Seems like the $4 droplet is a smoke screen hiding price increases. I'm a long time DO customer. I wish they would have just said "prices are going up" and listed a comparison of the old price with the new increased price. In their new price list, they do not list the old price... so you cant tell if they are going up and down. Because the article starts off with the $4 droplet announcement, you get a feeling that they have made changes to their infrastructure and prices will be going down to pass along those savings.
Quite frankly, I feel this only happens when we're in a time of wealth and growth. I suspect many more companies will start acting this way. It's simply a logical conclusion based on the current market sentiment and the view that I outlined above.
I was going to say that the email subject said prices "are going up", but it turns out the subject line was "DigitalOcean prices are changing July 1st. Here’s what you need to know." and I just assumed changing went up so strongly I remembered it wrong.
Seems like a really reasonable price increase (though the timeline is short), but they ought to have been a little clearer about exactly what the before-and-after picture was.
Ive quit them long time ago when they did not adjust price to compete. They also had for a few years, inferior performance per dollar as others in same range.
Have used them for a long time (I had their 2EUR VPS for ages, let go of it a few months ago but they honoured the price even when they were charging 4EUR for that spec). Very good customer support. I am a little worried about future prices though with electricity costs in Germany (although they have VPS in the US and Finland).
Contabo and Netcup are alternatives. Contabo has options in the UK/US/Singapore but is also German. Netcup is German, and I don't know where their servers are. OVH is another one but have had mixed experiences with their customer support.
I was affected by that fire (lost a VPS), but everything was up again a few hours later. All I had to do was to order a new VPS and restore my (very regular) backups.
The key is to be ready to recover from failure. OVH had a fire, but disks, backups, network, power, etc, can (and do) fail on premium providers. While this may say something about OVH, the effect on you as a customer is essentially the same: downtime, data loss, etc.
My experience with OVH until that point was good. 4 years without problems. I had another VPS and one dedicated server - different datacenters to avoid the "all eggs in the same basket" problem - and they were fine. The dedi, for example, I kept it from early 2017 until 6 months ago when I moved to Hetzner (better hardware, same price) and never had any issues.
I understand that not everyone can or wants to do things this way, but sometimes the savings are huge and that allows you to have more redundancy or to save money. For example, one of my websites uses a bit of bandwidth... last time I checked, it would cost around 2k/mo to run it on AWS, but only ~90 euros/mo on OVH/Hetzner. I can have another 2 replicas/servers ready to go in case of a problem and still save money.
And it's not only servers. For example, I was using S3 to store backups. Now I backup to providers like Backblaze B2, Wasabi, etc, at the same time and still save money. When I had to restore the VPS lost in the fire, I did it from my Wasabi backups because they don't charge for egress (fair use). Overall I still pay less, have more copies in different datacenters and providers, and don't have to worry about the costs of restoring backups (at least not as much).
I've been using both DigitalOcean (~5years) and Hetzner (11months) and I can definitely suggest Hetzner, very good service and good pricing - plus they offer dedicated servers at very reasonable pricing (and even vSwitch! You can create private network between them - very useful when you need a beast server and another one not too powerful).
I'm using Oracle Cloud always free tier, and I've got 4x VMs each with 1 Arm CPU, 6gb memory and 50gb disk. Free forever. You get a small amount of object storage and some free database (nosql/sql) but I'm mainly here for the 4 VMs to run a completely free k0s Kubernetes cluster.
I switched out of digital ocean because their docker apps don’t allow persistent access to the disk and don’t allow you to add any disk.
This eliminated a whole bunch of apps. I real head scratcher.
Render.com works a lot better for me. The disk is symlinked in automatically to ‘/var/data’ and I can add it in with an environmental variable set in the dashboard.
I have no idea why digital ocean cripples its app offerings like this. If anyone works there see this please add disks to docker apps.
The servers (I just tried booting the second-cheapest one) do seem much faster than DigitalOcean's and in my case they're actually cheaper, even without the coming price increase. However, one thing I noticed is that you have to pay extra for a floating IP (€3 + VAT) which is AFAIK free with DigitalOcean—or at least I didn't notice in on my bill. Something to keep in mind. I will probably switch over anyway.
Just switched everything over. I can live without the floating IP for now. I now pay slightly less than what I did at DigitalOcean while doubling the specs. Thanks for the tip!
The only problem is that now those other comments made me consider Contabo...
It doesn't take into account though:
- update guarantees
- quality of customer support (I had very bad experiences with Scaleway for example)
- score normalisation across many instances, to compensate different loads on VM hosts into account
At my company we used Contabo servers. They were Windows VMs, I can’t tell anything about Linux ones. But, the ones we had felt underpowered for what we expected. It might have been subjective, we haven’t performed any benchmarking, just a feeling. Also, their UI is straight from the 90s, in a bad way.
Interesting. Looks like more than half price. Are their interface / setup as easy as DO droplets? What's the catch? Are DO just expensive because they are market leaders?
They have developed drivers for Kubernetes though (CSI, CCM and Cluster Autoscaler). There are some good projects on GitHub to set it up with Terraform. I guess a real managed service will come at some point.
I tried to create an account and got the following error message:
Invalid characters, allowed are: A-Z a-z 0-9 ä ö ü ß Ä Ö Ü ^ ! $ % / ( ) = ? + # - . , ; : ~ * @ [ ] { } _ ° §
What year is it, that we cannot use &?
I recommend it as well, and one added benefit is you're in the same network as their cheap "storage box" servers (AKA SMB/CIFS/WebDAV/SSH storage server), so you can connect the two and get faster block storage compared to combining two clouds.
I have been using Backblaze/Wasabi. If you get their European servers, you can rclone mount on a Hetzner VPS and get very good speeds. If you have a fiber connection/very fast disks at home then maybe it will bottleneck. But for file storage and basic playback (for example, through SMB mount) then it is pretty good.
