DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing | Hacker News Reader

DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

digitalocean.com

172 pointslode326 comments

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.

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.

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.

100%

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.

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.

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.

All that behaviour let linode and vultr flourish

For the fellow European (edit: & US) HN crowd I can highly recommend Hetzner's Cloud offerings: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Did some DD work on upcloud.com as well - if you want fast storage they're the ones.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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 really also like contabo. Good server with great pricing from my own personal experience.

Great performance and pricing

I use it for all my projects for 3 years, and very satisfied

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.

DO prices are ridiculous (imo).

I also recommend OVH. I run a small api on their cheapest VPS, I think I pay like 4/mo for it.

I get maintenance emails quite often, but I think it's from an abundance of caution. I can't remember it actually ever going down.

probably because one of their datacenters burnt down last year, youd like to think they are being extra cautious now.

I wouldn't run anything too important on OVH. It is cheap though.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...

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).

Oh I'll definitely try them out, I'm on DO and not very excited about them, those Hetzner prices look great!

I'm a bit sad they don't have anything closer to the UK: I'll miss the 4ms ping to my DO VPS.

EDIT: holy shit, I looked into Contabo mentioned below and it's even cheaper! €5 for 4 cores and 8 GB RAM, what's the catch?

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.

A few months ago, I compiled this list to come up with cheap, mostly EU-based VPS providers: https://gist.github.com/derhuerst/4ef9a832e031bf82d6e640e2dd...

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

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 guess if they aren’t diligent with encoding urls that could be an attack vector because it separates query parameters.

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.

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 saw a clip of their datacenter tour and was not inspiring any confidence. But, I am sure they'd work just fine.

"You get you pay for", even if it is half true accounting for DO's shareholder's pressure, I think Hetzner is impossibly cheap.

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...

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.

How do they make money off this?

Platform lockin. Oracle enterprise pricing is eye watering.

Note that they terminate accounts for unknown reason https://www.reddit.com/r/oraclecloud/comments/tkbx04/oracle_...

Terrible support. https://community.oracle.com/tech/apps-infra/discussion/4496...

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

[2] https://www.linode.com/pricing/

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.digit...

I really like that about Linode, no click to see crap.

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 wish Akamai won't change Linode.

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.

AWS RDS is significantly cheaper

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.

The prices only change if you have additional nodes. If you don't, the pricing doesn't change.

yeah this one was really bad

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.

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.

A server is not a managed database

Agree. Still the price hugely differs.

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.

Dang, what are you doing with all that power?

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 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.

In addition to inflation, they may also be offsetting part of the projected cost of the $4 tier as well.

> offsetting part of the projected cost of the $4 tier as well

Usually - well before inflation - this tier was $2.50.

I thought the $4 tier was new. Or did they announce intent a while ago at the $2.50 price point?

$2.50 was from comparing to the similar specs from Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/pricing/

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.

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.

[0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ch...

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.

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)

Armchair hacker news CEO knows what is REALLY going on behind the scenes at digital ocean.

Your comment does not add to the discourse here

If the title doesn't mention lower prices, you can be sure it's going to be a rate hike.

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.

Cost of power is going up now. It might not be reasonable to assume price falls this year. Or it might. Dunno.

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?

Badly put. Only that the cost might well not drop. Whether it needs to rise significantly I don't know.

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).

Nobody’s arguing that power has gotten more expensive. Or that replacing hardware costs money.

the gov limits how much they can jump every 6 months -> only for residential customers. Business customers do not have this cap.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why do you think prices “should be going down”?

> We are still on exponential curves for compute, storage and DC bandwidth.

I don’t know about DC bandwidth, but for compute and storage… really? Feels like we are in the upper portion of an S-curve.

>We are still on exponential curves for compute, storage and DC bandwidth.

We are not and we haven't been at it for quite some time already. Only compute is dropping in price but it is hardly on an exponential curves.

>A $100 workload from last year should not cost more than a $100 this year.

That is on the assumption that cost of are the same for other part of business even if hardware cost are dropping. Which isn't true.

And ignoring all the above, we are currently experience component shortage which means everything cost more, and energy price increase.

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.

Computing may be cheap, but the power to run it is only going one way.

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.

The real question is - how your hourly rate that will justify increasing with $1 per month?

