Today fast-growing public-cloud provider DigitalOcean announced it has opened its sixth data center, in Singapore.
“We wanted to find a location that’s going to service the Asia region and provide some better latency,” Moisey Uretsky, DigitalOcean cofounder and chief product officer, told VentureBeat in an interview.
New York-based DigitalOcean has “a pretty large contingent of customers in Singapore,” Uretsky said, along with substantial numbers in India, Indonesia, and Australia.
It was only two months ago that the company announced its fifth data center — its second one in Amsterdam. DigitalOcean also has data centers in New York and San Francisco. The second New York data center went online in July.
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The number of droplets, or virtual servers, DigitalOcean operates has been increasingly rapidly. The droplet count had passed 514,000 by October, and it has since more than doubled. On Monday it was past 1.12 million.
Also the company, which has raised just $3.2 million in venture funding, has been hosting more and more websites. The growth rate of web-facing computers, which reflects the number of machines acting as web servers, exceeded that of Amazon Web Services, which is the biggest public cloud out there today.
Amazon, to put DigitalOcean’s footprint expansion into perspective, has multiple data center facilities in nine geographical areas, with another area — Beijing — coming soon.
So even if DigitalOcean’s operations are a drop in the ocean relative to Amazon, the addition of more infrastructure to DigitalOcean’s portfolio helps the company. It can provide faster service for more developers globally. And the new data center in Asia adds seriousness to a service that aims for simplicity for individual users who want easy access to cloud resources, not enterprises seeking a smorgasbord of complicated features.
This latest data center expansion went smoothly since the company has an idea of how much hardware is necessary for the deployment, even with the fast growth, Uretsky said.
“It’s more like clockwork at this point,” he said.
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