2022 demonstrated the strength of small businesses

2022 was a year marked by instability around the globe, but through it all I continue to be inspired by the resiliency of small and medium businesses and how they innovate even during trying times. At DigitalOcean, we’re more committed than ever before to being the ideal cloud for SMBs, from SaaS applications and streaming businesses to agencies and eCommerce stores. This year, we made some important steps towards that goal, including the acquisition of Cloudways, a leading managed hosting provider that will enhance DigitalOcean’s ability to serve small business owners at every stage of their business journey.

We increased our global presence with the launch of our Sydney data center in November, and deepened our social impact work with the formal launch of DO Impact in April 2022. We launched new products and features targeted at the needs of small businesses, including DigitalOcean Functions, a high availability control plane for DigitalOcean Kubernetes, and DigitalOcean Support Plans. We also introduced the Partner Pod, our new partner program which gives small businesses even more ways to work with us.

DigitalOcean’s community continued to show up for each other in 2022. Employees donated both time and money to causes important to them, and our employee resource groups hosted events throughout the year to connect with each other and the community.

Here are some more highlights from 2022:

Enhancements aimed at small businesses

We made many important updates to products in 2022 to better serve the needs of growing businesses and our global customer base. These included the launch of DigitalOcean Functions, providing new ways for customers to get their applications into the cloud. We also made key updates to DigitalOcean Kubernetes, including launching a high availability control plane and adding an egress gateway for DigitalOcean Kubernetes, giving our customers even more confidence in leveraging our Kubernetes offering to deploy their code in the cloud.

Small businesses often need dedicated support, so we added two new support levels to DigitalOcean’s Support Plans, which enable users to get faster response times and dedicated support from technical managers. We’ve also introduced enhancements to Spaces Object Storage and Volumes Block Storage that better address the increasing needs of our customers’ applications.

In databases, we launched a new Dedicated CPU Managed MongoDB that boosts the performance of MongoDB and enables users to migrate databases from any source to DigitalOcean Managed Databases with minimal downtime. We also made enhancements to the DigitalOcean Marketplace with SaaS Add-Ons, which enable builders to quickly add new capabilities to their Droplets, Kubernetes clusters, apps, or business operations. DigitalOcean Uptime is a new tool that enables businesses to be alerted when assets are down, so they can provide their own customers with an excellent experience.

Expanding our commitment to community

Following our launch of DO Impact in 2022, we also made donations to organizations including TSI, which works to make STEM education available in all communities, The Bronx Community Foundation’s Digital Equity Initiative, The Edhi Foundation, which has been providing on the ground relief from the floods in Pakistan, and several others doing good in their communities.

To further our goal of providing quality educational content for developers and builders, we acquired learning-focused websites CSS-Tricks and JournalDev, and continue to make their tutorials free and available to anyone looking to learn and grow.

We hosted the 9th annual Hacktoberfest, which saw over 140,000 contributors come together for the open source community, and DigitalOcean’s virtual conference, deploy, brought together builders from around the globe to discuss topics such as reducing burnout while building your business, unlocking synthetic datasets, and scaling in the cloud during uncertain times.

Looking forward to 2023

As we look to 2023, I feel the same optimism that SMBs reported to us in our recent Currents report, where 63% stated that they feel positive about next year. It is an honor to serve our customers as they work to achieve their dreams, and in 2023 we look forward to empowering more of you to grow through product enhancements, support, educational content, and more. Thank you for allowing DigitalOcean to be the place where you come to test your ideas, build your businesses and realize your dreams!

Happy New Year!