[joeblau]

It's an Infrastructure as a Service offering like Amazon's EC2, Linnode, Microsoft Azure, or Rackspace. Digital Ocean[1] has seen a sharp rise in popularity lately from developers due to ease of use and high performance VM's.

[1] - https://www.digitalocean.com/

[Thaxll]

I wouldn't say 'high performance VM's' but rather cheap prices.

[TallGuyShort]

I recognized their name from Packer.io, for which there is a DigitalOcean-specific builder: http://www.packer.io/docs/builders/digitalocean.html.

Given that it's a fairly new project and DigitalOcean is a relatively unknown cloud (relative to EC2 the other cloud-based builder in Packer.io), I wondered if they had also perhaps contributed heavily to the project. That's another good way to see a sharp rise in popularity from developers!

[jebblue]

Are their VM's performance on the same level as the others you listed or higher? What do you base the "high performance" comment on?

[latch]

They differentiate themselves by offering SSDs for all instance sizes + offering a very cheap level ($5). While SSDs won't improve all workloads, I think "high performance" claims compared to the typically IO-weak alternative isn't unreasonable.

Also, they're popular enough now that I'm surprised people haven't heard about them (especially after recent funding)...

[cs02rm0]

Yes, at least. For one I believe all DigitalOcean boxes have SSDs. I've found their boxes much better per $ than an EC2 VM. EC2 has a much wider tool suite and is possibly better if you regularly spin machines up and down. YMMV, but for just 'a box' they compete pretty well IMHO.