What does DigitalOcean do?

A quick refresher: what’s a cloud provider?

A cloud provider gives developers a place to run their apps instead of doing it themselves.

Nobody says it better than myself, from the Technically post about AWS:

There are basically two ways to run an app - locally or over the internet. In the “old” days (i.e. high school), most apps ran locally - you’d get a copy of Excel via a CD, or download it from the web. All of the computing that Excel did - both the “graphical” frontend you interacted with, and all of the math that happened behind the scenes - took place on your laptop. Even if Excel did sometimes communicate with the web, it was only to pull in a data source and get updated. You usually paid a one time fee to buy the software, or licensed it yearly.

Things have changed a lot since then. Now, most software runs over the internet - you access it via your browser. And even if there’s a desktop app, a lot of the hard work is getting done via the internet. So what does it mean exactly for an app to run on the web?

Cloud-based apps have most of their code deployed on a big, powerful server in someone’s data center – not on your computer. So when you type a URL into your browser, you’re accessing that server over the web. And when you interact with an app – like sending an email in Gmail, or deleting a Tweet on Twitter – you’re again communicating with that server and sending it some work to do.

If a company is really big, or in the less likely scenario that they’re small but have very tight security requirements, there’s a chance that they’ll buy their own servers, set them up in a warehouse somewhere, network them together, and get them on the web. This is what everyone did before AWS existed, actually. But today, most developers don’t want to do that, and instead pay someone like DigitalOcean to do it for them. And thus, we have the cloud.