Cloud Provider DigitalOcean Continues To Grow, Adds Region In Singapore

Public cloud provider Digital Ocean is launching its latest region in Singapore to serve Asia Pacific. The company is using Equinix as its data center provider.

DigitalOcean is a relatively new cloud provider that first landed on the radar last August, due to explosive growth. The company has built its cloud to be speedy and developer-friendly, using solid state drives for hardware. This has helped its customers launch more than 1.1 million cloud servers. DigitalOcean has been expanding its infrastructure to keep pace with this growth.  The company believes that Asia Pacific is very likely to be the leader in growth over the next few years.  

“We have a large customer base in Asia, which will only increase with this announcement,” said CEO Ben Uretsky. “It will allow them to leap-frog outdated markets and take advantage of lower costs to building out infrastructure.”

“Singapore continues to invest in its infrastructure,” said Moisey Uretsky, DigitalOcean’s Chief Product Officer. “Five or six years ago, Hong Kong and Tokyo were higher on the list for an initial presence, now we believe it’s Singapore.”

Singapore is an extremely well connected region, allowing local users to significantly reduce their latency time. “Connecting to Amsterdam or San Francisco can cause 200ms of latency,” says Chief Operating Officer Karl Alomar. “This will drop latency to 30ms and allow large customers to expand their presence for greater distribution.”

Additionally, it chose Singapore as its first AsiaPac hub due to IPv6. “Obviously IPv6 is a big concern that we’ve been looking to move into,” said Moisey Uretsky . “That location has a lot of IPv6 adoption. We’re new to the cloud space, so one of the issues we’ve run into is the limited available of IPv4 space. ARIN is hinting at the fact that if anyone wants new allocation, they’ll need to be IPv6 ready. ARIN’s tried to move that ahead of time.”

The company has a couple of different regions. Its New York region also acts as HQ, and it has San Francisco and Amsterdam. In Singapore, it’s starting with a smaller footprint.

The company had accumulated 35,000 customers in a short span, launching recently in 2011. “We’ve certainly overcome the hump of the initial explosion,” said Moisey Uretsky. “We had to scale staff and infrastructure unexpectedly. Now we’re on top of it, instead of behind. That turning point was recent, in last December.”

The company attributes its growth to making cloud hosting easier than what’s currently offered on the market. The message has been working.

DigitalOcean says it will continue to invest heavily in their infrastructure as more data centers are added throughout the world. This is one of many exciting announcements to come within the first half of the year, as the company is expected to switch from the legacy IP address standard IPv4 to IPv6,and roll out new features such as Load Balancing, Object Storage, CDN, and 1-click installs of common frameworks.