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DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

• halotrope 4y ago
  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.
• pchm 4y ago
  So the price increase for the managed database is... 100%? Currently paying $240/mo for 16 GB RAM / 6vCPU / 270 GB Disk. The new price is $480/mo. We have a bunch of these databases at work, so I'm sure we'll be considering other providers now.
  • miniman1337 4y ago
    AWS RDS is significantly cheaper
    • boesboes 4y ago
      And that is ridiciously expensive imo haha ;) 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.
  • impulser_ 4y ago
    The prices only change if you have additional nodes. If you don't, the pricing doesn't change.
  • asadawadia 4y ago
    yeah this one was really bad
  • donatj 4y ago
    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.
    • skrtskrt 4y ago
      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.
  • CoolCold 4y ago
    Hah, for 230 euro I run 160GB RAM, 2x512Gb + 2x3.8TB NVMe, AMD Epyc 32 cores CPU on Hetzner. Not saying you should do the same, just was a bit shocked and decided to share.
    • unixhero 4y ago
      A server is not a managed database
      • CoolCold 4y ago
        Agree. Still the price hugely differs.
    • systemvoltage 4y ago
      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.
    • andai 4y ago
      Dang, what are you doing with all that power?
      • CoolCold 4y ago
        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.
  • WXLCKNO 4y ago
    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.
• istillwritecode 4y ago
  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).
  • ZWoz 4y ago
    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).
• jakub_jo 4y ago
  For the fellow European (edit: & US) HN crowd I can highly recommend Hetzner's Cloud offerings: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
  • pluc 4y ago
    Did some DD work on upcloud.com as well - if you want fast storage they're the ones.
    • freediver 4y ago
      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.
  • kossTKR 4y ago
    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?
    • martin-adams 4y ago
      I use them and they’re a joy to use. Dashboard is just as simple. No managed databases or kubernetes clusters though. Hoping that’s in the works as it will really level up their offering if they do.
      • pretext-1 4y ago
        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.
    • celsoazevedo 4y ago
      > Are their interface / setup as easy as DO droplets? Hetzner Cloud looks modern and it's easy to use. They don't have the same services as DO though. If you go the dedicated server way, you'll use the old control panel. I don't find it hard to use, but it's not as good looking.
• samwillis 4y ago
  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%.
  • fideloper 4y ago
    I mean, $5 -> $6/mo is technically a 20% increase, but it's only because it's such a small amount to begin with. I haven't checked their pricing in a while but I think the $5/mo droplet used to be 512m but is now 1G ram, right? It sounds like there's also a $4/mo smaller droplet with 512m ram.
    • nop_slide 4y ago
      The $5 was 1G ram previously. I don't think there was a 512 option
      • lb4r 4y ago
        They used to have a 512M droplet for $5. After a few years they upped it to 1G, and you could upgrade for free.
        • nop_slide 4y ago
          gotcha, I've only been with them for 2 years so it's always been 1G for me
        • jandrese 4y ago
          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.
      • selcuka 4y ago
        It was 512M before, then they doubled the specs of every droplet a few years ago.
• pritambarhate 4y ago
  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.
  • cheschire 4y ago
    In addition to inflation, they may also be offsetting part of the projected cost of the $4 tier as well.
    • hartator 4y ago
      > offsetting part of the projected cost of the $4 tier as well Usually - well before inflation - this tier was $2.50.
      • cheschire 4y ago
        I thought the $4 tier was new. Or did they announce intent a while ago at the $2.50 price point?
        • hartator 4y ago
          $2.50 was from comparing to the similar specs from Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/pricing/ https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
      • pfist 4y ago
        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.
  • kyledrake 4y ago
    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.
• tpaksoy 4y ago
  Why aren't they showing a comparison between old and new price? This seems deliberate...
  • ricketycricket 4y ago
    Pricing page still shows current prices. It appears to be a roughly 20% increase across the board.
    • samwillis 4y ago
      No, it's only 20% on the basic droplets (which currently top out at $80/month), it looks like 5% on everything else.
      • haswell 4y ago
        This is unfortunate, and seems to impact hobbyists more than larger production setups if true. I love DO, but with the pretty basic requirements I have (just a blog and some small apps) I need to start looking at cheaper options.
        • stjohnswarts 4y ago
          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
  • mfer 4y ago
    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.
    • Xorlev 4y ago
• jjice 4y ago
  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.
  • mobilio 4y ago
    The real question is - how your hourly rate that will justify increasing with $1 per month?
    • alexpotato 4y ago
      $1000 bill invoiced: - Hitting the machine with the hammer: $5 - Knowing where to hit the machine to get it working again: $995
• jchw 4y ago
  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.)
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • leros 4y ago
    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 :)
    • nakedgremlin 4y ago
      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.
      • leros 4y ago
        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.
• zibarn2 4y ago
  that's a big price increase, almost 15/20% for small/medium droplets
  • dud3z 4y ago
    Yes that's a full 20% increase on droplets in the 5-10USD at least :(
  • heliodor 4y ago
    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.
• aosaigh 4y ago
  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.
  • davidbarker 4y ago
    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.
    • aosaigh 4y ago
      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.
    • dan353hehe 4y ago
      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`. Of course I am biased though :)
• jmartrican 4y ago
  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.
  • apocalyptic0n3 4y ago
    Yeah, I read the email they sent me and it overall felt pretty deceptive. I would have expected better from Digital Ocean given my past experiences.
    • mettamage 4y ago
      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.
  • twox2 4y ago
    100%
  • overmotion 4y ago
    I compared my statements to the new pricing. It boils down to a 20% spike on most of their products. That's a stiff price bump with a six week notice.
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    It is also not changing by $1 across the board. $6 droplet is going to $7. But, $12 droplet is going to $14 with the new pricing. PR folks who work in tech companies need to realize that their customers are different from, say, a toothpaste company's customers. Just be fucking transparent.
  • 4y ago
• makeworld 4y ago
  Ongoing discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396794
• l5870uoo9y 4y ago
  Essentially only adding more options for the managed databases?
• baobob 4y ago
  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
  • ihuman 4y ago
    They also introduced a new 10GB (512MB memory) tier that's 20% cheaper than the budget-tier's original $5/month price
    • baobob 4y ago
      $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
  • Dork1234 4y ago
    How does this compare with prices for AWS/Google Compute Engine/Azure ?
    • electroly 4y ago
      AWS Lightsail was already slightly cheaper than DO, and now it's even cheaper yet.
    • mark_l_watson 4y ago
      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…
      • selfhoster69 4y ago
        Isn't there terrible bandwidth restrictions for the GCP free tier VMs?
• asah 4y ago
  it's crazy to me that computers get faster+cheaper but hosting goes up in price.
  • pc86 4y ago
    I would imagine metal and silicon are a small portion of DO's operating costs.
  • ceejayoz 4y ago
    Computers were already pretty cheap, and engineers are not.
  • sithlord 4y ago
    its all of us trying to maximize TC that drives up the cost!
  • seunosewa 4y ago
    I don't think Intel and AMD based servers are getting much faster or cheaper anymore for custom workloads (web apps, etc)
  • lancesells 4y ago
    Employees, electricity, physical space, infrastructure, etc.
  • nik736 4y ago
    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.
• akpa1 4y ago
  Well, here's the motivation I needed to finally complete that migration to Hetzner.
• gmemstr 4y ago
  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.
  • dhzhzjsbevs 4y ago
    Those were so brutal to run things on. Fwiw, that 2.5 was after the price drop. 1vcpu + 512mb + 20gb used to be $5
  • arinlen 4y ago
    > 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. For perspective, Hetzner Cloud's CX11 nodes pack 2GB RAM and go for €4.15/month. https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
    • andai 4y ago
      And for €4.75 you get 2 CPUs? Dang. I haven't used Hetzner in a long time, I might have to check them out again.
• showerst 4y ago
  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.
  • throwaway_98554 4y ago
    Why do you think the price increase is fair? If anything I would expect it to go down as computation and memory get cheaper.
    • brink 4y ago
      They're not getting cheaper
    • jermaustin1 4y ago
      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.
      • tuananh 4y ago
        but aws ec2 price always go down
        • dfinninger 4y ago
          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.
          • TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
            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.
• karmakaze 4y ago
  The info I was wanted to see is on a linked page. > Introducing a new $4 Droplet 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.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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.
    • nimos 4y ago
      At some point AWS did have an "ECU" that did this. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/what-is-an-ecu-an-ec2-compute-unit-simply-explained/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/what-is-an-ecu-an-ec2-com...
• bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Russia is quickly becoming a no-fry zone.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• kossTKR 4y ago
  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.
• anderspitman 4y ago
  The most relevant bit for me is that apparently the minimum price for 1TB of transfer is now $6 instead of $5. That's unfortunate. Any suggestions on the best VPS providers for bandwidth-intensive applications?
  • dotnet00 4y ago
    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.
  • kitsune_cw 4y ago
    Hetzner gives a generous 20TB egress for each VPS of any size. They also have dedicated servers which give you a gigabit link with unlimited traffic.
  • sesteel 4y ago
    I am looking for somebody who has used a Contabo VPS. They advertise their smallest at: $6.99 / month Starts with 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 32 TB Egress, Unlimited Ingress, and 50 GB NVMe.
• tristor 4y ago
  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. Guess I have a reason to migrate now.
• ur-whale 4y ago
  Not affiliated with Hetzner so I feel comfortable pointing out that: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud (scroll down to unbeatable prices). and it's been that way for a long time. There's also: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/ https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/vps/ ... why is this news ?
  • 0des 4y ago
    half of hetzners ip space is on spam lists, and sometimes out of nowhere they like to ask for your passport and drivers license.
    • sparrish 4y ago
      I wish it was only half... It's nearly impossible to get a clean IP at Hetzner.
      • 0des 4y ago
        I'm more put off by any amount of contact. The correspondence should end at the point of sale. Unless something is on fire, lose my number.
• SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  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).
  • zatarc 4y ago
    So you're spending $102 a month for some hobby things?
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      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.
      • tasuki 4y ago
        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.
        • zatarc 4y ago
          Maybe this is part of the training. Paying overpriced fees and stay addicted to the cloud.
• dskrepps 4y ago
  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.
  • jedimastert 4y ago
    I think the $5 thing was a direct answer to Linode's offerings?
    • Macha 4y ago
      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.
      • Brian-Puccio 4y ago
        That’s my memory, too. Linode for a long time didn’t have a product at that very low price point.
        • apple4ever 4y ago
          That is right. I looked at both and since DO had the $5 VM and Linode didn't, I went with DO.
      • treesknees 4y ago
        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. [1] https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/11th-linode-birthday-10-linode-plan/ https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/11th-linode-birthday-10-l... [2] https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/high-memory-instances-and-5-linodes/ https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/high-memory-instances-and...
• malfist 4y ago
  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.
  • AdamGibbins 4y ago
    > 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.
    • malfist 4y ago
      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.
      • AdamGibbins 4y ago
        Increased energy prices absolutely impacts current hardware, especially given older hardware tends to be more energy intensive.
        • tedunangst 4y ago
          So the $5 I was paying for a droplet was all for electricity? DO doesn't have a plan to recoup capex?
  • rchaud 4y ago
    You're not buying a box from Digital Ocean, you're purchasing a managed service. Staff costs can and do increase independently of hardware costs.
• sesteel 4y ago
  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.
  • bravetraveler 4y ago
    I generally have heard good things for personal use. Never signed up personally I believe they limit disk IO to ~100MB/s unless requested, an annoying step but otherwise I hear they perform well especially considering the pricing
  • kossTKR 4y ago
    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.
    • gamblor956 4y ago
      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.
• hartator 4y ago
  Looks like around a 20% increase on everything?
