There’s a hike of up to 20% in DigitalOcean new pricing across products.

Founded in June 2011, this cloud platform has changed its pricing for the first time ever since.

Their new pricing will be effective from 1st July 2022 onwards.

This blog will cover the following topics:

1. New pricing – What is it All About?

2. Products Not Impacted By Price Hike

3. All About Billing

4. Should We Expect Other Providers To Join In?

5. Introducing a $4 Droplet

1. DigitalOcean New Pricing Structure

Overall, the increase in pricing is up to 20% varying across products.

People using products like Snapshots, Droplets, Custom Images, Floating IPs, and Load Balancers will see a hike in the billing.

Pricing of some of the Managed Database products and Managed Kubernetes will be changed too.

Here’s a detailed list of all products impacted due to the new DigitalOcean pricing.

1. Premium Droplets
2. General Purpose Droplets
3. CPU-Optimized Droplets
4. Storage Optimized Droplets
5. Memory-Optimized Droplets
6. Managed DB
7. Managed Kubernetes
8. Load Balancers
9. Snapshots
10. Custom Images
11. Floating IPs

Let’s compare the current and the new pricing released by DigitalOcean.

 1.1. Basic Droplet

Memory	vCPUs	Transfer	SSD	Old Pricing	New Pricing
1GB	1vCPU	1TB	25GB	$5/mo	$6/mo
2GB	1vCPU	2TB	50GB	$10/mo	$12/mo
3GB	2vCPUs	3TB	60GB	$15/mo	$18/mo
4GB	2vCPUs	4TB	80GB	$20/mo	$24/mo
8GB	4vCPUs	5TB	160GB	$40/mo	$48/mo
16GB	8vCPUs	6TB	320GB	$80/mo	$96/mo

 

1.2. Premium Droplet [Intel & AMD]

Memory	vCPUs	Transfer	SSD	Old Pricing	New Pricing
1GB	1vCPU	1TB	25GB	$6/mo	$7/mo
2GB	1vCPU	2TB	50GB	$12/mo	$14/mo
3GB	2vCPUs	3TB	60GB	$18/mo	$21/mo
4GB	2vCPUs	4TB	80GB	$24/mo	$28/mo
8GB	4vCPUs	5TB	160GB	$48/mo	$56/mo
16GB	8vCPUs	6TB	320GB	$96/mo	$112/mo

 

1.3. Managed Database

DigitalOcean shows no change in the pricing for Managed MongoDB.

If you use Managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis with Dedicated Droplets, there’s no price change.

If you are using Managed MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis with Basic Droplets & 0 additional nodes, you won’t be charged extra.

BUT

If you plan to use Managed MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis with Basic Droplets along with 1 & 2 additional nodes, you will have to pay more now.

For example, if you are using 4GB RAM, 2vCPU and 38GB Disk with 2 additional nodes, the price will be $180. The old pricing for this configuration was $140.

1.4. Managed Kubernetes

DOKS or DigitalOcean Kubernetes lets you deploy clusters without the need to manage complex containerized infra and control plane.

Here are some points to note for the new pricing:

• DigitalOcean provides a fully managed control plane at no additional cost.

• Up until now, customers were billed at a worker node level. This means you are charged at the same rate as Droplets.

• Node Pool Level Billing: From July 1, 2022, onwards, you will be billed at the node pool level This means your bill will be based on how many node pools you’ve used.

• Per-second Billing: Earlier, DigitalOcean used to round up or down the bill. However, to simplify the billing of Kubernetes, they will be billed for each second

• Predictable Billing: A monthly cap of 672 hours (28 days X 24 hours) has been introduced.
  For example, January has 31 days, i.e., 744 hours. Due to the monthly cap, it will be billed the same as in February.

Go to Kubernetes plans for more details.

1.5. Load Balancers

Load balancers cost $10/m per node. But with the introduction of the new pricing model, it will be charged at $12/mo per node.

1.6. Snapshots

DigitalOcean Snapshots is a product that copies everything from the droplet or volume’s disk and saves it in your account. The price depends on the size of the snapshot.

Old Pricing:

• Volume Snapshots is $0.05/GiB per month
• Droplet Snapshots is $0.05/GB per month

New Pricing:

• Volume Snapshots is $0.06/GiB per month
• Droplet Snapshots is $0.06/GB per month

1.7. Custom Images

For custom images, the earlier pricing was $0.05 per GB per month. After DigitalOcean’s price hike, this has also increased to $0.06 per GB per month.

1.8. Floating IPs

With the changes in new monthly pricing, Floating IPs will cost you $5 per month when reserved. Earlier, they were priced at $4 per month.

2. What remains unchanged in DigitalOcean New Pricing?

The following remains unaffected by the new price hike:

• Bandwidth Overages
• Backups
• App Platform Pricing
• Volumes
• Spaces
• Container Registry

3. What Will New Billing Be Like?

You will see increased prices for all the affected resources, including already created and new resources.

From July onwards, changes in the pricing of your already existing resources will be reflected in the Billing.

You will receive the updated billing on 1st August 2022

What will your new bill look like?

It will depend on which products you’re using. For example, if I was using a basic droplet of configuration 4vCPU, 8 GB RAM, the pricing will look like this:

Old:

Basic Droplet with 8GB RAM + 4vCPU + 5TB outbound transfer + 160GB SSD = $40/month

New:

Basic Droplet with 8GB RAM + 4vCPU + 5TB Transfer + 160GB SSD = $48/month

This is a 20% increase in the billing.

Important: If you’re on an old plan, the pricing will impact your resources and will reflect in your July bill.

4. Well, Is this going to be a trend?

Increasing the price is standard practice. DigitalOcean is in the business for a decade now but never hiked its prices. It has been a go-to option for most developers and business owners who want to experiment. To grow, expand, increase its profits and add better products, a higher price seems to be the only option in the long run.

The good news is that DigitalOcean has made it clear that there are no plans to further change the pricing again.

Impact of Price Change by DigitalOcean:

Basic and Premium droplets have the highest percentage change varying from 16% to 20%. While CPU Optimized Droplets, General Purpose Droplets etc have around 4-6% hike in their pricing

But are other PaaS providers going to follow this trend?

When I think of DigitalOcean, options like Vultr and Linode come to my mind. The time will reveal if these providers will stick to their current pricing or follow DigitalOcean’s lead.

However, if Linode, UpCloud and Vultr will continue to operate on slim profits, there is a good chance of getting new customers.

Additionally, those who are using managed DigitalOcean from hosting providers may see costlier plans in the coming months.

If your business is growing, a Managed Hosting is recommended. At Webscoot.io, we offer AWS based managed hosting at a fixed price so you don’t need to worry about pricing or performance.

5. $4 Droplet – New Offering

Alongside the changes in the pricing of current products, DigitalOcean has also introduced a new, more affordable droplet at $4. This aims to help developers with learning and experimenting.

The configuration of the $4 Droplet will be:

• 1vCPU
• 512MB memory
• 500GB bandwidth
• 10GB SSD Disk

The droplet will be available from July 1, 2022.