DigitalOcean let a developer rent a server for $5 a month and have it running in under a minute. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google fought over giant companies with long contracts. DigitalOcean went after the solo coder, the startup, and the small business, and it won them with plain prices and free tutorials. When it went public in March 2021, it was the rare cloud company small enough that its customers could read their own bill.

Brothers, Droplets, and Tutorials

Ben and Moisey Uretsky founded DigitalOcean in New York in 2011 with Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman. The brothers had run a web hosting business before. They called each server a droplet. The bet was that millions of developers wanted a cloud that was simple and cheap, without the hundreds of services big providers sold. Its free how-to guides drew huge search traffic and brought in new customers.

A Drop on Day One

DigitalOcean priced at $47 a share, the top of its range, raising about $775 million. It began trading on the New York Stock Exchange as DOCN on March 24, 2021. It opened at $41.50 and closed at $42.50, down about 10 percent. In 2023 it bought Paperspace to rent graphics chips for AI work, and DigitalOcean still trades on the NYSE as DOCN.

Cover: Two Boats in a Storm, Jules Dupré. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for small boats on a big sea (the ocean).