Tbf though, Hetzner auctions with 6TB*2 of disk at 45EUR are a good alternative. It is really a trade-off between having a server with decent power or having the flexibility of scalable S3 storage.
I wanted to build something Plex-like so sadly real block storage was a requirement, otherwise indexing and seeking could be a pain. If not I would use Wasabi or other S3-likes
Ah, I use it for Jellyfin. The only issue that I have found was storing the config files on a remote system. I have actually had that problem locally too (when using a HDD mount on a HyperV VM). But storing the config locally seemed to help.
I don't do transcodes though, and I think that is the other problem with a low-power system.
I preferred them to DO as they had newer (AMD CPU) hardware but then had a very bad experience with them as a customer, causing me to move my business away back to DO.
I've been using Linode instead of DigitalOcean since ~2015 IIRC. I just checked their pricing page [1] and find it pretty hostile and confusing. First, you won't see any tech spec at all without clicking on a card; "starts at $blah/mo" means precious little without tech specs. Then, once you click on "Droplets" you get another grid(s) of cards where the tech specs are teeny-tiny and comparison is very painful. Compare this to the classic table-based pricing page from Linode [2], where everything is very straightforward. I won't go to Wayback Machine and dig out DO's pricing page from back when they were still the HN darling, but I'm pretty sure it was a straightforward table-based layout. Who the heck prefer this new mess?
I've been a Linode user since 2011, my only minor complaint is I wish they had kept the 10% annual payment discount. Seems like they jumped over to hourly billing to match the competition (I suppose if you really are spinning up VMs for less than a month, hourly is nice. But if you're running your VM 24/7 for 11 years... you just get to pay slightly more than you were previously.)
I’m also a happy Linode user since … a decade? more? I remember the phpBB forums for their customers from forever ago. I’m sure there are cheaper out there, but given the already pretty low cost, I’m not interested in jumping ship. I hope their recent acquisition doesn’t change much.
I don't know why it is convenient to ignore the "managed" aspect of it.
DO's or AWS's managed databases do more than just stick it on an server VM. It has a firewall built it, replicas, backups, logs, API access to manage it, etc.
The reason why these managed database services even exist is because people are willing to pay for it. It provides them value. If it didn't, they'd stop working on them.
Processing web requests & some reports, pretty much the same as everyone do nowdays. Dev team add some features, but still on scale it the same - web requests and reports.
CPU is pretty much idling, like ~ 10-15% used on average, in spikes may be 20%. But that's minimal CPU hoster gives with RAM 128GB+ platform, so using it.
RAM (~ 110GB) obviously used for DB and the for auxilary tasks.
DB itself is medium sized, with raw data ~ 1.5TB yet
DISK IO on average is pretty high, around 55%, with often spikes to 100%, that part I'd add more IOPS on if response times grow above the limits.
I so badly wanted to use their managed databases, but they priced me out of it. It's so much cheaper just to manage the database myself, and thus far at least not that much more effort.
I think this is probably the right positioning for anyone's decision on managed database vs. running it yourself, or any cloud managed product for that matter.
If you feel you either don't need the managed offerings and/or can manage it to a point where you're spending less of you or your company's time resources on it, then by all means manage it yourself.
If the managed-ness of the cloud offerings are a high enough value for you, then you will pay for it.
Creating, maintaining, constantly upgrading and improving a managed database product takes a hell of a lot of expensive engineer hours. It's probably a better bet for cloud providers to have relatively fewer high-margin customers on that product than they would if they tried to squeeze margins to compete with "I can provision a VM and install Postgres myself" which is also a product they already offer - just buy the VM.
tbf, its about 2x the EC2 instance cost, so I guess is actually kinda reasonable for a kinda managed service.
But the (backup) storage is really how they get you in my experience.
And do not turn on auto growth for diskspace, it will just grow to the limit and then you are paying for 200GB of daily backup storage you are not even using.
I think it's because they included an additional node in the price by default. So it's double because they have a read only node added in there, the price for managed DBs doesn't seem to have changed mostly.
Oh! They have increased the prices! I went to the page hoping price reductions. Looks like inflation is changing the dynamics for the hosting business too.
I think it's overcharging customers to see how much they can get away with, like netflix. Jump on the "iTs inFlAtIoN" bandwagon and see how much profit you can squeeze out and see how well you can handle customer attrition while doing it. If it goes bad just say "oh looks like inflation is lightening up a bit now". I call it the Netflix Gambit (circa 2022)
Honestly I think enticing shareholders is one of their primary motivators here, and the inflation is more of the excuse. Nobody else I work with is raising their costs in this space right now (we'll see how long that lasts though), and DO isn't exactly the bottom of the list on pricing.
The increase doesn't look too large, but if you need a similar alternative I like Vultr a lot, the Neocities CDN is hosted there and it's been rock solid performance for years, and it's quick to get access to competent tech support. I wish I had more infra hosted there actually.
Hosting is naturally deflationary, since the cost of the underlying hardware becomes cheaper per unit over time. Take storage, which has gone from roughly 10 to 2 cents per GB over a decade [0]. I believe there's a quote somewhere about AWS initially selling EC2 unprofitably, with the expectation that their costs would go down.
Not sure the underlying economics here for DO or their motivation, but I don't think DO can expect to their customers to react to this the same way customers are reacting to inflated costs in cars, groceries and the like. If other providers follow suit, maybe that's a sign of slowing efficiency in the hardware, end of Moore's law, etc.
The $4 droplet is a new option that is similar to what their current $5 droplet used to be some years ago. DO has never had a $2.50 droplet to my knowledge.
EDIT: I just saw your comment clarifying that you were speaking about Vultr. That wasn't clear from your phrasing, but I wanted to acknowledge it here.
Changing the dynamics how when it is already overpriced. This is like all the businesses during COVID saying... It's COVIDs fault our customer service is terrible.
