Learning from the best is a new weekly feature, we’re starting today, where we take a look at some great companies out there. The notable thing about the social media and internet in general, is that many successful companies are so open with their tactics. Today we’ll have a look at Digital Ocean.
Ease of use
We had to test a WordPress installation today, so without wanting to touch the production server, I quickly fired a new Digital Ocean droplet (as they call their clusters). The process was very easy, and not because I have done it a few times in the past. The required inputs from me were minimal, the workflow was intuitive, and even fun.
Tutorials
It has been quite a few years since I last installed WordPress, and I could not remember a thing. So I googled it, as any good developer would do. The top results were tutorials from Digital Ocean. I did not put the digital ocean in the Google search. So I followed their tutorials by the letter, and all went (almost) smoothly.
There are 1050 tutorials at the moment on Digital Ocean. The ones I have looked at (and I have looked at many) are correct, up to date and professional. They are practical, with step by step advice, and cover a wide range of topics related to hosting and deployment. What a great way to develop your SEO! They even offer $50-$200 for tutorial writers.
Target market
Surely, creating all this useful content must have been their strategy to put themselves in the map of a very competitive industry, such as hosting. They harnessed the power of Google and the fact that their target market, developers, use Google many times a day, to position themselves perfectly.
The Digital Ocean website receives over a million of unique pageviews a month, and most of those are from their clients, or clients to be. What a great way to reach your prospects.
Pricing
Another strong point is their starting price. A monthly fee of $5 for 500MB memory and 20GB storage was original and clever at the beginning. At the time Heroku offered (and so does) a free tier, but the next paid tier increased steeply. At least for me it was quite useful, and I signed up straightaway.
Design
Their design has been a success too. Minimalistic, with plenty of white space, no backgrounds, it just fits my ideas of a well designed web app. The pages do not have decorative element, it’s all functional, and user friendly. Their design made even historically clunky processes, such as DNS, quite simple, a piece of cake.