• dawnerd 4y ago
  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.
  • kuschku 4y ago
    e.g., I’m using a €53/month Hetzner server which is 8 CPU cores, 64 GB of RAM, 512 GB NVMe SSD, 4 TB HDD, unlimited transfer. DO offer the same for $416.00/month.
• jmacd 4y ago
  I saw this headline and immediately thought they were making a genius move with the bad press Heroku is getting. natch
• nonoesp 4y ago
  Everyone who reads this headline. Thinks their $5 Droplet is now $4. [Continues reading...] Realizes their $5 Droplet is now $6 (!).
  • dskrepps 4y ago
    Now they don't have a $5 droplet, which was by name alone basically an important branding asset in of itself.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Carl's Jr used to have a Six Dollar Burger but that's gone now that it would cost ... six dollars. (I guess it's been renamed to a ThickBurger).
  • jimkleiber 4y ago
    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.
    • akomtu 4y ago
      Even $6 is a lie: they're going to take "taxes" on top of that. One day we'll see a mandatory "tip" field with three choices: 15%, 20%, 25%.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• ehayes 4y ago
  Makes Linode look like an even better deal.
  • 0des 4y ago
    I was under the impression that while we are happy to let linode sponsor our podcasts nobody actually uses them, like Rackspace
• erikrothoff 4y ago
  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.
  • heliodor 4y ago
    Inflation is quite high.
    • prepend 4y ago
      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.
      • Satam 4y ago
        But the prices for everything else that the company's owners and employees consume are rising.
        • prepend 4y ago
          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%.
• nonoesp 4y ago
  TL;DR: Existing $5/mo Droplets are now $6. New $4 tier added (1 vCPU, 512MB memory, 500GB bandwidth, 10GB SSD).
• Shadonototra 4y ago
  bandwidth limit? no thanks i'll stick with Scaleway 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
• Operyl 4y ago
  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.
  • steve_adams_86 4y ago
    I’ve never had that experience. Even when asking support for help with ~100/month in databases I got very quick and high quality help. Worth noting is that the issue was on their end, and they had it resolved within half a day or so.
    • Operyl 4y ago
      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.
      • steve_adams_86 4y ago
        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.
        • Operyl 4y ago
          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.
• sjs382 4y ago
  Here's the pricing for legacy droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/try/legacy-droplets https://www.digitalocean.com/try/legacy-droplets
• mardix 4y ago
  Hetzner is a very good alternative. They now have VPS in Virginia/USA.
  • em10fan 4y ago
    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!
  • sparrish 4y ago
    We tested their VPS in Virginia/USA - poor networkwork uptime.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      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.
  • mxuribe 4y ago
    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!
• humanistbot 4y ago
  As a customer for years, see ya DigitalOcean! I've been meaning to check out Hetzner for a while, but this is the motivation I need to move.
• sitkack 4y ago
  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.
  • zasdffaa 4y ago
    Cost of power is going up now. It might not be reasonable to assume price falls this year. Or it might. Dunno.
    • hnarn 4y ago
      The comment you replied to says: > 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?
      • zasdffaa 4y ago
        Badly put. Only that the cost might well not drop. Whether it needs to rise significantly I don't know.
      • ricochet11 4y ago
        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).
        • hnarn 4y ago
          Nobody’s arguing that power has gotten more expensive. Or that replacing hardware costs money.
• andix 4y ago
  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.
• laverya 4y ago
  Looks like Linode is still doing $5 nodes. Hopefully there's not a similar announcement there in the near future. https://www.linode.com/pricing/ https://www.linode.com/pricing/
  • CameronNemo 4y ago
    I had the same thought about Vultr. Hopefully these smaller VPS providers do not domino with their prices.
