The world’s 2nd largest cloud hosting company plans to launch data center in Bangalore

A typical server room. Photo credit: Torkild Retvedt.

DigitalOcean today announced that it will launch its 12th global data center in Bangalore, India this year.

Headquartered in New York City, DigitalOcean is considered the second largest hosting company in the world.

Cloud hosting is a service that provides developers with servers to host software apps. For non-developers, the cool thing about this is that it’s kind of like having a giant open computer with tons of storage and the ability to easily access and share things. Developers pay based on parameters like the amount of storage they’ll need and the type of processing power they’ll be using. DigitalOcean is priced at US$5 a month and bills on an hourly basis.

This makes it easy for multiple apps to exist and run simultaneously. It also lets developers overcome the technology limitations of particular sites. For example, creating an independent – and free – WordPress blog might mean that there’s a limitation on the size of the files you can upload. While there are chances that you can overcome this by contacting the people that run WordPress’s servers directly, a DigitalOcean database will allow you to host the entire thing on one of its droplets.

The fact that the population of software developers in India is projected to grow to over 5 million by 2018 – overtaking that of the United States – is a big reason behind the new center, it said in a press relase.

It plans to invest up to US$5 million in building and getting it operational this year.

“We’re here to help the booming economy in India continue to grow and succeed,” said co-founder and CEO Ben Uretsky. “There’s no better way to build and launch your business than on top of cloud. Entrepreneurs should be focused on their product and keeping their customers happy, not managing hardware and servers – that’s where we come in.”

DigitalOcean also runs a community page where it provides developers with access to tutorials, other projects within its network, and an active forum.

Head in the clouds

Photo credit: Antonio Cinotti.

DigitalOcean was founded in 2011 by Ben Uretsky, Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman. It has received US$123.21 million in funding across four rounds from Andreessen Horowitz, Techstars, Crunch Fund, Access Industries, and IA Ventures.

In 2013, it opened a center in Amsterdam and expanded to London and Singapore in 2014. Last year, it launched yet another center in Toronto, Canada. Data centers are important because they house things like servers, storage devices, and cables.

Others in the sector include Amazon Web Services and Linode. The former is considered a better service to use for the many requirements of a large-scale project, while the latter is considered superior for the power it grants developers with specific tasks. DigitalOcean seems to fall more in the second category, and users have called it the best option for developers that work on several independent projects.