Prices should be going down, not up. Infact, I would expect out of my cloud provider a commitment to drop prices by some percentage each year. A $100 workload from last year should not cost more than a $100 this year. We are still on exponential curves for compute, storage and DC bandwidth.
Electricity costs are going up, and hardware is harder to source due to the chip shortage (and thus likely more expensive, if you pay to get ahead of the line). Perhaps these are part of the reasons.
This is why cloud providers build in as much lock in as possible in the form of managed services - eventually they won't want to decrease prices every year and you'll have so much code written against their proprietary cloud widgets that it'll be more expensive to move than to pay their increases.
If you ever take a vendor specific certification, it's all about how you should use their specific cloud features in order to "properly" architect the solution for the cloud. Often these services do in fact result in cheaper bills, but there are other costs - and no provider I've seen has ever made any commitment regarding future prices like you mention expecting.
Electricity costs are going up. Replacement hardware is more expensive (and in some cases impossible to find). Inflation means you have to pay employees more. All vendors have bumped up their prices as well.
There is a balance. Computers are getting faster. Bandwidth is nominally cheaper. However, inflation is hell right now and supplies are still tight. A lot of components are just as expensive as they were years ago.
> We are still on exponential curves for compute and storage and DC bandwidth.
So what’s the angle here, power makes up so much of the service or the cost of power has increased so much that it warrants doubling the price for managed databases?
at least for me in uk the cost of power has almost doubled the beginning of this year, and is expected to rise another 50% in october (the gov limits how much they can jump every 6 months).
so i kind of agree with the other poster, power has got so expensive i would expect prices to be going up. (add onto this manufacturing and supply chain issues and replacing hardware isnt cheap either).
Digital Ocean are entitled to do whatever they want with their prices, regardless of their costs. Frustrated customers have some good alternatives to switch to.
So right now, if you were choosing an on-demand cloud provider (like digital ocean), which would you chose if your requirement would be expecting that next year your bill would be lower than it is today?
You know the answer. Which cloud providers routinely drop prices, which ones stay flat and which ones sneak in price increases?
You cant trust a cloud provider that raises prices. They are either a) mis-managed and can't calculate their own costs b) greedy and short sided or c) not in charge of their own prices. None of those qualities should be someone you enter into a relationship on this magnitude.
The battle between cheaper hardware and inflation was something I found interesting and wondered which would affect prices first. I personally won't change anything, I'll pay the extra $1 a month for my cheap droplet to not have to move anything. DO's big selling point to me (as a hobbyist) was the simplicity. Now that I work with AWS every day, I feel very comfortable getting some basic infra set up, but I still really like DO's smooth setup.
It's a shame they had to do it. I wonder how difficult it is to compete with all the big providers? They still fit my use case just fine (still a big cheaper than the AWS equivalent too I think, but maybe not) and I'm fortunate to not be in a situation where the extra dollars are a deal breaker.
Is it important that they're losing the branding of the $5 droplet? It seems that's significantly more of an impressionable number than 4 or 6, in my understanding of the factors that made them popular. To me they've simply lost the #1 thing that people remember them by and don't stand out with that simple change. That's the only change that worries me.
I thought Linode's "Nanode" ($5 VM) was several years after DO. I remember wishing Linode had a lower tier option and contemplating moving to DO back when Linode started at $20 for their lowest spec.
I went back to check and indeed my annual billing for Linode's lowest tier was was $216 annually (12 * $20 * 0.90 for the 10% annual payment discount.)
Linode then dropped the price in 2014 to $10/month [1], and eventually in 2017 introduced the $5 option [2]. DO was definitely around well before then, but I do recall DO becoming more popular around that time. Because for $5 it was awesome to spin up a VM to test a new app.
I think this price increase is honestly pretty fair, but I really wish they'd show side by side prices, and offer me a tool to see what my total increase will be.
I don't just pay DO for servers, I'm paying them for a cohesive integrated UX, decent support (for the price), and nice hosted database and load balancer options. That's always been what separates DO from the rest of the market. Servers are cheaper elsewhere, that extra stuff is all pretty competitively priced.
All of those things are subject to the prices of people, which are nuts right now.
I also have deployments at hetzner and OVH and the management angle is day and night (although Hetzner is almost there now). Multiple different logins and dashboards by product, country, etc.
I'm sure some of it is just driven by being public as well. I'll keep paying them if they can keep those other factors great, but little things like wasting my time on the pricing table above are damaging the one thing that I really like about DO.
I’m not saying you don’t - but my experience has been different. In my experience Linode has customer service that is in a different league than DigitalOcean has ever provided. I’ve never gotten what I would call great, or perhaps memorably good, customer service from DigitalOcean. I haven’t gotten awful customer service either. It’s the kind I would expect from any turn key solution that doesn’t employ support agents who are already well versed in what they’re working on.
Because Digital Ocean is a company with employees and investors, not just an automated conglomeration of servers. A 20% increase in prices after 12 years of basically stable prices seems fair.
I just checked one of the node types and EC2 is about 20% more expensive, even after the price hikes. AWS may have more baked-in margin than DO.
Also, I didn’t include Transfer costs in the cross-check, so AWS may be much more expensive.
Depending on your needs, AWS is hands down one of the most expensive ways to put workloads into the cloud.
At the same time it’s a bit difficult to compare them apples-to-apples. In my experience EC2 instances aren’t designed for reliability as much as they are designed to meet exactly what AWS can put on the invoice as being the value exchanged for money. I’m not bashing their design goals, they’re just different from “traditionally VPS-first” firms.
If you’re running not-huge On Demand instances you can definitely get much better performance for your dollar on something like Linode or DigitalOcean, OVH, Hetzner, etc. And then you can still some of the AWS services where they have much less comprehensive competition. IMHO, you can beat EC2 all day but feature-wise it’s extremely difficult to beat S3.
Seems like AWS has really only gone down in price on the pre-provisioned EC2 instances, not the on-demand. On-demand is more inline with what Digital Ocean provides.
