Cloud computing provider DigitalOcean is now growing faster than Amazon Web Services. Our December 2013 Web Server Survey showed a month-on-month gain of 6,514 web-facing computers at DigitalOcean; Amazon, meanwhile, grew by an almost as huge 6,269 web-facing computers. Together, the two companies accounted for more than a third of the internet-wide growth in web-facing computers in December.

DigitalOcean is now the 15th largest hosting company in terms of web-facing computers — a remarkable feat considering DigitalOcean had only 280 web-facing computers at the start of this year. Although Amazon is still the largest hosting company (by web-facing computers) and has nearly six times as many web-facing computers in total, the rapid growth at DigitalOcean may have startled those at Amazon who thought their major competitors were Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.

Whilst DigitalOcean competes directly with Amazon EC2, there are a number of Amazon Web Services which do not have a DigitalOcean equivalent. For example, Amazon offer file storage (S3), load balancing (Elastic Load Balancing), and a Content Delivery Network (CloudFront). However, by simplifying their offering — lack of support for Microsoft Windows is notable — and not offering enterprise features, DigitalOcean appeals to users with straightforward requirements such as small businesses and developers.

The cheapest virtual computer ("droplet") at DigitalOcean uses solid state storage and costs less than one cent per hour, about a third of the price of Amazon's cheapest on-demand instance. Unsurprisingly, such competitive pricing is attracting a large number of completely new customers as well as enticing other hosting companies' customers to switch to DigitalOcean.

Sites migrating from Amazon to DigitalOcean

818 existing websites migrated from Amazon to DigitalOcean this month, whereas only 88 sites moved in the opposite direction. Although the difference seems significant, the largest gains at DigitalOcean actually consist of new sites: DigitalOcean is currently hosting 490,000 websites, 120,000 of which were not present in last month's survey as per the Netcraft December 2013 Hosting Provider Switching Analysis.

Sites which migrated from Amazon to DigitalOcean include text messaging service Phonify (plus its API at api.phonify.io), several Windshield Guru sites, and real-time crowd photo sharing site zingly.

DigitalOcean growth trends and a timeline of events can be viewed at http://trends.netcraft.com/www.digitalocean.com