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Cloud hosting startup DigitalOcean has grown extraordinarily over the past six months. In December 2012, DigitalOcean had just over 100 web-facing computers; in June 2013, Netcraft found more than 7,000. DigitalOcean provides SSD-backed virtual computers which are available by the hour. The cheapest droplet, as it refers to virtual computers, costs less than a cent per hour, about a third of the price of Amazon’s cheapest option. DigitalOcean claims to be able to provision a new droplet within 55 seconds in one of three locations: New York, Amsterdam (available since January 2012), and San Francisco (April 2013).

Fastest growing hosting providers by web-facing computers, December 2012 to June 2013.

Over the last six months DigitalOcean had the fourth largest growth in web-facing computers with only Amazon, Alibaba, and Hetzner ahead of it. DigitalOcean’s more than 50-fold growth makes it the 72nd largest hosting provider in the world by web-facing computers, up from 549th in December and 102nd last month. DigitalOcean had the second largest growth of web-facing computers last month — it was one of only five hosting providers to grow by more than 1,000 web-facing computers — and it contributed 10% of the total growth worldwide.

Sites (hostnames) switching to DigitalOcean from notable providers, May 2013 to June 2013

As shown in the table above, websites are migrating to DigitalOcean from its better known competitors; last month almost 1,500 websites moved from Rackspace and 1,000 from Shore Network Tech (Linode). NewsBlur, a news aggregation website, is one of the busiest sites hosted at DigitalOcean. Several websites belonging to the Ruby on Rails project including guides.rubyonrails.org and api.rubyonrails.org are now hosted at DigitalOcean after recently moving from Linode.

Operating System share by web-facing computer at DigitalOcean in June 2013

DigitalOcean provide a number of template images in order to create a droplet, including five Linux distributions: Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Arch Linux and Fedora. Of the web-facing computers presenting a distribution-specific server banner, Ubuntu is by far the most popular: over 70% of web-facing computers with an identifiable distribution are using the Debian-derived distribution. Microsoft Windows is conspicuous by its absence; DigitalOcean has postponed plans to support Windows citing complexities including licensing and security concerns.

DigitalOcean — 2012 graduate of the Tech Stars startup accelerator — has had difficulty getting access to a sufficient quantity of IPv4 addresses in Amsterdam which meant that it was uneconomic to provide smaller droplet sizes. In May 2013, DigitalOcean announced the availability of further IP addresses for smaller droplet sizes in Europe, re-enabling the creation of 512MB and 1GB droplets.

Netcraft provides information on the Internet infrastructure, including the hosting industry, and web content technologies. For information on the cloud computing industry visit www.netcraft.com.