One of the mundane but crucial tasks for every developer is properly handling backups. Cloud providers have outages, and data is sometimes lost. If that data is important to a developer's application -- say, a mission-critical database -- a lack of backups will be an unmitigated disaster.
Most cloud providers offer their own backup services for a fee, but that's often not good enough for a few reasons. First, it's common to have data spread across multiple clouds or providers. A developer might run an app on Amazon Web Services (AWS) but use a managed database provider outside of AWS, for example. Relying on built-in backups for each service is a fragmented and messy approach.
Second, developers often have little or no control over these built-in backups. Want to back up your database every day? You might not be able to, depending on your cloud provider.
And third, relying on the same cloud provider for your data and backups is a case of putting all your eggs in one basket. A widespread outage could wipe out both, leaving a developer high and dry.
DigitalOcean (DOCN -0.54%) offers a standard backup service for its virtual machines, but it leaves a lot to be desired. The cloud provider performs backups only once per week, and enabling the feature tacks on 20% to the cost.
The company's Volumes product, which provides extra storage for virtual machines, doesn't offer automated backups at all. DigitalOcean's managed databases are backed up once per day, but customers have no control over that process.
The company's mission is to make cloud computing simple, but its backup features certainly don't fulfill that mission. The company is apparently aware of this fact. It announced the acquisition of SnapShooter last week, bringing a robust multicloud backup tool under its umbrella.
Solving a customer pain point
SnapShooter aims to take the pain out of dealing with backups. The service allows developers to set up automated backups of servers, databases, applications, and files without needing to fiddle with code.
A wide range of popular databases and applications are supported. A developer wanting to back up a WordPress site, for example, would normally have to handle backing up files and the underlying database separately. SnapShooter does it all by connecting directly to the developer's server.
Importantly, SnapShooter can back up data from any cloud provider, and customers can choose where those backups are stored. This goes well beyond the native backup solutions offered by cloud providers. With this acquisition, DigitalOcean recognizes that some of its customers are using multiple cloud providers, and that simply improving its own backup solution wouldn't solve the core problem those developers face.
This is a smart, customer-first move by DigitalOcean, and it could also accelerate the growth of the company's Spaces product. Spaces is one potential place SnapShooter customers can store their backups, and the company has said in the past that it thinks it can double the percentage of revenue coming from its storage products. Customers who use DigitalOcean's storage products spend 25 times as much with the company on average compared to customers who don't use them.
Instead of trying to compete directly with the big cloud platforms, DigitalOcean is appealing to developers and small businesses that don't want to deal with complexity. The acquisition of SnapShooter will make cloud computing even simpler for DigitalOcean customers, and it reinforces my view that the stock can produce market-beating returns in the long run.
