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There are more than a couple of ways you can make money with the tech company Digital Ocean.
In fact, from my research there are three ways you can make money with Digital Ocean if you have a tech background. In this article, I’ve listed those three ways and provided some details so it’s just up to you to check them out and see which ones are right for you.
Digital Ocean offers cloud hosting for developers around the world so they can create modern applications. They have data-centers all over the world and a community of more than 3.5 million developers.
To make money with DigitalOcean isn’t easy for everyone as it requires very technical knowledge, particularly in sysadmin and Devops and you also need to know Linux.
The easiest way to make money with DigitalOcean on this list is probably #3 unless you have the above technical qualifications.
Here are three ways in which you can make money with DigitalOcean.
1. Work At DigitalOcean
You may not be looking for this or even expect to find it here but one of the ways to make money with DigitalOcean is to actually work for the company.
They are hiring and according to their career page, they have a number of open positions.
Both BuiltInBoston and BuiltInNYC voted them #1 best place to work out of 100 companies in their respective cities in 2020.
Their main offices are based in New York City, Cambridge and Bangalore but they also offer remote positions for persons in the rest of the United States, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands depending on the role.
DigitalOcean offers many attractive perks for employees which include:
- Custom work stations
- Free catered lunches and monthly remote meals
- Commuter benefits
- Tuition reimbursement
- Attractive 401K plan
- Flexible vacation time
- Team-building and social events
- Gym reimbursement
- Full health coverage
- Headphones
- Mean gender pay gap below 10%
- Company equity & employee stock purchase plan
- Performance bonus
- Return to work program post parental leave
- Relocation assistance
- Casual dress
- Promote from within
- Job training and conferences
- and more.
The company has openings in the categories of engineering, infrastructure, finance, product management, business operations, data & analytics, marketing and community and security.
So if you think you have the necessary qualifications to work for DigitalOcean, check out the job openings available and get in touch with them today.
2. Write For DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is looking for freelance writers who know about the tech stuff that they want to teach developers about. You can get paid up to $400 just for creating in-depth tutorials which will be published on their website.
The writing program is called Write for DOnations and was created to grow DigitalOcean’s public knowledge-base of tutorials for developers. They’ll pay you and also select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
Freelance writers who know their way around Linux and can write about topics in DevOps, software development and production systems based on free and open-source software can apply to write articles and tutorials for the company.
The normal rate is $300 for new tutorials while more complex production-focused topics can fetch up to $400. You can also get $75 – $125 for updates to existing tutorials based on the amount of changes made and how technical the content is.
Examples of topics DigitalOcean is looking for include:
- How To Use Inspec to Test your Chef Deployment on Ubuntu 16.04
- How To Set Up a Highly Available PostgreSQL Cluster
- Kubernetes Workload Scheduling using DigitalOcean Kubernetes Node Pools
You can take a look at the existing content and tutorial currently on DigitalOcean to get an idea of what is needed and how it should be formatted.
To write for Digital Ocean, you’ll need to apply using this form but make sure to read the entire page first. You’ll need to have a topic idea, an outline of the tutorial you want to write and also provide writing samples so they can know you have the ability to create content for their community.
3. DigitalOcean Affiliate Program?
If you looked for a DigitalOcean affiliate program and couldn’t find one, well that’s because they don’t really have one yet. They do have a referral program, which is similar but not quite what an affiliate program should be.
But there is a way to get paid affiliate commissions for referring people to use DigitalOcean for managed cloud-hosting.
Cloudways is a company that allows you to deploy a DigitalOcean server using their managed hosting service. DigitalOcean is just one of 5 cloud hosting providers you can use through Cloudways. The other 4 include – Vultr, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Linode.
To earn money promoting DigitalOcean, you can earn up to $200 per sale depending on the number of referrals you can convert into paying customers.
Cloudways also offer bonuses and incentives for promoting their services and they also let you choose your commission structure.
For example, you can choose a slab structure where your commission rate starts at $50 for every sale you get up to 5 sales, then increases to $75 per sale up to 20 sales and so on. These sales have to happen within the month to count. The table below shows how the slab payouts work.

You can also choose to get paid on the Hybrid structure instead of the slab structure. On the hybrid structure, no matter how many sales you get from referring DigitalOcean customers, you’ll be paid $30 upfront bonus per referral and then 7% recurring commissions for as long as the customer stays with Cloudways.

Finally, there is a third way and it’s called the custom structure. This is usually reserved for super-affiliates who can refer a lot of customers. If you can refer more than 81 customers in a given month then you can get paid up to $200 per sale.
You’ll need to get in touch with an affiliate manager to talk about this payout structure and the details.

So if you’re an affiliate looking to get paid from DigitalOcean by referring their hosting services, then this is a great option seeing that there is no native affiliate program offered by the company itself.
You can join the Cloudway affiliate program here.
Make Money with DigitalOcean
There you have it – three ways to earn money with DigitalOcean. You’ll need to have the technical developer knowledge and qualifications for the first two ways.
Affiliate marketers can benefit from the third way especially if you’re in any niche that appeals to web development and web hosting customers.