In 2011, brothers Ben and Moisey Uretsky, along with Mitch Wainer, Jeff Carr, and Alec Hartman, were running a traditional managed hosting company in New York. They watched in frustration as Amazon Web Services became increasingly bloated, complicated, and impossible for individual developers to configure without dedicated DevOps teams. The founders envisioned a cloud server platform so simple that a developer could spin up a virtual server in under a minute with just a credit card. Entering the Techstars Boulder accelerator in 2012, they pioneered SSD-based virtual machines—calling them **Droplets**—for a flat $5 per month. In January 2013, tech evangelist John Carmack tweeted about DigitalOcean's speed, igniting a viral developer explosion that transformed DigitalOcean into a global cloud powerhouse.