Cloud computing provider: ‘’DigitalOcean now growing faster than Amazon’’.
For those who thought that Amazon
major competitors were Microsoft Azure and Rackspace, they are more or less
deceived. In fact Connectikpeople.co has captured a new Netcraft survey which
reveals that, cloud computing provider DigitalOcean is
now growing faster than Amazon Web Services.
Connectikpeople.co can observe
a month-on-month gain of 6,514 web-facing computers at DigitalOcean; Amazon, meanwhile, grew by an almost as huge 6,269
web-facing computers. Together, the two companies accounted for more than a
third of the internet-wide growth in web-facing computers in December 2013.
According to this survey, DigitalOcean is now the 15th largest
hosting company in terms of web-facing computers; a remarkable feat considering
DigitalOcean had only 280 web-facing computers at the start of 2013.
Amazon remains the largest hosting company (by web-facing computers) and
has nearly six times as many web-facing computers in total.
Connectikpeople.co also observed that, there are a number of Amazon Web
Services which do not have a DigitalOcean equivalent. For example, Amazon offers
file storage (S3), load balancing (Elastic Load Balancing), and a Content Delivery Network (CloudFront). ‘’However, by simplifying their offering , lack of support for
Microsoft Windows is notable , and not offering
enterprise features, DigitalOcean appeals to users with straightforward requirements such as small businesses and
developers’’.
According to the same survey, the cheapest virtual computer
("droplet") at DigitalOcean uses solid state storage and costs less
than one cent per hour, about a third of the price of Amazon's cheapest on-demand
instance.
Such competitive pricing seems attracting a large number of completely new
customers as well as enticing other hosting companies' customers to switch to
DigitalOcean.
818 existing websites migrated from Amazon to DigitalOcean this month,
whereas only 88 sites moved in the opposite direction. The largest gains at
DigitalOcean actually consist of new sites: DigitalOcean is currently hosting
490,000 websites, 120,000 of which were not present in last month's survey as per
the Netcraft
December 2013 Hosting Provider Switching Analysis.
Sites which migrated from Amazon to DigitalOcean include text messaging
service Phonify (plus its API at api.phonify.io), several Windshield
Guru sites, and real-time crowd photo sharing site zingly.