I disagree, CPU performance per $ is getting cheaper. Increasing pricing on the $5 droplets by 20% is significant and their deceptive email is also an issue. I'm going to cancel my droplets.
One of the upsides of only being 50% cloud is that I get some perspective.
The cheaper, better, faster assumption is being challenged in most segments. Shipping costs have been crazy and eating margins for just-in-time delivery for some time. Containers are 5x-10x from China vs 2018, a tractor trailer costs $1400 to fill with diesel today in my region.
Also, commodities like storage aren’t getting cheaper.
It is not like hardware costs are the only costs. My electricity costs are going to be nearly doubling shortly. They could be seeing the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if employee retention/turnover is another issue they are facing.
Yes, the price of computation is going down, but the prices for real estate and electricity are going up, often way up. Computers use lots of electricity and sometimes the price of electricity over the lifetime is more than the cost of the machine. Gasoline prices don't track electricity prices in the short term, but eventually the prices of energy catch up with each other. They can't escape inflation.
Computation needs electricity, computers need maintenance, and the maintenance is done by people with salaries. People have to drive to work which uses gas. Parts of computers have to be shipped, which also needs gas.
Gas and electricity are going up.
You have no clue what you're talking about. Computation prices are not going down.
I think DigitalOcean is okay as a company, but I don't like the wording of this news item.
> New DigitalOcean Pricing / customers using Droplets, Snapshots, Load Balancers, Floating IPs, and Custom Images will experience a change in prices
They are dancing around the matter without using the word "increase". If instead the news was a price decrease, they would be screaming "decrease" loudly everywhere.
> Introducing a new $4 Droplet
A smokescreen, a distraction from the fact that most of their existing services are going up in price. Combining good news with bad news to smooth over the bad news.
> For 10 years, DigitalOcean has expanded and evolved to deliver a better cloud computing experience ... Today, DigitalOcean is proud to serve both teams of developers looking to build their next application ...
Flowerly language that serves to dilute the real news of the price increase.
I moved to DO from Linode about 10 years ago for various reasons. One was their straight-forwardness and transparency, which felt like a breath of fresh air from Standard Marketing 1.0. Considering that, I think the previous poster is right to call out today's email as a disappointment.
Interesting. While it doesn’t seem that unreasonable, this change would really add up if you already had a lot of droplets, and I kind of did. I suppose it’s good luck that I’ve been migrating workloads to Fly lately. Maybe I should finish the job.
To be fair, once you pass the Fly free tier, I can only guess it is more expensive, but in my case it’s made up for by being able to do much smaller VMs. Digital Ocean’s a bit more limited on how you can cut up memory and disk space (and the dynamics of k3s or kubernetes at this scale is awkward.)
I operate a service called RunBuildRun that sells managed GitLab runners that run on DigitalOcean droplets. I have lots of droplets. I may need to bump up my price a bit :)
Sorry for the tangent, but can you provide more info on your service? Without signing up from an account on your site, I'm unsure on how the interface here compares to GitLab runner registration (which I always felt was a bit convoluted due to how GitLab structures their user and organization accounts) and how the hardware compares to what GitLab offers.
RunBuildRun makes creating a runner a one click operation. We give you a registration token for your runner, which you then register in the GitLab interface like usual.
The primary value over GitLab's runners is that RunBuildRun doesn't have any CI/CD minute quota. With GitLab, you get a finite quota (e.g. 400 minutes on the free tier) and then you have to upgrade to a per seat premium plan or buy additional CI/CD minutes.
Also, RunBuildRun gives you a dedicated runner so you don't have to wait on shared runners and you don't have to setup/manage a runner on your own server.
Just closed a bunch of droplets. This is a deceptive price increase hidden behind a bunch of annoying PR. I guess it's understandable with everything going on but the market is beginning to get very hostile towards smaller startups with a lot of smaller services.
I find it particularly amusing that they're reintroducing the 512MB of memory tier, but at $4 instead of the $2.50 it was before the removal. But I suppose that's roughly inline with the basic 1GB/RAM droplet going to $6. I'm most interested to see how the managed Kubernetes offering changes shake out -- hoping I don't sense a migration in the near future.
No, sending a vague email that makes me waste my time to figure out how much more I have to pay them is unreasonable. They could have just included prices side by side and a sample invoice under the new system with the last month's usage
I don't think AWS has ever raised prices. Generally for a given service, prices are fixed and they'll either release a new version or a new machine generation with new pricing (and the old version usually has a very generous deprecation window).
AWS pricing can be confusing but they also offer significantly more services. I think it'd be more straight forward if they had the same number of products as Digital Ocean. Afaik they bill for the same things.
At the same time, plenty of us are trying to build businesses with no external funding, where every dollar might matter.
Recently Datadog surprised me with a nearly 21x-over-typical bill for features that had previously communicated as being disabled and non-billed, by their own billing team. Just weeks before. No changes on my side since.
If it were my spouse’s company they’d spend more money (in terms of paid time) retrieving that than they’d get back. They wouldn’t care and it wouldn’t ever show up in the billions on their financials.
I don’t know. Even if they make $100k per year, an extra $12-36 a year doesn’t seem like it should break the bank. That’s an hour of work for someone making $72k/year.
Interesting (or maybe not?) that the App Platform and Spaces pricing hasn't changed. I've been migrating as many projects as possible over to App Platform + Managed DB + Spaces recently. Although it's been frustrating due to their documentation being lacking, I've found it great for simple projects and static websites once you get your head around it. It's certainly more expensive than running plain Droplets, but the convenience is worth it. Their costs must be better covered on the App Platform over Droplets.
I was a big fan of Nanobox (the company DigitalOcean acquired and then turned into App Platform). And Pagoda Box before that. I've never found any PaaS that was as easy to use as those — especially because it came with a local environment for development that would match the production environment.