$1000 bill invoiced:

- Hitting the machine with the hammer: $5

- Knowing where to hit the machine to get it working again: $995

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 think the $5 thing was a direct answer to Linode's offerings?

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.

That’s my memory, too. Linode for a long time didn’t have a product at that very low price point.

That is right. I looked at both and since DO had the $5 VM and Linode didn't, I went with DO.

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-l...

[2] https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/high-memory-instances-and...

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.

Why do you think the price increase is fair?

If anything I would expect it to go down as computation and memory get cheaper.

They're not getting cheaper

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.

but aws ec2 price always go down

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.

not saying aws ec2 is cheaper. it's just that over the year, the prices are always going down. I can't recall the last time it went up.

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.

Inflation, and chip shortages interrupting their (presumably linear) asset lifecycle costs.

Possibly also gearing up for a sale, and keen to test the elasticity of the market.

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.

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.

Is it getting cheaper? Pretty sure the chip situation is driving up prices.

People forget those rack servers still need a CPU to run everything and controllers for all the drives.

That, and the demand for cycles. That's the real shame these days. The new hotness is burning cycles just to show that that you did.

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.

Both the price of, and electricity consumption of computation goes down over time.

How much the consumption reduction counteracts the rise in electricity prices, I don't really know.

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.

Yeah, I thought this is surely to do with electricity prices. They have doubled or tripled in Europe recently.

Everything from wages to electricity to real estate to the CPUs themselves have gotten more expensive.

Saying it's just computation and memory is ignoring 99% of what it takes to run that business.

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.

Standard marketing 101. Can't fault them for doing what every other company on the face of the earth does.

But I liked DO because they didn't follow the standard marketing practices. Had been very straightforward with their prices.

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.

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...

Ongoing discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396794

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.

Those were so brutal to run things on.

Fwiw, that 2.5 was after the price drop. 1vcpu + 512mb + 20gb used to be $5

> 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

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.

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 ?

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.

To me, not showing existing prices is customer hostile and a bit shady. That said DO has always been expensive to me.

hetzner, OVH, or the swarth of VPS hosts on lowendbox.com is preferable to me.

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

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.

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.

Then use AWS. As a sibling comment points out the price increase is less than inflation

>1$ increase after 12 years

Adjusted for inflation, it should be $6.63.

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.

What percentage of HN users do you imagine makes $200k/year?

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 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.

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 :)

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.

https://github.com/Koed00/django-q/issues/522#issuecomment-1...

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/

I had the same thought about Vultr. Hopefully these smaller VPS providers do not domino with their prices.

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/

  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 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/

  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:

  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"...

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.

I got an email that explains the changes.

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

They also introduced a new 10GB (512MB memory) tier that's 20% cheaper than the budget-tier's original $5/month price

$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

How does this compare with prices for AWS/Google Compute Engine/Azure ?

AWS Lightsail was already slightly cheaper than DO, and now it's even cheaper yet.

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…

Isn't there terrible bandwidth restrictions for the GCP free tier VMs?

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

Limited to 50mb/s ... But yes ... It's free :)

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.

Here's a comparison of some free clouds: https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/

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

What's the cost at the cross over though?

If it switches at $10 worth of bandwidth, or even at $20, is that REALLY that much?

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

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.

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.

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.

At some point AWS did have an "ECU" that did this.

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/what-is-an-ecu-an-ec2-com...

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.

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

Because it is most definitely not enough for what I want.

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.

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.

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 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.

The $5 was 1G ram previously. I don't think there was a 512 option

They used to have a 512M droplet for $5. After a few years they upped it to 1G, and you could upgrade for free.

gotcha, I've only been with them for 2 years so it's always been 1G for me

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.

It was 512M before, then they doubled the specs of every droplet a few years ago.

It's because the other types of Droplets are overpriced and less competitive to begin with.

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

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).

So you're spending $102 a month for some hobby things?

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.

Maybe this is part of the training. Paying overpriced fees and stay addicted to the cloud.

Pretty cheap if you account for the very employable skills either being learned or kept sharp!

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.

What are your traffic requirements?

