You don’t know, these nine startups have been silently supporting your network behind the scenes

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Granted, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are tech giants worth billions selling web hosting and other services to the world's largest companies.

But you might not realize there are a number of startups working behind the scenes to help the web run smoothly.

Here are nine companies whose services you might be using without even realizing it.

Docker: The container management startup

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Solomon Hykes, Founder and CTO of Docker

Company Name: Docker

Headquarters: San Francisco

Since its establishment: 5 rounds of financing, a total of US$180 million

Users: Uber, eBay, Spotify Business Insider

With Docker, programmers only need to write code once, because they can pack it up and take it away. The backup can be stored on their own laptops or on Amazon's massive cloud. This makes it easier for developers to create and manage code, and also allows major companies to run their websites faster.

NGINX: Service Network

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Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX

Company Name: NGINX

Headquarters: San Francisco

Since its establishment: 3 rounds of financing, a total of US$33 million

Users: NASA, GoGo Inflight Internet, WordPress, Wikipedia

NGINX, pronounced “engine X,” calls its eponymous web server software “the secret heart of the modern web.” Basically, it acts as a middleman between your browser and the actual website or app you want to visit.

NGINX has been so successful that it claims to power a third of the most popular sites on the web.

Stripe: Online Payments

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Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison

Company name: Stripe

Headquarters: San Francisco

Since its establishment: 7 rounds of financing, a total of US$280 million

Users: Reddit, Kickstarter, Slack, Lyft, IndieGoGo

Stripe is the invisible hand of online payments. Whenever you hail a Lyft car or raise money on Kickstarter, you pay with Stripe.

MongoDB: Integrating Network Information

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Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB

Company Name: MongoDB

Headquarters: Dublin, Ireland

Since its establishment: 7 rounds of financing, a total of US$311.1 million

Users: Craigslist, EA, Business Insider, eHarmony

MongoDB is a popular database company that helps companies store, organize, and access all their information. For example, The New York Times uses it to store socially shared content for later analysis.

So whenever you get a new item while playing a network game online, that item is added to the MongoDB database.

CloudFlare: Network Accelerator

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Matthew Prince, CTO, CloudFlare

Company Name: CloudFlare

Headquarters: San Francisco

Since its establishment: 4 rounds of financing, a total of US$182 million

Users: League of Legends, Bain Capital, NASDAQ, Metallica

CloudFlare is called a "network accelerator", or CDN for short. When you use CloudFlare to visit a website, it will detect your location and direct you to the nearest server to get the content.

In addition to providing a better user experience, CloudFlare can even make or break your business when you trade on the NASDAQ stock market or place a bet on a game of League of Legends.

It also has the nice side effect of protecting users from distributed denial of service attacks, which are the most common way bad guys take down websites.

CloudFlare claims to handle 5% of the world's web traffic.

Xamarin: Making app development incredibly easy

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Nat Friedman, Xamarin co-founder and CEO

Company Name: Xamarin

Headquarters: San Francisco

Since its establishment: 3 rounds of financing, a total of US$82 million

Users: JetBlue, Draw A Stickman, Berkshire Hathaway

The feature of Xamarin is very simple: you only need to create an application once and then put it on iOS, Android, Windows or any other system, which reduces the difficulty of application development to a minimum.

This means that when you open the apps you use every day (from the JetBlue client to the popular game apps Draw a Stickman and Bastion), you are actually loading Xamarin.

Mixpanel: Let the website really help you

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Suhail Doshi, CEO, Mixpanel

Company Name: Mixpanel

Headquarters: San Francisco

Since its establishment: 5 rounds of financing, a total of US$77.02 million

Users: Uber, Airbnb, Match.com, Amazon's Twitch

Mixpanel is a data analysis company founded in 2009 that allows developers to track various user behaviors. Y Combinator incubator, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin have all invested in it.

So if you find that a website landing page is too cluttered, the developers may need to make targeted adjustments to simplify it. Or if you find that you spend too much time looking at the pictures of your Airbnb listings, it may be a sign that it’s time to redesign the pictures related pages.

In fact, Mixpanel can collect enough data to help companies like Uber and Airbnb predict what users will do next.

DigitalOcean: Network storage everywhere

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From left to right: DigitalOcean CTO James Cariello, CFO Brian Cohen, and CEO Brian Uretsky

Company Name: DigitalOcean

Headquarters: New York

Since its establishment: 3 rounds of financing, a total of US$123 million

Users: Beyonce and a ton of small sites

DigitalOcean is a hot New York startup that has successfully challenged Amazon Web Services, which dominates the cloud computing world.

According to Netcraft's statistical analysis, in 2015, the number of websites run by DigitalOcean exceeded 163,000, making it the world's second largest storage company (Amazon ranked first).

In July this year, DigitalOcean raised $83 million in financing.

The company has three co-founders, two of whom are brothers who met the third co-founder through an ad on Craigslist, an American classified website.

Twilio: Let your website talk

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Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson

Company Name: Twilio

Headquarters: San Francisco

Since its establishment: 6 rounds of financing, a total of US$233.7 million

Users: Home Depot, Nordstrom, Democratic National Committee

If you’ve ever gotten a text message from a web server (like “Your Uber will be here in four minutes”) or received a call back from a customer service agent at an online store, I’m happy to tell you that you’ve used Twilio’s technology.

Basically, Twilio acts as a software layer for phone calls and text messages, connecting businesses to the phone network.