I'm very interested to try App Platform for my next side project. In fact, I still have a server running on DigitalOcean that was set up through Nanobox a few years ago. I need to move that over to App Platform at some point.
It’s always nice to hear that someone liked Pagoda Box. I worked there way back in 2011 before the Nanobox change, and it was really fun working with containers, dynamic load balancers, and the `git push` workflow before those were widely known.
Nothing was as magical as having a site up a running a few seconds after doing `git push pagoda`.
It might be different for you having come from the predecessor, but I found it quite hard to get started with the App Platform. There is a conflict between DO's attempt to have a web interface that allows you to create and manage apps, and the underlying YAML/Buildpacks that actually model your apps. While the web interface is OK for seeing your apps at-a-glance, it's definitely not OK for creating and configuring new apps. For that you need to use the YAML config files and probably doctl (their CLI app). It took me a long time to understand this. Their docs don't do a good job at explaining the App Platform at a high-level. That said, I've still found it very useful for "simple" webapps.
App Platform is a great concept, but we hit a dealbreaking road block when trying to migrate some Python apps with job queues. Their runtime (gVisor) doesn't support semaphore locks, which is used by Pythons multiprocessing and in turn used by most job runners (we discovered it with django-q, but I think most, if not all of them including Celery, rely on this, see link below).
The build times for Dockerfiles are also atricious… our build failed after 40 minutes by running out of memory and the multi-stage Dockerfile really wasn't anything special. We would have just used the images hosted on Github Container Registry, but App Platform only supports a limited range of Docker registries too. Note: the images build in 3 minutes on Github Actions.
As far as I can see it is also not possible to add any block storage too. While I mostly work on projects that use object storage anyway, SOME things just need persistent block storage. Which is annoying, since DigitalOcean HAS block storage… just not for App Platform.
I really wanted to use it, but man they make it hard.
OVH has an option for $3.50 (which I think is _cheaper_ than it was when I signed up a couple years ago, and I don't _think_ I'm looking at CAD pricing)... Compare:
DO:
https://www.digitalocean.com/try/new-pricing
The new Droplet priced at $4/month has 1 vCPU, 512MB memory, 500GB bandwidth, and a 10GB SSD Disk. It will be available on July 1, 2022.
RAM CPUs SSD Storage Transfer Network In Network Out Monthly
1 GB 1 25 GB 1 TB 40 Gbps 1 Gbps $5
And I wasn't going to include Vultr from my sibling comment at first, but then I checked them out, and they're significantly different enough to mention:
https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
"Regular Performance", last-gen Intel CPU and regular SSD; not a typo that this lists the first configuration twice, with two different prices - that's what they show as of 5/16/2022 1PM ET:
"High Frequency", 3GHz+ Intel Xeon CPU and NVMe SSD:
1 vCPU 1 GB 1.00 TB 32 GB $6 /mo
And finally "High Performance", AMD Epyc/Intel Xeon (pricing the same for both) with NVMe SSD:
1 vCPU 1 GB 2.00 TB 25 GB $6.00 /mo
I didn't have an opinion coming into this, just was looking at another potential host for my small projects, but Linode, OVH and Vultr clearly win here vs. DigitalOcean.
Note that this doesn't take into account personal preferences (I think some people don't like OVH because of concerns about their data center physical safety, with that recent-ish fire, which, fair), datacenter locations, etc. etc.; but assuming parity on quality etc., I think those three are all better options, with Vultr especially having a lot of of flexibility.
I apologize for formatting and term confusion in this post, didn't have the time to clean it up more, and didn't want to editorialize the original sites too much. I will just say I hate how we use "bandwidth" to both mean "data transfer speed" and "monthly data transfer limit"...
As I understood it, the difference between the $2.50 and $3.50 Vultr VPSes is an IPv4 address. I don't know why that page doesn't explain. Maybe it's changed.
Yeah this was really lame. I had to go on Hacker News to figure out what was changing. Why do companies do crap like this? Does DigitalOcean realize there are other companies that are eating their lunch right now?
Like, I'm less mad about the price increases and I'm more annoyed about the communication.
20% bump for the most budget-sensitive option is a crazy increase. Sure it's fine if you only have one, but I'm sure there are many folk who have hundreds
$100/hour+ human costs to migrate though right. Imagine downsizing 100 web apps, notifying clients of what's going on, and dealing with random breakages. That's not an hour's work
You can get a GCP micro VPS for free, “forever”. I have a free VPS always running, and run beefier VPSs as-needed for my personal projects. For my needs, GCP and Colab (sometimes Pro, sometimes free) are convenient and time-savers.
You can also get a free Oracle Cloud VPS, and Alibaba provides good cloud value also. Many years ago, I enrolled in Microsoft’s BizSpark program, and if they still do that, check them out. So many good options…
Oracle gives you 10TB of monthly bandwith + a 4 core/24gb ram ARM VM + 1 or 2 (can't remember) 1Core/1GB x86 AMD Epyc core... for free. If you are just looking to get a cloud VM for personal projects, it's by far your best option.
It's a bit weird to say considering it's oracle, but there's no catch and no hidden costs. As long as you don't upgrade to a paid account, there's no way to even mess up and get charged
Is that really the case? I just ran the CLI version of speedtest.net and I got way more than the 4Gbps that oracle advertises. Though I only ran the test on ARM, and I know AMD VMs get much less bandwidth. I also wouldn't be surprised if my results aren't representative of real world sustained usage.
I've priced up DO as an alternative to AWS on several projects and it has never been cheaper once AWS discounts (reservations, spot) are applied correctly. You need to consume a relatively large amount of bandwidth before DO becomes cheaper, and even then a third party CDN is likely to be a better solution
The $5 droplet includes the equivalent of $90 worth of AWS egress, although it is accounted somewhat differently.
An equivalent low usage machine on AWS in us-east (t3a.micro - 1GB / shared CPU) on spot instead costs around $2.16, almost 57% less.
So this is where bandwidth becomes interesting, especially in combination with an external CDN.
