DigitalOcean wants to gain more share of the startup market for its cloud infrastructure. The company announced today that it will be offering $250,000 in credits to all Y Combinator startups. The move, which puts DigitalOcean in direct competition with Microsoft, is good for developers because it gives them more options on which to build their products.
A Techstars-backed company, DigitalOcean is known for providing what it calls “simple cloud hosting, built for developers.” It claims to allow you to deploy an SSD cloud server in as little as 55 seconds. Developers can pay based on how much memory, processing power, storage, and data they’re going to need. Plans currently start at $5 per month and go all the way to $80 per month.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1871028,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,cloud,dev,","session":"D"}']This promotion comes just less than a year after Microsoft offered $500,000 in Azure credits to Y Combinator startups, an offer that included three years of Office 365 application usage, access to Microsoft’s developer staff, a free year of CloudFlare services, and free DataStax enterprise services. This isn’t the first time that DigitalOcean has done a promotion like this, as it regularly features campaigns to entice individual developers to check out its offering.
Of course, DigitalOcean and Microsoft aren’t alone in their pursuit of developers, and Y Combinator certainly is a good place to find them. Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services are also competing to host startups’ data and have even offered their own credit promotions of $100,000 and $15,000, respectively. By targeting programs like Y Combinator, DigitalOcean, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon can reach startups in the early years and get them hooked, which in turn could help to improve the services of these cloud platforms.
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Y Combinator president Sam Altman commented on DigitalOcean’s deal by saying, “lots of YC founders are already huge fans of DigitalOcean.”
DigitalOcean has raised $83 million in funding.
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