DigitalOcean was founded in 2011 and has grown from a typical virtual private server host with a single data center to a developer-friendly cloud service provider with data centers around the world. Netcraft noted that in December 2012, DigitalOcean hosted around 100 web-facing servers; in March 2018 that number exceeds 400,000, making DigitalOcean the third largest host of web-facing instances.

What makes DigitalOcean popular among developers, apart from its prices, is its performance; DigitalOcean was one of the first hosting companies to offer all solid-state drives (SSD) for its instance storage. It is simple-to-use web-based control panel, alongside the ability to launch instances from its command-line interface, and also a powerful API, which allows you to launch instances (which DigitalOcean calls Droplets) from within your applications, and also tools such as Ansible.

You can sign up for an account at https://www.digitalocean.com/. Once you have signed up, the first thing that I recommend you do before proceeding with anything else is to configure two-factor authentication on your account.

You can configure 2FA by going to your settings in the DigitalOcean control panel and then clicking on Security, which can be found in the left-hand-side menu; once there, follow the onscreen instructions to enable 2FA on your account.