everyone’ approach, it sells multiple products in multiple categories. You can choose various products ranging from storage, networking, to database and compute.
“Both are easy to set up. They are straightforward. AWS and DigitalOcean have an API that you can configure to add/launch/destroy/delete your projects. But DigitalOcean has a nicer UI for launching droplets.”
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Several first-person reviews of the DigitalOcean are available here in IT Central Station.
Key Excerpts:
Valuable Features: Simple no-nonsense, super fast, and reliable Linux based servers on the cloud.
Improvements to My Organization:
- Ability to spin up additional production servers in seconds
- Testing new systems and setup is super affordable
- Instantly go global US/UK/Amsterdam
Room for Improvement:
- Backup/snapshots does not always restore properly
- Would be nice to build servers direct from ISOs
- Custom Kernels can be tricky
Use of Solution: 5 months
Deployment Issues: Deployments are super simple.
Stability Issues: Stability has been rock solid.
Scalability Issues: Not for our needs.
Customer Service: Very responsive. Not always helpful.
Technical Support: OK, not great. Then again, I am a fairly advanced user.
(To read the full review, go here.)
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Current DigitalOcean customers include:
- High Fidelity
- Houseparty
- Cloudways
- Preteckt
- Content Ignite
- Crowd Content
Delivery: Cloud only
Pricing: Subscription based; breakdown can be found here.
Other key players in this market:
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud Platform
- Microsoft Azure
- VULTR
- Linode
Contact information for potential customers:
Resources:
If you would like to have your company’s listing included in eWEEK’s new Product Overview & Analysis library, email cpreimesberger@eweek.com.
