User:Abzter623594/sandbox/DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is New York based company that provides Virtual Private Servers (VPS) for deploying web application(s). DigitalOcean's claim to fame is the speed of their SSD images and the assertion that it takes only 55 seconds to setup a cloud based server.

History
DigitalOcean was born out of the idea that web infrastructure is generally complicated - hosting companies often have complex control panels, and an ideal hosting environment requires a good understanding of ideas like load balancing,distributed file systems, etc. Instead of building a service, founders of DigitalOcean decided to build a product to deliver the simplest possible virtual private server.

“ Virtualization enabled a new way of doing business and because customers needed to scale, a hosting company would also need to be able to scale easily to support them. I wanted to combine these two concepts of virtualization and hosting and build a company that was not just fully virtualized but also made virtualization simple.” - CEO, Ben Uretsky, DigitalOcean

Droplet
A virtual private server on DigitalOcean with a set of RAM, number of CPU's, storage and bandwidth constitutes as a 'Droplet'.

Private Networking
Private Networking allows Droplets to talk with other Droplets in the same data center. Traffic sent between Droplets across the private will not count towards the bandwidth costs and can be used for database replication, file storage, and similar host to host communication.

Global Transfer
This enables a copy of Droplet snapshot to all its data centers.Once the snapshots are transferred to all regions, the user is able to spin up image snapshot in region from the Droplet create page.

IPv6 Support
IPv6 addresses are now available for all Droplets in the Singapore Region, users can enable IPv6 during Droplet creation or on existing virtual servers without the need to reboot.

Team Accounts
Digital Ocean also allows team usage, useful for organizations where the billing info will be maintained by the owner(s). The owner can include software developers or system administrators or any other of their choice as the collaborators.

Platform supported
Currently DigitalOcean supports only Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu, Debian, CoreOS, FreeBSD, Fedora and CentOS in both 64 bit and 32 bit versions.

Comparison
The following table briefly compares different virtual private server providers for deploying Ruby on Rails application:

How to Set up a Droplet
A user can have as many Droplets he needs,incurring a cost with each new Droplet.A Droplet's size can be increased with increasing workload from the account settings. The following screencast describes how a Droplet can be setup:

[Credits : OceanCasts]

Growth
DigitalOcean today hosts more than 163,000 web-facing computers, according to Netcraft's May 2015 Hosting Provider Server Count and has grown to become the second-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers, followed by Amazon AWS.

Pricing model
A Droplet can be purchased on per hour or per month basis, with the pricing dependent on the RAM, processor power, SSD storage space and bandwidth usage. Each additional bandwidth transfer is charged at 2 cents per GB. The company leases capacity from existing data centers, including sites in New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Singapore and Frankfurt. Following are the current price configurations available: