DigitalOcean Spaces is AWS S3 compatible object storage service. It allows us to store data of any size at a low cost. And, it is ideal for static and unstructured data like audio, video, images, or text. You can store files in any space or bucket, and it also provides free CDN.
Table of Contents
Key concepts
Space or Bucket
A DigitalOcean Space is a bucket or container for you to store objects or files.
The key points about Spaces are:
- The name of your Space should be unique. For example, in the same region, no two Spaces can have the same name.
- While creating any Space, you can select any region where you want to store it.
- You can control access to your Spaces by making them public or private.
- There are three ways to manage any Space, API, CLI, and S3 compatible tools.
- It is up to you to enable Content Delivery Network (CDN) or not for any Space.
- One account has a limit of 100 spaces. And, if you want to increase this limit, you will need to talk to customer support.
- Operations you can perform on spaces include LIST, POST, COPY, PUT, and DELETE. You can perform any single operation 750 times per IP address in a second.
- If you want to perform all the operations combined, then the limit is 150 operations in a second.
Access and secret key
Access and Secret Key help us grant access to others. They act as username and password for your Space. You can create any number of keys and can assign different keys to different teams. For any key, you will need to delete the key if you want to revoke access.
Object
An object means any file such as text, image, audio, or video. DigitalOcean provides an easy-to-use browser-based Control Panel to upload files. The control panel works best when the size of your files is less than 2GB or less than 100 files. Use third-party tools for files greater than 2GB.
Why use DigitalOcean Space?
Here are some reasons why you should use DigitalOcean Space:
- DigitalOcean provides a free content delivery network (CDN) to improve performance. The CDN also reduces infrastructure costs and makes scaling easy.
- It gives the ability of unlimited uploads and spaces.
- The per month price for this storage is only $5 with 250 GB SSD storage space and outbound data transfer of 1 TB.
- This storage is compatible with AWS S3 Storage which makes it easy to use with existing tools and code.
- Both the cost and bandwidth of this storage are less by 90% as compared to other Storage platforms.
- It is easy and simple to use and everyone can understand the documentation. Moreover, to upload files, they provide a simple drag and drop facility.
- Due to the reliability and usefulness of this storage, over 1 million developers use it.
- They also provide data redundancy which increases the availability of your data.
- Your data is secure because it uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol to transfer data.
- There are many data centers available. You can select any data center for your space that is near to your droplets and customers.
- This storage is ideal to use for static and unstructured data like audio, video, images, and text.
Frequently asked questions
How does DigitalOcean Space protect our data?
It transfers all the data using a secure protocol that encrypts your data. And, your data remains encrypted during uploads as well as downloads. Moreover, you can also use SSH keys to enable protection.
Which tools can you use with DigitalOcean Spaces Object Storage?
There are 3 ways to manage any Space, API, CLI, and S3 compatible tools.
Here is the list of some of the tools/libraries you can use:
- Cyberduck
- FileZilla S3 Plugin
- s3cmd
- npm Upload Plugin
What makes DigitalOcean Space different than other storage platforms?
DigitalOcean provides a free CDN to improve performance. It also reduces infrastructure costs and makes scaling easy. Moreover, it helps reduce complexity. They claim that their storage saves up to 90% of costs as compared to other storage platforms.
What is the upload file size limit for Space?
To upload files, you use the PUT HTTP method. Here are the limits for the PUT statement:
- Using a single PUT, you can upload 5 GB at most.
- To upload more than 5 GB, you will need to use a multi-part upload.
- Using multi-part upload, you can upload 5 TB at most.
- The largest size for each multi-part upload is 5 GB.
What is the difference between a Bucket and Space?
Each storage platform has its terminologies for different concepts. So, Space is a DigitalOcean terminology to store objects. In comparison, a bucket is an AWS S3 terminology to store objects. However, both bucket and space have the same functionality in what they do.
Related Object Storage Services
There are many related object storage services that you need to know. Every organization, small or large, needs to store data. Finding the right cloud storage provider to meet your needs is essential.
Below is a full-list of the related object storage services covered by Anto Online:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3)
- DigitalOcean Spaces Object Storage
- Google Cloud Storage
- Linode Object Storage
- Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
- Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage
