DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a public cloud-infrastructure provider (NYSE: DOCN, founded 2011; CEO Paddy Srinivasan; ~1,462 employees as of Dec 31, 2025 per its FY2025 10-K) that reported $258M Q1 2026 revenue (+22% YoY) after crossing $1B in annualized run-rate revenue in December 2025. Droplets (VMs) start at $4/mo (512MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10GB SSD, 500GB transfer); a 4GB/2vCPU General Purpose Droplet runs $24/mo. Hetzner's equivalent CX22 runs roughly $4.50-5/mo, but Linode charges the same $24/mo for its comparable 4GB/2vCPU tier — no discount there. Moved to per-second billing January 1, 2026. Managed Kubernetes (DOKS) has a free control plane, with HA control plane an add-on at $40/mo (99.95% SLA) — cheaper than AWS EKS's flat $73/mo. Acquired GPU cloud Paperspace for $111M in 2023; AI customer ARR hit $170M in Q1 2026 (+221% YoY). Unlike Rackspace Spot, DigitalOcean offers no spot/preemptible instance pricing — every Droplet is billed at fixed on-demand rates. Current version/status: N/A — SaaS platform; moved to per-second Droplet billing Jan 1, 2026. License: proprietary SaaS. Pricing: Basic Droplet from $4/mo (1 vCPU, 512MB); 4GB/2vCPU General Purpose Droplet $24/mo; DOKS control plane free, HA control plane +$40/mo (99.95% SLA). Maintained by DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DOCN), CEO Paddy Srinivasan.
Pick DigitalOcean when you want managed Kubernetes with a genuinely free control plane and a $40/mo HA add-on, plus a UX simple enough for a two-person team to run production without a platform engineer. Don't pick it for pure price-per-core: Hetzner's CX22 (2 vCPU/4GB) runs about a fifth of DigitalOcean's $24/mo equivalent, and Hetzner wins outright on cost if you don't need US-region latency or DO's managed add-ons. Don't pick it for bursty batch jobs either — DigitalOcean has no spot or preemptible tier, so you pay full on-demand rate for every hour, where Rackspace Spot auctions capacity from $0.001/hr. DigitalOcean's own docs concede the tradeoff: you're buying convenience and support, not the cheapest compute on the market. Known weakness: No spot or preemptible instance pricing exists on the platform, so interruptible/batch workloads always pay the full fixed on-demand rate, unlike AWS/GCP/Azure or Rackspace Spot.
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