DigitalOcean Inc. has secured $50 million in debt financing from Fortress Investment Group LLC, a prominent New York hedge fund with north of $60 billion under management, to expand its wildly popular public cloud into new markets. The investment tops months of record growth that saw the startup draw tens of thousands of new users to become the world’s third largest hosting provider.

That represents a remarkable climb from DigitalOcean’s humble roots in 2011 as a fledgling services that trailed years behind the web giants that popularized the cloud infrastructure model. When it first showed up on the radar of web research provider Netcraft Ltd. in December, 2012 it had a meager 137 publicly-reachable machines to its name.

A month later, DigitalOcean had already tripled its server count to 400, a number that increased nearly 30 times to over 10,000 the following quarter and another sixfold to 63,000 by the time Netcraft conducted its survey in April of this year. The startup said it’s attracting an average of 20,000 new users every month.

Most of the new registrations are developers drawn to DigitalOcean’s minimalistic approach to hosting, which combines ultra-affordable instances with a a slim interface that avoids the hassle of setting up application environments on other clouds. The company allows users to spin up pre-configured servers for specific technologies such as WordPress or Docker with literally the press of a button, a uniquely straightforward approach that has proven a hit among coders and small businesses alike.

But that convenience comes at the expense of fewer features and configuration options than more mainstream platforms such as Amazon Web Services. This is a trade-off many users are evidently more than willing to make, yet that success could prove a double edge sword in time, potentially pressuring the retail-turned-cloud giant and other major players into addressing the usability issues that are costing them developers’ money. Then there’s the question of whether DigitalOcean has what it takes to remain price-competitive against its multi-billion-dollar rivals amid the accelerating race to zero, which has seen hundreds of rate cuts in recent years.

The new financing, which brings the startup’s total raised to $92 millions, should help make the challenge a little less daunting. DigitalOcean intends to spend much of the money on building more data centers beyond the five markets it already serves. It didn’t mention which new regions it’s eyeing, but the Central United States and Australia seem like good candidates, given their accessibility and potential.

The loan will also enable the firm to take better advantage of economies of scale, leasing more equipment at better rates and hiring additional engineers. DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky said he expects to triple the size of his team before the end of the year.