What does DigitalOcean do?

The cloud provider for the people

The TL;DR

DigitalOcean is an independent infrastructure as a service provider; you can think of them as AWS or GCP, but for the people.

• DigitalOcean rents out servers (and software on those servers) to developers building applications on the web

• Unlike AWS, GCP, or Azure, DigitalOcean is a standalone company not owned by a massive trillion dollar tech giant

• DO made a name for themselves by prioritizing simplicity and user experience instead of sheer power and number of products

DigitalOcean went public in 2021 and did almost $700M in revenue in 2023 (last full year of data), so they’re far from a small company. But as we’ll see, they approach things a bit differently than your average cloud provider.

Note: I am a former DigitalOcean employee but do not currently own and have not ever owned any shares.

A quick refresher: what’s a cloud provider?

A cloud provider gives developers a place to run their apps instead of doing it themselves.

🧠 Jog your memory 🧠

Want a refresher on what the cloud is, and how developers use it? Check out the Technically post on cloud and also, perhaps, if you’re feeling spicy, the Technically post on web apps.

🧠 Jog your memory 🧠

Nobody says it better than myself, from the Technically post about AWS:

There are basically two ways to run an app - locally or over the internet. In the “old” days (i.e. high school), most apps ran locally - you’d get a copy of Excel via a CD, or download it from the web. All of the computing that Excel did - both the “graphical” frontend you interacted with, and all of the math that happened behind the scenes - took place on your laptop. Even if Excel did sometimes communicate with the web, it was only to pull in a data source and get updated. You usually paid a one time fee to buy the software, or licensed it yearly.