DigitalOcean growing faster than AWS

DigitalOcean (DO) is VC funded so its very different from some "hoster" started by some guy with rented server(s). DO can grow really quickly due to that funding which you need to achieve economies of scale. The biz has thin margins and you need volume to achieve profitability.

Ben Uretsky, the CEO of DO is also the CEO of ServerStack. I think I've heard that DO is a sister company of ServerStack, but I could be wrong. The two use the same datacenters: https://www.serverstack.com/infrastructure So very likely one is piggybacking off the other and they're able to get much better prices that way through higher volume.

DO also developed their own control panel so they don't have to pay a licensing cost. Most "hosters" use WHMCS and SolusVM. Granted those aren't hugely expensive but it adds cost if your talking about a $5 VPS. Also the custom panel allows them to further automate most everything.

It can't hurt that DO is also giving away tons of free credit to new sign ups. They must be getting tons of new customers from that alone.

No other host has grown faster than amazon, so it probably is a great thing. The reason DigitalOcean can continue the fast growth is in a strong part due to the community it has built. DigitalOcean is an unmanaged service that provides a vast amount of educational resources to its users: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ The DigitalOcean community is comprised of its articles, a question section, and an IRC channel. The difference between DigitalOcean and other "hosters", is that DigtalOcean, as an unmanaged host, has set up an ecosystem that allows the users themselves to set up, scale, and maintain their servers.