DigitalOcean Is Now the Third Largest Hosting Provider, WordPress Droplets Account for 23%

In just under two years, DigitalOcean has managed to sail past competitors to become the world’s third largest hosting provider, according to a recent report published by Netcraft. The company’s SSD-based cloud hosting products cater to developers and other tech-savvy customers.

As of November, DigitalOcean counts a total 187,866 active users running a cloud server (or “Droplet”), thanks in large part to the company’s affordable pricing structure, which starts at $5/month.

How many DigitalOcean customers are running WordPress?

I spoke with Tyler Hoffman, a DigitalOcean representative, who reports that the the company hosts 13,000 active 1-click WordPress droplets, a number which continues to grow each day. “These WordPress sites account for 3.74% of our total active ‘droplets,'” he said.

These figures are based solely on users who have deployed DigitalOcean’s 1-click WordPress images and do not take into account any custom WordPress images. The total number of WordPress droplets is likely much higher. In fact, at the end of October, Netcraft reported that “more than 23% of the active sites hosted at DigitalOcean are running WordPress, compared with less than 10% of all other active sites around the world.”

At the moment, the company doesn’t seem to be actively trying to attract WordPress customers. Nevertheless, Hoffman reports that WordPress customers are on the rise. In October 2014, DigitalOcean users launched an average of 220 WordPress droplets per day via the 1-click method, roughly 6,600 per month. As WordPress currently powers more than 23% of the web, it will be interesting to see how much of that market the company will be able to capture.

Netcraft reports that DigitalOcean is currently netting more than 68,000 new customers per month. In general, developers seem to appreciate the speed of deployment, the simplicity of the hosting interface, and the API for managing droplets and resources.

The company is still relatively new to the hosting industry and caters heavily to developers, which makes its rise to being the third largest provider all the more remarkable. Although DigitalOcean’s products don’t necessarily cater to the average non-developer WordPress user, the company seems to have no problem adding WordPress customers to its user base.