DigitalOcean, the world's second largest web hosting company, commissioned its first data centre in Bengaluru on June 1, with a seed investment of $5 million.

Targeted at the thriving start-up and developer community in India and co-located in Electronics City with Netmagic, the data centre is the New York-headquartered company’s 12th data centre globally and its 6th international location following Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt and Toronto.

Globally, 700,000 developers have deployed their cloud infrastructure on DigitalOcean and the company has 14 million servers hosted across all its data centres. As of December 2015, DigitalOcean had 58,000 registered users in India, and had registered growth of 2,500 new users every month, making India one of its top five markets after the US, the UK, Canada and Brazil.

“India is home to the fastest growing ecosystem of start-ups and entrepreneurs with around 4,000 start-ups launching this past year alone. Considering the number of software developers in India is set to grow to over 5 million by 2018, surpassing the number of developers in the US; its clear that India is one of the most important technology markets in the world,” Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Manager, DigitalOcean, told BusinessLine . “The Droplets, which is our company branded term for cloud servers, deployed in the data centre will have product and feature parity with those deployed in the other 11 data centres. The entire network is 40 Gigabit Ethernet enabled and will support tens of thousands of servers for customers in India,” he said.

Pricing for India is at par with the rest of the world, starting from $5 per month for a virtual server at the entry level up to $640. Billing is calculated on an hourly basis, guaranteeing that companies only pay for infrastructure resources that are actually being used. The flexibility to spin up servers in less than a minute via the company’s simple control panel or API is part of the DigitalOcean experience.

DigitalOcean recently partnered with Nasscom’s 10,000 Startups initiative and is offering all 3,500–4,000 start-ups that are a part of the initiative $10,000 in cloud credit for one year on its cloud computing platform.

Jayakumar, a former Amazon executive, said the company has already hired an executive to head partnerships and alliances, is in the process of hiring a sales team and actively scouting for an executive to head communities comprising software developers and start-ups who are customers and non-users visiting the DigitalOcean site for the tutorials on offer such as ones on Linux or how to set up a database server.

The company is due to launch a new storage product, which is already in private beta and will enable software developers to easily add extra disk space to their cloud servers through DigitalOcean’s simple control panel.

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