DigitalOcean has shown phenomenal growth over the past two-and-a-half years. DigitalOcean today hosts more than 163,000 web-facing computers, according to Netcraft‘s May 2015 Hosting Provider Server Count. This gives it a small lead over French company OVH, which has been pushed down into third place. DigitalOcean’s only remaining challenge will be to usurp AWS, which has been the largest hosting company since September 2012.
Although cloud hosting provider DigitalOcean started growing at a faster rate than Amazon Web Services towards the end of 2013, Amazon still has more than twice as many web-facing computers than DigitalOcean today. Nonetheless, DigitalOcean continues to challenge AWS by driving growth across its offerings.
AWS vs. DigitalOcean
Part of the appeal of using DigitalOcean could lie within its relative simplicity compared with Amazon’s bewilderingly vast array of AWS services (AppStream, CloudFormation, ElastiCache, Glacier, Kinesis, Cognito, Simple Workflow Service, SimpleDB, SQS and Data Pipeline to name but a few). Signing up and provisioning a new Droplet on DigitalOcean is remarkably quick and easy, and likely fulfills the needs of many users, according to Netcraft.
For a full hosting industry “Champions League” analysis by Netcraft, visit their website.