Say if you're hosting 100 low volume client sites where each client gets its own instance (sensible security choice), DO you'd be paying $284/mo. more than equivalent AWS config, or you could treat the $284 as a bandwidth allowance, leaving 3.155 TB egress in aggregate across all clients before DO/AWS are breakeven again.
If some/many of those client sites consume a lot of bandwidth, the equation quickly changes, but you need to start looking at edge hit rates of an individual application before attempting to make a meaningful comparison.
The last project I looked at this for included several high bandwidth sites with good edge hit rates on an external CDNs, and AWS still came in significantly cheaper
Customers use DigitalOcean for use cases ranging from hosting mission-critical applications to testing new ideas. To empower even more developers across the globe, we are introducing a new Droplet priced at $4/month with 1 vCPU, 512MB memory, 500GB bandwidth, and a 10GB SSD.
I'm kind of annoyed that vCPU is now a measurement of ... something.
Whereas memory, bandwidth, and storage are "roughly" comparable (there are performance differences between SSDs and RAM for sure, they're not as blatant) the difference between "a single core" on a CPU can be completely insane.
We need some form of "generic CPU power" that can more accurately compare these things.
Personally I think once you’re in the 70usd range a month you should just look into some unmanaged servers from ovh or similar. You’ll end up with way more for your money. I do realize there’s benefits to sticking with services like DO and that’s something to weigh as well.
From a very quick look I think the cheaper basic droplets have gone up 20%, but larger ones (such as the "general purpose droplets") have only gone up as little as 5%.
Edit:
Yes, it's only "Basic" droplets that have gone up 20%, everything else is only 5%.
I actually got slightly burned when they did that update. I was doing deployments by "slug" (their term) and the old slug went up to $10/month when they created the new 1GB $5 droplet option. Now my system double checks the price before deploying a droplet.
To give some hobbyist level price increase numbers:
I'm currently running two basic droplets at 8gb RAM and 4vCPU, which is basically just enough resources for a proper dev kubernetes cluster with Promethueus, Loki, 5-6 apps, etc (4gb 4vCPU is not enough, I tried). I also run a third 1gb1vcpu management droplet outside the cluster as well as a load balancer in front of my API gateway and a spaces instance to dump backups and store stuff like terraform state. My previous bill was $102 and it looks like it will now under this new pricing with all of the above be about $125 which is about 20% increase.
Are there similar managed kubernetes offerings out there that are better on price? My understanding is that I could probably half this or even do better if I run my own control plane on some other provider but if I want managed k8's is this still the best option price wise? I guess if something like Hetzner or OVH is less than half the price it may even be worth the headache to run my own control plane (which has it's own advantages too - currently I'm stuck with Cilium on DOKS and it would be nice to use another network provider for some of my use cases).
This is Raspberry Pi 4 territory. Your monthly cost is the price of hardware, per month. If you are on a home 1G connection, your home bandwidth is as good or better than what you are getting on DO. At the end of a year, you would have a 12 node cluster.
I am not advocating that people run k3s on raspberry class hardware, just that GP is overpaying for what they are getting. An Ebay server machine colo'd would be several orders of magnitude more capable at the same cost.
My 1G connection sees 250M up and down continuously.
PS Shame on you Radxa for naming your module CM3, shame. There will be a flood of RK3588 based devices on the market in the next 6-12 months. A low end PC would replace 10s of these devices.
My point was that a 4 vcpu instance is overpriced and also a very small amount of compute. Most cloud costs are 1/3 to 1 of price of hardware, per month.
Yep - it's also an exercise to keep my cloud engineering skills up to date - I can take the approach I use on the hobby projects and apply it to production level stuff in my job.
If it's an exercise to keep your cloud engineering skills up to date, perhaps you'd like to manage your own Kubernetes? Then I'm sure it can be much cheaper.
Spending money on hobbies is part of the benefits of working no? If you can afford the essentials I would hope people are spending money on things they enjoy.
You might want to look into OVH's k8s offering [1]. You only pay the worker nodes and the general purpose instances cost 26,18 € per month offering 2vcpu and 7 gb RAM [2].
Very very low - I used only 30 gb of the massive amount DO gives you last month. Basically currently just have some stuff periodically sending data in and most of the outbound is just small REST responses.
Has anybody heard of and formed an opinion on Contabo? I was searching for unmetered or high bandwidth offerings and ran across them. They have a cloud VPS for $7/mo with 4vCPU, 8GB RAM, and 32TB traffic.
Wow, that's about 1/5 of the price of my current DO test droplet. Think i am going to switch soon if there isn't a catch - i wonder why there is such a huge gap in prices?
I wonder if you can go even lower as i've never heard of multiple companies mentioned in this thread, Hetzner being the other one that's about double this but half DO.
The catch is that you're comparing VPS prices to IaaS prices. They're similar and can be used for many of the same things but are not the same.
With the VPS, you'll be responsible for a lot of the things that the IaaS provider would otherwise handle. However, you can install Dokku/etc. on your VPS and run your own self-hosted IaaS and approximate what you would get from DO/Heroku.
That's what I call a misleading title, my droplet is going up 20% with this news.
Sad, my hardware hasn't changed in 4 years, why is it suddenly more expensive to host? Hardware costs are always dropping, there's no reason for this other than greed.
I guess this is another "inflation" thing where companies demand higher profits without changes in services.
> Hardware costs are always dropping, there's no reason for this other than greed.
They're not though, there's a load of world happenings currently resulting in chipset shortages and increased energy pricing etc in many parts of the world.
Maybe, but that doesn't impact existing hardware. So unless this upgrade includes things like newer CPUs or more ram/disk for a droplet that doesn't apply, and as far as I can tell, the hardware I started on 4 years ago is the same. At least they've not advertised any new CPUs or increased disk or ram.
The little secret differentiator to the big clouds is the outgoing bandwidth cost which is $0.01/GB compared to e.g $0.13/GB on AWS. This did luckily not change with the new prices.
