Deliver exceptional experiences with our newest data center in Sydney - SYD1

The cloud computing market in Australia & New Zealand is growing rapidly—in November 2022, DigitalOcean announced our newest data center in Sydney - SYD1. Since the launch of SYD1, we’ve been pleased to serve many growing startups and SMBs with customers in Australia, and in this blog, we will go over five key ways DigitalOcean’s Sydney data center provides exceptional experiences for startups and SMBs looking to scale.

1. Excellent network connectivity and performance improvements

The Sydney data center is designed, implemented, and operated like a global telecommunications service provider-style network built to reduce latency - or the time it takes from when the user requests to the time it takes for the response to get back to that user. Our internal performance tests have shown a 6x reduction in round trip time for customers using the Sydney data center from major cities in Australia compared to DigitalOcean’s Singapore data center. Low latency is essential for businesses that host interactive applications such as multiplayer gaming, live streaming, audio/video conferencing, and retail analytics.

The Sydney data center is connected to DigitalOcean’s private internet edge and backbone network, an information superhighway that connects DigitalOcean’s global data centers and encrypts all the traffic for additional security. The Sydney data center is connected with the lowest latency links to California and Singapore with end-to-end physical path diversity. Customers accessing your application hosted in the Sydney data center from Singapore or California can get a superior experience as their requests will be routed on DigitalOcean’s private network internationally instead of routing over the public internet, which is an inherently unreliable channel. The end-to-end physical path diversity ensures that even if a submarine cable gets damaged, the traffic gets re-routed on an alternate path, ensuring that the overall connection stays uninterrupted. To boost domestic connectivity, the Sydney data center is directly connected to Perth using diverse segments, meaning connections that run along the continent over land and underwater.

The Sydney data center uses a blend of peering and transit connectivity from major providers, which provides single-hop access to over 75% of residential service provider networks in Australia, with total connectivity approaching 1Tbps. Single-hop access means less re-routing, which means your data can reach its destination faster. DigitalOcean is committed to providing startups and small businesses with simple, cost-effective solutions -so our customers get all the benefits of this excellent connectivity by default without having to pay extra or decide between various routing options.

2. Latest network design that can help you scale

The Sydney data center is built from the ground up with a brand-new network design and architecture that can scale to handle the growing traffic to your applications. The data center’s network design is modular rather than monolithic, which allows separate devices (core routers, switches, etc.) to perform a specific task instead of having a single device perform multiple networking functions as with a monolithic design approach. In the event of a hardware malfunction, the modular design limits the reach of a faulty device can cause - minimizing the blast radius. It also allows for easy failovers, which can be carried out in seconds, preventing large-scale network outages that can impact our customers and their end customers.

The modular network choice also increases the overall resiliency of our data centers so we can provide our customers with a great experience. The Sydney data center also uses the latest generation 400G ethernet-enabled routers, which ensure that we can help businesses with high bandwidth/throughput requirements quickly scale and grow on our platform.

3. DigitalOcean offers a complete solution

DigitalOcean’s Sydney data center is a one-stop solution that offers you all the products you need to build and scale your application, including Droplets, DigitalOcean Kubernetes clusters, Volumes Block Storage, Spaces Object Storage, and Managed Databases. Unlike many cloud providers that provide a limited set of products in any given data center, DigitalOcean’s goal is to provide access to all the products you need in the same data center. This enables you to provide your customers with an exceptional experience while avoiding unnecessary expenditures such as egress costs or paying for extra staff to architect a solution to work around the gaps in a cloud provider’s offering.

4. Reliability and privacy for your startup

The Sydney data center has plenty of capacity to scale, so you can seamlessly provision new instances as the traffic to your application grows. The data center has access to 54MW of power with backup UPS and generator systems, which will seamlessly kick in to provide backup power. This means your applications keep running smoothly in case the main power from the utility companies gets interrupted. All the equipment is deployed in a secure cage with floor-to-ceiling panels and has seven layers of physical and biometric security procedures to ensure complete privacy and security. The hardware racks are custom manufactured for DigitalOcean and have locking cables to avoid issues arising due to human error.

“I was excited to hear that we’ll have DigitalOcean’s reliability coming onshore to Australia. That will make a big impact for local businesses.”—Scott Purcell, Co-Founder, Director, Man of Many

5. Predictable pricing as you scale

DigitalOcean’s philosophy of flat pricing across all data centers is one of the key reasons startups and SMBs love our platform. Unlike other cloud providers that charge a premium for regional pricing, with DigitalOcean, you will enjoy the same low-cost pricing across all data centers. With affordable price points, industry-leading bandwidth pricing, and flat pricing across all data centers, DigitalOcean removes the guesswork/billing surprises often associated with other cloud providers. According to Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study, a business using DigitalOcean finds a payback of its investment in less than six months. The simple pricing structure means you don’t need to allocate valuable resources for conducting lengthy reviews or hiring external consultants to analyze your monthly spending, so you can focus on growing your business and not costs.

DigitalOcean is focused on making it easier for businesses to deploy and scale their applications, and we are incredibly excited to see what we can build together in Australia. If you want to discuss using DigitalOcean in your business, click here to contact our sales team.