  • maicro 4y ago
    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: OVH: https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/ https://us.ovhcloud.com/vps/ 1 vCore, Memory 2 GB, Storage 20 GB SSD SATA, Public bandwidth 100Mbps [ed. - "unlimited traffic"], $3.50 DO: https://www.digitalocean.com/try/new-pricing 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. And then Linode (I assume you were referencing the 1GB Shared CPU option): https://www.linode.com/pricing/ https://www.linode.com/pricing/ 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/ 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: vCPUs Memory Bandwidth Storage Monthly 1 vCPU 0.5 GB 0.50 TB 10 GB $2.50 /mo 1 vCPU 0.5 GB 0.50 TB 10 GB $3.50 /mo 1 vCPU 1 GB 1.00 TB 25 GB $5.00 /mo "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"...
• laverya 4y ago
  Looks like Linode is still doing $5 nodes. Hopefully there's not a similar announcement there in the near future. https://www.linode.com/pricing/ https://www.linode.com/pricing/
• tekbog 4y ago
  Haven't seen it posted, but ignore if it's somewhere, here's the table with all the new prices: https://www.digitalocean.com/try/new-pricing https://www.digitalocean.com/try/new-pricing
• UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
  Let's see, I host Dokku in a VPS. For 7 USD/month I get: 4 cores, 4 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD, uncapped bandwith (at least in theory) The days of DO offering the best prices are long over.
  • gosukiwi 4y ago
    What hosting service you use?
    • UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
      https://servercheap.net/ https://servercheap.net/ 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).
      • gosukiwi 4y ago
        Nice, thanks! Looks great, I like the unlimited network :p
• oefrha 4y ago
  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? [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing [2] https://www.linode.com/pricing/ https://www.linode.com/pricing/
  • 8bitbuddhist 4y ago
    I'll dig it up for you. This is from Feb 2020, and is much more straightforward than what's on the site now. https://web.archive.org/web/20200229081345/https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200229081345/https://www.digit...
  • ketanip 4y ago
    I really like that about Linode, no click to see crap.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • treesknees 4y ago
    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.)
  • Brian-Puccio 4y ago
    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.
• nayuki 4y ago
  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.
  • michaelmcdonald 4y ago
    Standard marketing 101. Can't fault them for doing what every other company on the face of the earth does.
    • habibur 4y ago
      But I liked DO because they didn't follow the standard marketing practices. Had been very straightforward with their prices.
    • alamortsubite 4y ago
      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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • rmbyrro 4y ago
    Isn't that normal? They're not being dishonest, I think? In a job interview, we scream our strengths and downplay the rest as well. Not saying it's right or "ok", but normal. Expectable as well...
• Drybones 4y ago
  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.
• bastardoperator 4y ago
  The only edge DO ever had from my limited perspective was pricing and it seems like that edge is fading.
  • your_username 4y ago
• oreally 4y ago
  My question is: does this price hike still make them cheaper compared to AWS?
• karaterobot 4y ago
  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.
• nrmitchi 4y ago
  So, just to be clear, this is a 20% increase on the lowest tier, and a smaller increase on the more expensive options. I can't see how this change doesn't push their small (hobby) users away entirely. It sounds crazy, but this may actually push my personal usage into "AWS might be cheaper" territory.
  • compscistd 4y ago
    Why not move hobby projects and droplets to the $4 tier when it launches? It’s cheaper and likely enough to do what you want
    • nrmitchi 4y ago
      Because it is most definitely not enough for what I want.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• asdz 4y ago
  If I'm the competitor, I will announce another news, 'No price change' :D Being with them for more than 5 years on basic droplet.
• rundmc 4y ago
  So basically they have raised the prices of droplets and at the same time make it almost impossible for non-sysadmin type users being able to reduce droplet sizes.
• nichochar 4y ago
  I've been using them for 6 years with their 5$/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.
  • latchkey 4y ago
    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?
    • nichochar 4y ago
      My complaint is 20% increase with no added value. Why do you look at the absolute cost rather than the relative? Competition looks better (like fly.io). I think the company is stale and greedy, otherwise prices wouldn't be going up.
      • latchkey 4y ago
        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.
  • JanSt 4y ago
    How much did energy prices rise in 5 years? Their employees salaries? I think it‘s fair and still cheap.
