Being one of the top companies in the world should be the result of decades of experience and hard work. But would you believe if you are told that a startup is holding the position of world’s third-largest web hosting company? Quite surprising, right? But it is not surprising for the founders of Digitalocean, the very company holding the mentioned title, Ben Uretsky and Moisey Uretsky, as it is their unique ideas and approaches they used to build their company so big.
Digitalocean is a New York-based company that the two brothers, Ben Uretsky and Moisey Uretsky, founded in 2011.
Early Life and Career
Ben and Moisey moved to the U.S. from Russia, when Ben was only 5, with their family. They started living at Brighton Beach and completed their high school education from Stuyvesant High School.
Ben is a Pace University pass out and holds a bachelor’s degree in information technology. He had the experience of 20 years in systems and network engineering in the infrastructure space at the time he started Digitalocean with his brother. He even started another company named, ServerStack, a managed hosting business, before he launched Digitalocean. He drove the inspiration to start the ServerStack from his previous company that got bankrupt due to its bad planning of product development.
Being the CTO of the company, he had gained enough knowledge and experience so that he could start a similar company and established ServerStack.
Moisey on the other hand, despite having an interest in computers went on to get a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from NYU. He also experimented with various startups and gained some expertise in the business incubation and venture investing activities, etc. His first startup was a big data company named CorreGroup.
Both, Ben and Moisey, ran ServerStack successfully for eight long years, and the annual revenue they generated always fluctuated between 3 to 7 million. But, with the rising competition, there was nothing new or unique that they were offering to their customers. So other similar companies, Rackspace being their biggest rival, were also getting their hold on the market.
During the same time, cloud computing started becoming a thing, and Amazon launched AWS. The rise of cloud and the success of AWS made the two brothers think for a new business, and they looked for an opportunity in the cloud.
Founding Digitalocean
As everyone, including Google and Microsoft, was running after the cloud, the two brothers thought of bringing something better and unique. They thought of building a cloud infrastructure that would help developers deploy and scale applications. So they founded Digitalocean in 2011.
To bring their plans into action, they hired Jeff Carr, who is also the co-founder of Digitalocean, for the engineering work. Carr built the entire backend for their company product singlehandedly himself. Later in 2012, Mitch Wainer and Alec Hartman also joined the founding team. Since the Uretsky brothers ran their previous business all by themselves, they did not know any of the venture capitalists. But for their new startup, they wanted a bigger scale and more investments. So in the same year, the co-founders participated in TechStars, the startup accelerator to raise seed funding for the company.
The Success
By August 2012, the company earned 400 customers and launched around 10,000 cloud server instances through the accelerator program. The next year, the company was offering SSD-based virtual machines and became one of the first cloud-hosting companies to do so. The company also established its first European data centre in Amsterdam, leading to becoming one of the fastest-growing companies. The company raised a US$3.2 million in July 2013, in its seed funding led by IA Ventures. In the series A funding, the company raised US$37.2 million in the next year.
In 2015, Digitalocean became the second largest hosting provider in the world, and it raised US$123.21 million in a round of funding. And by 2017, the company had opened twelve data centres in different parts of the world, including Singapore, Canada, London and India.
Digitalocean also hosts a forum for the developer-to-developer forums and tutorials on open source and sysadmin topics. Today, DigitalOcean has got 500 people working for it and records over $200 million in revenue annually.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.