Companies Using DigitalOcean Spaces

Second place in a category with one winner

Object storage is the most concentrated market we track. Amazon S3 is on 659,040 domains and 86.13% of Cloud Infrastructure. DigitalOcean Spaces is second at 41,623 domains and 5.44%. Between them they are 91.56% of everything we detect in the category, and the distance from first to second is 15.8 to 1.

A gap that size usually means second place is a consolation prize. Here it means something more specific. Almost nobody arrives at Spaces by evaluating object stores on the merits and narrowly preferring it. They arrive having decided not to be on AWS, and then needing somewhere to put files. That is a different purchase from the one S3 wins, and it turns up in every other chart on this page.

Second in this category is not "nearly first". It is the default for people who already ruled out the default.

Small, young, and buying without a committee

60.43% of the matched companies employ 10 people or fewer. Add the 11-to-50 band and 85.78% of this base is under 50 staff. Companies above 1,000 employees number 225, 1.24%. Put the age chart beside it and the same buyer appears twice: 65.12% were founded in 2010 or later, 39.66% in the 2010s and 25.46% in the 2020s, with only 12.37% predating 1990.

Small and young is the shape of a product bought on a card. There is no vendor review for a storage bucket and no negotiation. It gets chosen the way a developer chooses a text editor, and it stays chosen until something breaks. That also sets the ceiling: this base grows by the number of new small companies starting on DigitalOcean, not by enterprise displacement.

What the named list actually shows

The 34 companies below are ordered by LinkedIn following, and they look nothing like the size chart. The Washington Post is here. So are Loews Hotels, Geberit, Tramontina, Pepsi-Cola Products Philippines and IIT Delhi. That contradiction is the most useful thing on this page, and the detection URLs resolve it. 10 of the 34 detections sit on a side property rather than the main site: careers.washingtonpost.com, reservations.loewshotels.com, presse.radio-canada.ca, crstrecruiter.crst.com, b2b.tramontina.com, shop.rodekruis.nl, rental.armac.com.br, sustainability.hirdaramani.com, iges.iitd.ac.in and info.lenord.fr.

A press room, a booking flow, two recruiting sites, a wholesale portal, a charity shop, an equipment rental portal, a sustainability microsite, a local government information site and a single university institute page. None of them is a corporate estate on DigitalOcean. Each is one team inside a large organisation that needed a bucket for one project. Sorting by company size finds those teams; it does not find the base.

A developer geography, not an enterprise one

The United States takes 6,434 of the 19,675 matched companies, 32.7%, and the United Kingdom 1,679 (8.53%). Then the order stops looking familiar. Brazil is third on 1,061 (5.39%) and India fourth on 917 (4.66%), both above Canada (3.73%), the Netherlands (3.72%) and Germany (3.72%). France is ninth at 1.98%.

Enterprise infrastructure profiles do not order that way; they put Germany and France near the top and Brazil well down. We cannot see what anyone pays, only where they deploy, so treat price sensitivity as the obvious reading rather than a measured one. The four large English-speaking markets reach 47.14% between them, which still leaves the majority of this base somewhere else.

The stack says independent web

Cloudflare fronts 62.63% of these domains. That is worth pausing on, because Spaces ships its own CDN and four of the five buckets we sampled were served through it. These sites bought storage from one vendor and delivery from another, on purpose. Google Tag Manager runs on 59.45% and Google Analytics on 57.44%, which is ordinary.

The row that names the base is further down. Next.js reaches 13.82%, effectively level with WordPress at 14.72%. Nginx at 19.2% runs about two and a half times as often as Apache at 7.79%. jQuery is still present on 55.1% and core-js on 44.08%, so this is not a uniformly modern estate, but a base where a React framework is as common as the world's most-used CMS is not an enterprise base and not a WordPress base either. It is people building their own thing.

What this page measures, and what it cannot

We identify DigitalOcean Spaces when a page publicly serves an image from a .digitaloceanspaces.com bucket. That one sentence sets the limit on every number above. A private bucket is invisible. So is a backup, a video pipeline, a server-side read, and any site serving only JavaScript or downloads from Spaces with no image on the page we reached. 41,623 is a floor. Whatever the real deployed number is, it is larger than this, and we would rather say so than imply precision we do not have.

We opened five randomly sampled live domains in a browser. All five loaded genuine Spaces buckets, across three regions and five different bucket names: lumaguide.sfo3.cdn, dte-live.fra1, logo-showcase.fra1.cdn, idxaddonsdocs.sfo3.cdn and cc-client-assets.nyc3.cdn. No shared template and no single cohort behind them, which is the failure mode to worry about with a signal like this one.

The bucket names are the tell. Five samples, five names, three regions. That is a real distribution rather than one company's assets turning up everywhere.

One honest caveat comes from those same names. A bucket called cc-client-assets reads like an agency serving files for its clients, which would mean a detection can record somebody else's Spaces account rather than the site owner's. Read this page as sites that load files from Spaces, not as a confirmed customer list. It is the same reason there is no switching table here: the signal drops out whenever a page renders without a Spaces image, so departures and redesigns look identical, and we will not publish the second as the first.

What to take from this

If you sell to this base, you are selling to a company of fewer than ten people, founded after 2010, more likely in the United States, Brazil or India than in Germany, running Cloudflare in front and either Next.js or WordPress behind. If you are sizing the market, use 41,623 as a floor for publicly visible usage and assume the true figure is higher. If you are comparing vendors, read the category table as a ranking rather than a ratio: Oracle Cloud sits tenth on 265 domains, which tells you how little the tail means. Our cloud provider traffic share analysis looks at the same market from the traffic side.