I really wish the US would get an offering that's more like Hetzner and OVH (I understand OVH does have a near-US location, I'd like something closer to where I live).
I've been a DO customer for years. Over those years I've observed support become mismanaged with long delays, lack of continuity (except via escalations), etc... Increasing the prices with this vague message I think is a bad move; if you (as a business) need to increase your prices then save me the massaging. Just tell me what's gotten more expensive, how you're going to use this money, and if there's a path to making services cheaper in the future. That's how you get your customer invested in your direction versus selling them on generalized messaging that fails to succinctly describe what's about to happen to their wallets.
OMG I'm going to have to pay $6 for my $5 droplet now. The sky is falling!
For point of comparison, the increased annual cost is the equivalent of 3 Starbucks mocha lattes, or a single latte at any of their hipper indie competitors.
Nobody in either DO thread has actually suggested a competitor that offers the same product for less. (Hertzner is not comparable.) Of course switching to a VPS costs less; you have to do more of the work yourself. And if $12/year increase really is a backbreaker, you can go even cheaper by going straight to bare metal (i.e., self-hosted on your own hardweare).
I don't know if I would call them the 'best', but Kamatera offers pretty good bandwidth, 5TB/mo or 50MB/s unbounded at $4 (for non-dedicated allocation, $9/mo for dedicated). I don't know if I'd call them the best because I don't really need much more than something that's reliable and has decent speed, which it satisfies pretty well.
This is not true at all. Electricity prices are crazy and hardware is a lot more expensive for us (not affiliated with DO, I run a PaaS service) than it was 2 years ago.
> That’s why today we are announcing that for the first time we’re changing our prices to best serve you at every stage of your growth journey.
To best serve you at every stage of your growth journey it would seem. Or if you'd like a translation from stilted corporate speak into plain language: we went public and the line's gotta go up and engineers and hardware don't come cheap.
It more and more feels like going public is the big mistake in a lot of tech companies, because everything gets real squirrely after that for customers and employees.
Any more, whenever a company I use goes public or is acquired, I start looking for the egress. I'm happy that the founders of whatever it is got a nice payday, but I don't expect their creation to continue being worth using after that.
the thing is once you start private and giving options as comp, your only option is to go public eventually, or screw everyone that's every gotten options.
Profitable private companies that never want to go public can solve this by doing profit sharing with employees, but in tech there's often no profits for a very long time.
I agree. I understand pricing increases (even if I don't look forward to them) and I'm an adult, just tell me the difference in prices instead of deliberately obscuring that information. Not showing the prices smells of not standing beside your product/new pricing. I think DO is still worth it at the new prices, that said I'm having a hard time remembering when a cloud provider raised prices like this, normally the trend is down/same no?
I mean even with the price increases my little server that could that serves some basic self-hosted apps up for me still costs me less that a meal at a non-fast food restaurant. I'm sure I'm getting more utility out of that than 1 meal
How many places show a difference in their prices? How often to restaurants, stores, and other as a service companies doing that? I almost never see it. I wouldn't say they are doing something deliberate (in a negative sense). They are doing something pretty typical.
They have a table of everything listed along with a new price for it. All they would need to add is a column showing the existing price. There is a 100% chance they have a spreadsheet internally passed around with that existing price column.
Do you really believe it was a not a deliberate choice to not show the side by side comparison?
Restaurants and stores are single transactions, not ongoing subscription services.
DigitalOcean makes you dig for the price increase, which is pretty scummy. They tried to soften the blow with a new droplet which looks even worse. At the end of the day, 20% is a huge change.
I have a very small number of VPS with DO, so while this price increase is not impactful to me, it is somewhat shady how they portrayed this new pricing...not evil, just less than what i expected from DO. In paralell, for a couple of years now, i had heard of and been curious about Hetzner. But i was not as interested because their focus was in/around Europe, which i can't blame them. But, now that i see they have a data center in virginia area...well, now i'm going to start looking into them seriously. Their pricing is quite awesome...plus i have also recently heard of Contabo, and wow, their pricing is really awesome! Again, i'm not thinking that DO is evil or anything, but i appreciate that more and more i - as a small consumer fish - have much more choice!
Hetzner in general doesn't seem to be peered that well, such that using a Linode VPS near a Hetzner machine in Germany and then routing everything through the Linode VPS is much faster than going direct.
Yeah, we used Hetzner in Germany a lot at a former workplace where I was for a number of years, for production traffic, and we had a good experience. Most of our other infra was in physical DCs we owned, but we used Hetzner for production DR for the EU region, and also for internal stuff like CI/CD. Was slightly more reliable than AWS was at the time (2011-2014ish) , if I recall!
I'd love to know how much of their business is the formerly $5 tier, vs all the other tiers put together. I assume it's the majority. I also assume these popular, lower tier droplets also have a lower profit margin than the more deluxe tiers.
Shipping and inflation probably hurt their profits, but what are the chances that it's an even 20% across the board? I am assuming they're padding it with a bit of extra profit, to make it a round number. $1 a month per droplet is probably not enough reason for me to migrate all my projects to another service, and assuming most people are as lazy as me, they'll probably end up squeezing me for a tiny bit more profit.
I like DigitalOcean, I've been very impressed with their service so far. This is the first time they've done something that made me hesitate to recommend them. However, I'm reserving my outrage until there are a few more examples like this.
I’ve been paying for a cheap dedicated server for ages for some things but never bothered to migrate my DO workloads. With the price increase this means my DO workloads cost nearly as much as the dedicated server, and I know they can be containerized and shifted easily.
I've been on digital ocean for maybe ten years but I now want a place where I can run a mail server. That rules out digital ocean because thei IP address blocks are on too many blacklists. I'd be curious to hear other suggestions (but not aws, whose pricing model is too complex).
