DigitalOcean, the quickly growing SDD-only web hosting and cloud infrastructure provider, launched its European flagship data center in Amsterdam today in an effort to keep up with growing demand for its services. The company also says it plans to launch in Singapore within the next two months and has already shipped equipment there to get its Asian operations off the ground.
The new Amsterdam data center (Amsterdam 2) is actually DigitalOcean's second one in the city. Both data centers are hosted by Telecity but are located in different buildings. Unlike Amsterdam 1, the new center features private network and an improved network design based around high-end Juniper routers. While the company plans to offer these features in all of its locations in the near future, they are only available in its New York 2 and Amsterdam 2 locations for now.
Today's expansion will allow DigitalOcean to finally offer the ability to launch instances in Europe again. For a few weeks now, starting instances (or 'droplets,' as DigitalOcean calls them) in Amsterdam 1 wasn't possible, because the company wasn't able to keep up with demand and ran out of capacity there. With the launch of the new data center, the company's CEO and co-founder Ben Uretsky told me last week, these kind of capacity crunches in Europe should now be over.
While Brazil remains the top-requested location for DigitalOcean's next expansion, the company will actually first go to Singapore. Brazil is a challenging market for DigitalOcean, Uretsky said, because of its high import taxes and poorly laid out network infrastructure. The company is considering the U.K. as its next target for its expansion after Singapore, though.
According to Uretsky, scaling remains DigitalOcean's main problem. Its latest funding round allowed the company to acquire about 130,000 new IP addresses, but its capacity is often pushed to the limits. With the new data centers coming online and new network and financing agreements in place, however, he thinks the company is on track to be able to meet customer demand going forward.
Looking ahead, the company plans to roll out IPv6 support across its locations, something its users have been asking for since the company started gaining traction earlier this year. While Uretsky wouldn't say when exactly this feature will launch, it doesn't seem like users who really need this capability will have to wait more than a few weeks.
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