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.

k3s makes running your own control plane relatively painless if you're not too opinionated about some things

Also k3s will run on much smaller instances

r/homelab

I'm pretty sure GCP's managed kubernetes service offers 1 control plane as part of the free tier

Was going to say the same. If its just 1 cluster then you probably will be cheaper overall on GCP.

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].

[1] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#568

[2] https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/prices/#419

Thank you!

> 8gb RAM and 4vCPU

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.

Good luck actually buying a Pi right now

Or equivalent is implied.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/pine64-and-radxas-new...

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-m1-with-8gbyte-ram/

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.

Is an old arm CPU really comparable to a Xeon/epyc?

And home connections are all asymmetric, you may get a gig down but I've not seen anything outside business class with over 50 up.

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.

Mythic Beasts[1] do Pi hosting for a reasonable amount - not used them personally, but I have been recommended to them by a few people

[1] https://www.mythic-beasts.com

I think Scaleway is pretty cheap

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.

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

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.

Increased energy prices absolutely impacts current hardware, especially given older hardware tends to be more energy intensive.

So the $5 I was paying for a droplet was all for electricity? DO doesn't have a plan to recoup capex?

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.

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.

Well, here's the motivation I needed to finally complete that migration to Hetzner.

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).

On its own it's not significant, but we run a fleet of ~150 droplets. Costs add up.

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?

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.

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.

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.

it's crazy to me that computers get faster+cheaper but hosting goes up in price.

I would imagine metal and silicon are a small portion of DO's operating costs.

Computers were already pretty cheap, and engineers are not.

its all of us trying to maximize TC that drives up the cost!

I don't think Intel and AMD based servers are getting much faster or cheaper anymore for custom workloads (web apps, etc)

Employees, electricity, physical space, infrastructure, etc.

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.

Why aren't they showing a comparison between old and new price? This seems deliberate...

Pricing page still shows current prices. It appears to be a roughly 20% increase across the board.

No, it's only 20% on the basic droplets (which currently top out at $80/month), it looks like 5% on everything else.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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?

Hetzner is a very good alternative. They now have VPS in Virginia/USA.

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!

We tested their VPS in Virginia/USA - poor networkwork uptime.

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.

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!

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.

Even with the price increase, it's a fraction of what i'm paying for what feels like aging rackspace stuff

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each table is missing an “Old Monthly Price” column.

that's a big price increase, almost 15/20% for small/medium droplets

Yes that's a full 20% increase on droplets in the 5-10USD at least :(

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.

Here's the pricing for legacy droplets: https://www.digitalocean.com/try/legacy-droplets

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.

Arguably the end of the Linode / DO era.

Not affiliated with Hetzner so I feel comfortable pointing out that:

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/

... why is this news ?

half of hetzners ip space is on spam lists, and sometimes out of nowhere they like to ask for your passport and drivers license.

I wish it was only half... It's nearly impossible to get a clean IP at Hetzner.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The only edge DO ever had from my limited perspective was pricing and it seems like that edge is fading.

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.

Inflation is quite high.

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.

But the prices for everything else that the company's owners and employees consume are rising.

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...

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/

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

TL;DR: Existing $5/mo Droplets are now $6. New $4 tier added (1 vCPU, 512MB memory, 500GB bandwidth, 10GB SSD).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

What hosting service you use?

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).

Nice, thanks! Looks great, I like the unlimited network :p

Eh, I'm probably going to move to Hetzner or Linode anyway as apparently a lot of DO IPs are blacklisted for mail.

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.

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/

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?

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.

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.

How much did energy prices rise in 5 years? Their employees salaries? I think it‘s fair and still cheap.

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.

Makes Linode look like an even better deal.

I was under the impression that while we are happy to let linode sponsor our podcasts nobody actually uses them, like Rackspace

I saw this headline and immediately thought they were making a genius move with the bad press Heroku is getting.

natch

My question is: does this price hike still make them cheaper compared to AWS?

Essentially only adding more options for the managed databases?

I still don't understand their new K8S minimum price.

Looks like around a 20% increase on everything?

Everyone who reads this headline.

Thinks their $5 Droplet is now $4.

[Continues reading...]

Realizes their $5 Droplet is now $6 (!).

Now they don't have a $5 droplet, which was by name alone basically an important branding asset in of itself.

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).

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.

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%.

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

Russia is quickly becoming a no-fry zone.

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