Look into some kind office internet ISP, who offers static IP-s. At least my experience with those is good. You probably need to make exception in Spamhaus PBL list ( end-user IP address ranges), I haven't seen any problems after removal. If that isn't possible, go with some solid colocation (old school company, who don't offer cloud services).
If only their managed databases weren’t causing such annoying issues for me right now. I tried contacting their support, but it was impossible to get past tier 1 and I felt like they just weren’t even reading what I was saying. Their prices are “cheap,” and the support definitely shows it.
Wish I could get the same experience, we have frequent issues with INSERTs to small tables randomly taking 5-15 seconds and SELECTs from small tables going on infinitely. Their built in stats reflect this as well, so it doesn't appear networking or application related. I'm just frustrated and ready to self-manage my own clusters again. The first reply took around a day to begin with.
Interesting, this is the same issue I had. This was around 3 years ago, though.
Have you tried spinning up your own Postgres instance to see if the same thing happens? It might help to be able to show them that you’re able to resolve it when you don’t use their DB.
We're using the MySQL product, but it's interesting the exact same problem is happening on multiple products under the umbrella. It's not my job to deeply diagnose their issues, and their support wasn't able to even comprehend what I was asking in very plain English. What I could have gained in offloading the maintenance to them was lost in hours wasted so far, and I'm probably better off bankrupting the experiment. When I say small, I really mean it: less than 10k rows in the database. Queries only interacting with primary IDs, etc. It's mind boggling.
The US government admits to 8% inflation in the last 12 months. This price increase seems completely fair given the number of years it's been unchanged.
Not too happy about this, thought it was just them adding a new tier droplet but then reading further they've increased there gold standard $5 droplet to $6. Guess I'm going to move to some other VPS because of this. Vultr is looking like a good candidate as they have a Dallas DC (I'm in TX) and for there $5 dollar VPS you get 2TB transfer, plus they have cheaper VPS's under $5. (I just do home lab stuff so the best bang for my buck is what I'm aiming for.)
DO has been on the path to increase profitability for quite some time. I guess most just aren't aware of their pricing / spec compared to Linode in the past few years.
Unfortunately Linode is now under Akamai, which means there will be a lot of uncertainty going forward. DO is now officially moving towards the AWS direction. Or at least a cheaper AWS alternative direction.
This may be a little off topic from the pricing changes, but working in a DC (and a competitor to DO in some way but not directly), we typically have to end up blocking DO's ASNs to prevent the vast amount of automated abuse coming from their services. Typically we have to end up blocking AWS, DO, Azure, gCloud on most servers. Not really so with Linode and Vultr.
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but does anyone have experience with Hostinger? I want a VPS and am looking between Hostinger, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner.
The only reason I'm entertaining Hostinger is because I'm Canadian and want to support a Canadian company if it's a reasonably priced alternative.
I had huge issues with IP reputation of Digital Ocean. some (smaller) providers seem to completely block their IP ranges. So you can’t reach some servers, and some people can’t reach your DO servers.
The reason for that seems to be, that they don’t take abuse reports very seriously, which is especially critical for mail/spam.
I'm really glad we've started to move to another cloud (OVH). DigitalOcean has been upping their prices consistently for years now. It used to be an affordable, good looking, easy to use cloud. Now it's just good looking and easy to use.
Not for cloud services. Cloud prices have been deflationary for decades. And this makes sense as software has a near zero marginal cost and efficiencies in hardware and data center management are occurring faster than “normal” inflation.
That’s true but that’s what I meant by software has near zero marginal cost. Employees scale massively with cloud providers.
I mean a single sysadmin can automate and manage a million vms. So if the admin’s salary goes up 10% then that’s almost nothing in terms of costs for customers.
This is different from other brick and mortar businesses where the price of corn goes up 10% so the price of potato chips goes up 10%.
For one of my projects running a few droplets, it's an almost 10% increase. Sure they didn't increase the prices for many years, but I would have expected that new instances would got the new prices, not an increase on existing ones...
So basically they have raised the prices of droplets and at the same time make it almost impossible for non-sysadmin type users being able to reduce droplet sizes.
One release is like ripping the bandaid- get all the negative attention out at once. Dragging it out over time means constant drops of negative attention.
The prices listed are slightly higher but every time you visit a 15% discount code will pop-up. So far, so good. The server is in Chicago and I get 1 GBps (symmetric).
Any provider with a very cheap or free cloud tier is gonna be blacklisted somewhere; it can be hard to get an IP that doesn't appear (spin one up and test some blacklist checkers to see).
Vultr allows you to bring your own IP space and do BGP peering. Then any work you do to increase the reputation of the IP space will be portable across providers.
I've been using them for 6 years with their 5$/month droplet.
I am going to be upgraded to 6$ month droplet and forced into 5GB extra SSD space which I don't want or need.
Honestly this doesn't make sense, the price of hardware + their economies of scale should bring prices down if anything, they nowhere explained what's going on, am I paying for the CEO's bonus?
I'll probably switch off, it's a shame I liked how developer first they were.
Your complaint is over $12 a year? Come on... they've provided you a reliable service for 6 years and now you have to pay $1 more a month and that is enough to drive you away?
Because what matters is that you've gotten a good service for the last 6 years at a very competitive price. A 20% increase, one time in 6 years is still extremely good. They don't need to add value, they need to stay in operation while navigating the ocean of rising costs.
Let's see if their competitors can match that... oh wait, they haven't been around that long.
Why the hell would I pay for their employee salaries if the service hasn't changed? They likely hired people to pay for features I don't use, and gave executive bonuses.
As I said, I'm happy for them to make more money, but if I'm getting out of it why should I be the one paying?
Yea, it doesn't seem like such huge news to me they're intoducing a new $4 droplet when they had previously had a $5 droplet...and bumping that one to $6.
there is something about digital ocean, they are stuck in the past, the only things they are doing these days is catching up with the competition while at the same time keep their useless restrictions like the bandwidth limit
