Top ten reasons why small and medium-sized businesses should adopt DigitalOcean as their cloud provider

At DigitalOcean, we understand the growth pains of businesses and their complex needs related to cloud infrastructure and acceleration. As a leading cloud provider that offers a range of cloud services, we can help your small and medium-sized business (SMBs) or startup accelerate innovation, improve operational efficiency, and ensure robust, scalable infrastructure, paving the way for business growth. With a focus on simplicity, affordability, and developer-friendly features, we stand out as the ideal choice for businesses looking to leverage the full power of the cloud.

Have a different cloud provider? You can still leverage the benefits of The DigitalOcean Innovate More program by engaging with one of our cloud experts. Request a cloud bill comparison with DigitalOcean and highlight any critical pain points around pricing or performance. We’ll show you how DigitalOcean can improve your cloud experience and reduce your existing bill—Scraper API cut costs by 250% by migrating from AWS to DigitalOcean. To make your cloud adoption pathway even easier, we offer environment assessment, cloud migration support, and cloud rewards to initiate the process.

Many of our customers apply a multi-cloud strategy with DigitalOcean to avoid vendor lock-in, improve risk management, leverage innovative solutions, reducing reliance on a single provider. A multi-cloud setup enables businesses to optimize costs and services by selecting cloud providers based on specific needs rather than a larger provider with unused services.

Here are ten reasons to consider DigitalOcean as your cloud provider of choice:

1. Developer-friendly environment

DigitalOcean’s developer-friendly environment, characterized by a simple user interface, robust API, and extensive documentation, empowers SMBs to deploy and manage applications quickly. This setup minimizes the entry barrier often encountered with other cloud platforms, enriching the developer experience and making cloud management less daunting for smaller teams.

For businesses, this translates into the capability to maintain a leaner, more efficient team, optimizing operational workflows and, consequently, reducing overheads. “DigitalOcean has enabled our non-DevOps tech staff to easily set up Droplets and configure the network easily,” says Gim Wee, CTO of Sans Paper.

2. Cost-predictability

Cloud bills are often complex and unpredictable, challenging teams to pinpoint areas for cost reduction. DigitalOcean’s affordable pricing and transparent billing provide a cost-effective solution that aligns well with the budget constraints of SMBs, ensuring customers get maximum value for their investment. The clear pricing structure eliminates any unexpected costs, making budget management more predictable and enabling better financial planning.

“The simplicity of the billing calculation is there. We can easily forecast and figure out what you’re paying for. In AWS, it is very difficult to figure out, especially with multiple regions,” says Ankit Aggarwal, CEO and CTO of EGLogics. “With DigitalOcean, as the CEO and CTO of the company, I can easily see what is being utilized and how to reduce my billing.”

Try the DigitalOcean pricing calculator to create a custom price quote based on your selection and usage of DigitalOcean services, helping you better understand the costs and align them with your budget.

3. Scalability

DigitalOcean makes it easy for businesses to scale their infrastructure up or down as needed. The platform lets you spin up new cloud servers and resources within seconds. This enables businesses to seamlessly accommodate growth, new product launches, seasonal traffic spikes, and other fluctuating demands without downtime or disruptions.

ScraperAPI, a proxy solution for web scraping used by over 10,000 companies, has scaled its business with DigitalOcean. “The best thing here is that if I want to scale up to even 2x, I can do it in about a minute,” says Zoltan Bettenbuk, CTO of ScraperAPI.

4. Powerful infrastructure

DigitalOcean offers robust global infrastructure and reliable network connectivity to businesses worldwide, with 15 distributed data centers across nine regions. This allows businesses to deploy resources close to their customers to reduce latency.

Benefit from exceptional performance with virtual machines, fueled by the latest iterations of Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc processors, coupled with top-tier storage solutions across all data centers. This infrastructure gives businesses the raw computing power needed for modern application development, machine learning, and other performance-critical workloads.

5. Wide range of services

DigitalOcean offers a comprehensive suite of products—across compute, managed hosting, storage, networking, and more—that cater to various SMB requirements. “We see that the response time from our server latency decreases when we use Premium CPU-optimized Droplets,” says Nick Zorin, Co-Founder and CTO of Jiji. “Aside from achieving low latency, the product impacts our backend. They are CPU bound, so it provides lots of additional processing power, which helps us.”

