DigitalOcean was founded in 2011 by Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Jeff Carr, Mitch Wainer, and Alec Hartman in New York City. The company was built on a simple premise: cloud hosting was too complicated and too expensive for individual developers and small teams. AWS had hundreds of services and confusing pricing; DigitalOcean offered VPS droplets starting at $5/month.
The company gained massive traction in developer communities through its clear pricing, clean interface, and outstanding documentation. DigitalOcean’s tutorials and community guides rank highly in search results for nearly every Linux and deployment topic — they’ve become a developer education resource in their own right.
DigitalOcean went public on the NYSE in 2021. The company serves over 600,000 customers in 185+ countries, with a focus on SMBs, startups, and individual developers. It’s deliberately not trying to compete with AWS for enterprise workloads — instead, it serves the “smaller fish” that hyperscalers often overlook.
The platform offers Droplets (VMs), Kubernetes, App Platform (PaaS), managed databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB), Spaces (S3-compatible object storage), and Functions (serverless). Pricing is transparent and predictable, which is a big deal for budget-conscious smaller customers.
Annual revenue is around $700 million, and the company has been profitable on an adjusted basis. DigitalOcean acquired Cloudways (managed hosting) in 2022 and Paperspace (GPU cloud for AI/ML) in 2023, expanding into adjacent markets.
Headquartered in New York City with a largely remote workforce, DigitalOcean employs around 1,200 people. The company has 15 data centers across 8 regions worldwide.
