DigitalOcean is a cloud hosting solution for small developers, looking for a cheap virtual private server to experiment, host web applications with low memory needs and run some cron jobs. While Linode and Rackspace provide cheap servers starting at $20 a month, DigitalOcean has two key advantages — it starts at $5 a month for a comparable offering, and it now uses SSD.
For $5, you get 20GB of SSD, 512MB of RAM and 1 core. Many other configurations exist. For example, for $20, you get 40GB of SSD, 2GB of RAM and 2 cores. DigitalOcean provides two separate node locations for now, in New Jersey and Amsterdam. Comparatively, Linode provides six different locations.
“Linode is a great competitor, they offer reliable Linux virtual servers and have been around for a long time,” said Mitch Wainer II, marketing and design guru at DigitalOcean. “But we are all about the user experience. Simple cloud hosting is our main driver and everything we develop supports that position,” he continued.
Wainer is also the one who did 100 push ups in front of our TCTV camera during New York Tech Day, in order to be featured on TechCrunch.
After registering with an email and password, the company will set up a server in 55 seconds. Tutorials and other educating features will help you get started if you don’t have a lot of experience in system administration.
All current customers can now migrate to the new offering with a single click in the admin panel. After graduating from TechStars Boulder and receiving funding from the TechStars Star Power Fund, DigitalOcean’s five employees relocated to New York.
While DigitalOcean is not a threat to big cloud hosting providers like Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute and Google App Engine, DigitalOcean targets small developers and it’s working quite well. Netflix or Reddit will keep using Amazon EC2, but DigitalOcean boasts more than 76,000 servers right now. Nothing to be ashamed of.
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Romain Dillet was a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch until April 2025. He has written over 3,500 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, AI, fintech, privacy, security, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With thirteen years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry — his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover Revolut, Alan and N26. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.