Cloud hosting company DigitalOcean announced its third expansion into Europe today with a new data center in London. The company added two facilities in the Amsterdam region earlier this year. This new center will be located on the outskirts of London proper to meet the growing developer demand in the area.
London’s tech scene has been bubbling up for the past couple of years. A recent report from Bloomberg shows tech jobs have accounted for 30% of all new job growth in the city since 2009. According to London.gov the city now has 32 accelerators and incubators for start-up companies and more than 340 London-based tech companies have attracted investment of over £1.47 billion (or U.S. $2.9 billion). DigitalOcean estimates over 10,000 developers currently work in London.
This puts the city on the map for key user growth, but it also helps DigitalOcean with government regulations. Europeans may be a bit nervous about an American data center after revelations made by Edward Snowden about the NSA mining our data. The European Union’s Data Privacy Directive currently makes it difficult for data to be moved outside of the region. Any lag in data can cause a loss in users and potential revenue. According to this KissMetrics infographic, even a 1 second delay can result in a 7% reduction in users.
The new London location will also run IPv6 support on all “Droplets” – the company’s branded term for cloud servers. IPv6 is the latest version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. It can also be added to existing Droplets without the need for a reboot.
DigitalOcean raised $37.2 million from Andreessen Horowitz just a few months ago. Part of that money will now be used to expand to more data centers globally, including London. The European market is important to the company. According to CEO Ben Uretsky, about 20% of the company’s presence is outside the U.S. There are already two data centers in operation around Amsterdam. Headquartered in New York, DigitalOcean has data centers in San Francisco, Singapore and now in the UK as well.