    • nichochar 4y ago
      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? This is really weird thinking that you guys have.
• sigjuice 4y ago
  Each table is missing an “Old Monthly Price” column.
• sieabahlpark 4y ago
• annoyingnoob 4y ago
  I just went from Quarantining all email from Digital Ocean IPs to outright deleting it before delivery. Digital Ocean is a huge supporter of spammers and does absolutely nothing about spam or toward spam prevention. Please do not support Digital Ocean as they've chosen to be a bad actor on the Internet in the name of profit.
  • tehbeard 4y ago
    They're all guilty. From my experience we've had way more issues with AWS machines running exploit checks/brute force logins than any other cloud provider.
    • annoyingnoob 4y ago
      If I report an issue to AWS, AWS actually takes action. If I report an issue to DO, DO sends my report to the bad actor and my problem becomes worse. They may all be guilty, but some actually try to do something. DO does nothing and does not care.
• snalty 4y ago
  Eh, I'm probably going to move to Hetzner or Linode anyway as apparently a lot of DO IPs are blacklisted for mail.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    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). It can take months to spin up an IP correctly.
  • CameronNemo 4y ago
    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. https://www.vultr.com/docs/configuring-bgp-on-vultr/ https://www.vultr.com/docs/configuring-bgp-on-vultr/
• dimgl 4y ago
  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.
  • ngetchell 4y ago
    I got an email that explains the changes.
• ehutch79 4y ago
  Even with the price increase, it's a fraction of what i'm paying for what feels like aging rackspace stuff
• donatj 4y ago
  Just from a PR standpoint, wouldn't they had been better off rolling these changes out over time rather than all at once in a big press release?
  • tedivm 4y ago
    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.
• kodah 4y ago
  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.
• throwaway5959 4y ago
  Crazy how $1/mo is enough to get people who make $200k/year to spend hours or days to move their stuff to another platform. Ooof.
  • Toutouxc 4y ago
    What percentage of HN users do you imagine makes $200k/year?
    • throwaway5959 4y ago
      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 $72k/year.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• evandale 4y ago
  I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but does anyone have experience with Hostinger? I want a VPS and am looking between Hostinger, DigitalOcean, or Hetzner. The only reason I'm entertaining Hostinger is because I'm Canadian and want to support a Canadian company if it's a reasonably priced alternative.
• ksec 4y ago
  DO has been on the path to increase profitability for quite some time. I guess most just aren't aware of their pricing / spec compared to Linode in the past few years. Unfortunately Linode is now under Akamai, which means there will be a lot of uncertainty going forward. DO is now officially moving towards the AWS direction. Or at least a cheaper AWS alternative direction. Arguably the end of the Linode / DO era.
• slig 4y ago
  I still don't understand their new K8S minimum price.
• 999900000999 4y ago
  HN, the place where almost everyone makes at least 120k TC, with many of you hitting 300k. Yet a 1$ increase after 12 years is unreasonable ?
  • nijave 4y ago
    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
    • 999900000999 4y ago
      Does AWS do this ? Unless your using DO at a very large scale the pricing difference isn't significant. I personally use AWS now since my skills with AWS are useful at work as well. That's the biggest perk of AWS to me. At the same time I've always found AWS to have convoluted confusing billing, at least DO is straight forward even if it's gone up a buck or so.
      • nijave 4y ago
        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.
        • 999900000999 4y ago
          Then use AWS. As a sibling comment points out the price increase is less than inflation
  • TheNewsIsHere 4y ago
    I totally get the sentiment. 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. For my small business that was a shocker.
• sharno 4y ago
  And I thought they'd make a very cheap basic droplet that would be cheaper than $4 to compete with the free tiers from Fly.io and render.com I hope they make something like this in the future
• gamblor956 4y ago
  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).
  • julianlam 4y ago
    On its own it's not significant, but we run a fleet of ~150 droplets. Costs add up.
• gregoriol 4y ago
  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...
• InitEnabler 4y ago
  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.)