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Comment by DanielDent | Hacker News Reader

sigh. DigitalOcean continues their march towards irrelevance.

First it was the app platform and now this. Gouging us at $0.10/gigabyte bandwidth charges makes us: (1) think less of you, and (2) adds a bunch of cognitive complexity & work to developers' lives.

If this is how it's going to be we may as well just use AWS or move on to one of your competitors that isn't trying to pretend that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't, and there isn't any reason we should have to design applications around artificially absurdly inflated costs.

Even Oracle pretends to understand this. _ORACLE_ are the ones trying to make the case that they aren't only about having hostages/locked in customers.

When Oracle is beating you on this metric you've really jumped the shark.

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I don’t think this is reasonable criticism. It’s more than fair for them to charge for egress traffic, and they’re doing it at a price point less than AWS.

Of course it would be nicer if things were free, but to claim this to be evidence of a march into irrelevance? For charging for egress traffic on a Docker registry? That’s a bit too much don’t you think? Especially considering how easy it is to set up some GitHub action and or another CI tool that constantly keeps hammering their registries without a lot of value. Docker (the company) clearly feels the pain of this a lot, and they just want to prevent this type of thing from happening.

If I were to guess the intended use case is to help you with deployments inside the DO cloud, and to actually reduce your ingress traffic when pulling from other, remote docker registries. It’s a win/win for these use cases, and to be honest, it’s not expensive.

Besides, DO’s pricing still is very much favorable compared to other cloud vendors.

There are many CDNs that make money charging < $0.01/gb.

Indeed DigitalOcean themselves built their place in the market by charging $0.01/gb for bandwidth. How do we reasonably get to $0.10 as is the case here?

If it were really that expensive for them they could outsource it to a CDN for well under $0.01/gb at their scale, which would leave them the ability to get margin. But all of this pricing is in fact completely detached from the underlying physical realities -- they are charging these prices because they think they can get away with it, not because they need to do so to cover costs and have some margin.

Bandwidth prices shouldn't be going up, indeed they should be going down. 100 gigabit interconnects are a thing now.

I believe that bandwidth charge is after you've exceeded the monthly allowance and for when someone wants to pull your image over the internet, and not distributing to your instances.

"In the future, each plan will have a bandwidth allowance and additional outbound data transfer (from the registry to the internet) will be $0.10/GiB."

BW topic is not related to container registry, but worth mentioning as it is being discussed in this thread. Regarding the outbound data transfer pricing for a $5/month droplet, you get minimum 1TB/month free Internet-bound BW. The price of 0.01/GB kicks in only after that.

Disclaimer - I work for DigitialOcean.

There's a really big gap between the $0.01/gb you are talking about being charged on droplets and the $0.10/gb that DigitalOcean is using on newer offerings like this and "App Platform".

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/container-registry/ - "In the future, each plan will have a bandwidth allowance and additional outbound data transfer (from the registry to the internet) will be $0.10/GiB."

The fact that somebody could put a caching proxy in front of the container registry -- on a droplet also hosted at DigitalOcean -- and have their bandwidth costs fall 10x for doing that does indeed provide further illustration of the absurdity of DigitalOcean's new approach to bandwidth pricing.

I don’t think I agree. This is still a great choice if you need a container registry for your images that you run on Digital Ocean compute - as far as I can tell there is no bandwidth charge there. This means that DO has a total container hosting platform.

You should probably double-check on egress data pricing from AWS.

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