DigitalOcean announced in July that it will be opening a new London data center. The facility will be located on the outskirts of the city and will be running the latest version of the company's back-end code base, allowing all of the data center's servers to have IPv6 support.
The London data center will receive many benefits from the use of the new codebase, including an overall more secure architecture. It also allows actions to be initiated without having to power off a server and IPv6 to be installed onto existing servers without having to reboot.
DigitalOcean's London data center is meant to meet the growing demand from developers in the area. Research by the company estimates that more than 10,000 developers call the city home, and London's tech scene has been rapidly expanding. A recent Bloomberg study found that 30 percent of all new job growth in the city since 2009 was from technology positions. Almost $3 billion in investments have been gained by the more than 340 London-based tech companies between 2010 and 2013.
"As the U.K. is experiencing a boom in both tech and entrepreneurship, it is a top priority for DigitalOcean to ensure that innovative companies there have the tools and support they need to continue to grow and succeed," said DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky. "This new data center was created to bring the best cloud infrastructure experience possible to developers in this fast-moving and exciting region."
DigitalOcean, while based in New York, has been expanding its service footprint into Europe in recent months. Earlier this year, the company added two Amsterdam data centers. Opening a U.K. data center seemed ideal, as it allowed DigitalOcean to comply with the European Union's Data Privacy Directive, which makes it difficult to move data outside of the region.
