DigitalOcean is a cloud platform for developers and small businesses. It offers virtual servers called Droplets, plus managed databases, Kubernetes, an app platform and storage.
Alongside Droplets, DigitalOcean offers Volumes Block Storage, which adds storage to your Droplets, and Spaces Object Storage for storing and accessing data in the cloud. Its Load Balancers are a fully managed, highly available service, and Cloud Firewalls give Droplets a network-based, stateful firewall. Reserved IPs are additional static IP addresses, and Private Droplets use VPC-only networking with no direct public connectivity. Monitoring tracks the health of your infrastructure and URLs and lets you set alerts.
DigitalOcean says Droplets suit individuals and small to medium-sized businesses, and calls them a popular choice for developers and startups. The use cases it lists include software-as-a-service, e-commerce sites, blogs and forums, media streaming, development and testing environments, and CI/CD pipelines. From the DigitalOcean Marketplace you can launch a Droplet that comes with apps and databases such as WordPress, Docker and MySQL already installed. For AI work, DigitalOcean describes its AI-Native Cloud as a way to build, train and deploy AI agents.
You can manage Droplets through the web interface, the API, the open-source doctl command line tool or the Terraform provider. The API manages Droplets, Spaces and other resources through conventional HTTP requests. Ticket-based support is available to all customers from the support portal. Paid support plans add faster responses and access to Solution Architects, with live chat on Standard and Premium and Slack support on Premium.
Droplets come in different sizes and types, from small shared servers to dedicated CPUs. Current prices are in the pricing box above.