In 2003, Ben Uretsky and Moisey Uretsky, who founded the ServerStack, a managed hosting business, wanted to create a new product which would combine web hosting and virtual servers and target entrepreneurial with software developers.[8][7] In 2011, the Uretskys founded DigitalOcean, a company which would provide server provisioning and cloud hosting for software developers.[9]
In 2012, the Uretskys met co-founder Mitch Wainer following Wainer's response to a Craigslist job listing.[10] Mitch Wainer company launched their beta product in January 2012.[11] In mid-2012, the founding team consisted of Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman. DigitalOcean accepted the offer of TechStars 2012's startup accelerator in Boulder, Colorado, and the founders moved to Boulder to work on the product.[12] At the end of the accelerator program in August 2012, the company had signed up 400 customers and launched around 10,000 cloud server instances.[12][13] On January 16, 2018, new droplet (virtual machines) plans were introduced.[14] In May 2018, the company announced the launch of its Kubernetes-based container service.
In June 2018, Mark Templeton, former CEO of Citrix, replaced co-founder Ben Uretsky as the company's CEO. In July 2910, Yancey Spruill, former CFO and COO of SendGrid (a fellow Techstars company), replaced Templeton as CEO.[18] Bill Sorenson, former CFO of EnerNOC, was appointed as the company's new CFO.
In September 2021, DigitalOcean announced plans to acquire Nimbella, a serverless startup.[5] In March 202, the company acquired CSS-Tricks, a learning website for front-end developers.[19] [20]
In May 2022, the company released DigitalOcean Functions. Based on technology acquired from Nimbella and the open source Apache OpenWhisk project, DigitalOcean Functions is a serverless platform that allows developers to build and run applications without having to manage servers.
In August 2022, DigitalOcean acquired Cloudways, a Pakistani cloud hosting service provider, for $350 million.