Here’s just a selection of DigitalOcean solutions available to SMBs:

• Droplets: Linux virtual machines that allow you to choose CPU plans, RAM, SSD storage, and transfer quotas to meet your needs.

• Kubernetes: A managed Kubernetes service that provides uptime, scalability, and portability for containerized applications with a free control plane.

• Functions: A serverless solution that runs code on-demand, enabling instant scaling without managing servers.

• App Platform: A fully managed platform for quickly building, deploying and scaling apps without worrying about infrastructure.

• Cloudways: Fully managed hosting that eliminates middle-of-the-night troubleshooting for your websites.

• Spaces object storage: Store and access vast amounts of data without compute server limits using S3-compatible tools.

• Volumes block storage: Add block storage volumes to expand capacity for compute servers as needed.

• Load balancers: Scale applications easily with load balancing that directs traffic to available resources.

• DDOS protection: Defend against network DDoS attacks with always-on and automated mitigation to ensure app uptime.

• Paperspace: Cloud GPUs provide accelerated computing power for AI/ML workloads with uncompromised performance.

6. One-Click App Marketplace

DigitalOcean’s One-Click App Marketplace enables SMBs to quickly launch and deploy pre-configured applications, saving time and effort associated with manual setup and configuration. You’ll find a vast array of software, streamlining the process of implementing common frameworks, services, and development stacks.

Popular development stacks llike MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, and Node.js.), MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, and Node.js.), and FARM (FastAPI, React, and MongoDB) are at your fingertips. This accelerates the deployment phase, allowing businesses to focus on optimizing their applications for their specific needs, speeding up the overall development cycle and bringing products or services to market faster.

7. Robust security measures

DigitalOcean implements robust security practices and features to safeguard customer data and applications. Servers come with built-in firewalls to control network traffic. Data at rest is encrypted by default for additional protection. Regular automated backups ensure disaster recovery capabilities. DDoS protection and two-factor authentication provide additional layers of security.

Compliance with AICPA SOC 2 Type II and SOC 3 Type II, and ISO 27001 demonstrate DigitalOcean’s commitments to security. Businesses can feel at ease knowing DigitalOcean has implemented industry best practices and passed rigorous audits.

8. Hassle-free cloud management

Configuring servers, deploying applications, and managing infrastructure can be complex tasks that divert focus from core business goals. DigitalOcean’s platform is designed for ease of use with features like automatic backups, monitoring, and customizable alerts. This enables SMBs to ensure their infrastructure is running smoothly without having to check dashboards constantly.

Recovery from outages or disasters is simplified with just a few clicks to restore from automatic backups or Snapshots. The focus is on making infrastructure management effortless so that businesses can concentrate on developing applications and innovating products rather than managing servers. DigitalOcean’s automation and simplicity provide true “set it and forget it” cloud infrastructure management.

“This feature gives us the confidence to make frequent releases without worrying that production might go down,” says Gim Wee, CTO of Sans Paper. “We are confident that we can recover it.”

9. Active and supportive community

DigitalOcean fosters an active community of developers, customers, and technologists. The DigitalOcean Community provides forums, tutorials, and resources for SMBs to learn, connect, and get help. You can participate in discussions, ask questions, or share expertise about cloud infrastructure, development, system administration, and more.

Experienced community members actively help troubleshoot issues and provide guidance. The collaborative community enables new users to gain proficiency with DigitalOcean’s platform quickly. It also allows SMBs to network and exchange ideas with fellow entrepreneurs and developers.

10. Educational resources

DigitalOcean offers a vast library of educational resources, including documentation, technical tutorials, startup guides, and community-led initiatives. Step-by-step tutorials provide training on crucial skills like cloud infrastructure management, DevOps, web development, and more. DigitalOcean’s startup building guides offer actionable advice on technical and business aspects of building a company—from cloud monitoring tools to product roadmap prioritization. Events like Hacktoberfest facilitate collaborative learning.

These educational resources accelerate success in the cloud, empowering businesses to skill up their teams with the knowledge needed to leverage cloud technology and work more productively.

DigitalOcean’s simplicity, affordability, developer-centric approach, and extensive features make it the consistent choice for SMBs seeking a reliable and user-friendly cloud provider. We’ve thought through your entire cloud journey. But nothing is more powerful than hearing the cloud success stories from our customers, like Loot.tv. Check out how DO is enabling customer success, and join us today.