DigitalOcean is one of the most popular cloud hosting providers for developers and small businesses. With its simple pricing structure and affordable plans, DigitalOcean makes it easy to get started with cloud hosting without breaking the bank. But how much does DigitalOcean actually cost? In this post, we'll break down DigitalOcean's pricing, features, and how you can get the best deal.

‍

How Much Does DigitalOcean Cost?

DigitalOcean uses a flexible pricing model, so the monthly fee can vary widely based on your usage, features, and required resources. The typical pricing range for most small—to medium-sized businesses using DigitalOcean is between $1,000 and $22,000 per year. The pricing scales up as your traffic and resource requirements increase.

‍

How to Get a Better Deal on DigitalOcean

Right-size droplets

Start with the smallest droplet size that meets your technical requirements. Many starter apps and blogs can run on the basic droplet plan. Only scale up when you truly need more capacity.

‍

Leverage hourly billing

Make full use of the hourly billing system. Strategically spin droplets up and down based on your workload patterns. Delete droplets when not actively in use to stop the instance meter from running.

‍

Use auto-scaling groups

Implement auto-scaling groups to automatically add droplets when traffic is high and remove them during quiet periods. This ensures you aren't overpaying for unused capacity.

‍

Offload to Spaces

Offload storage and backups to Spaces, which is cheaper than block storage volumes. Use Spaces to store files, website assets, database backups, and other artifacts.

‍

Use reserved instances

For production workloads running 24/7, reserved instances allow you to pre-pay for droplet usage at a steep discount compared to on-demand instance pricing. This offers cost savings in exchange for a 1 or 3 year commitment.

‍

Leverage spot instances

Spot instances can reduce droplet costs substantially, but come with the risk of the droplet being reclaimed with only 30 seconds notice if DigitalOcean needs the capacity back. Use for flexible workloads like batch processing.

‍

Delete unused resources

Regularly review usage metrics and delete unused resources like volumes, load balancers and droplets so they aren't silently paid for each month. Use tags to identify idle resources.

‍

Maximize promo offers

For new users, promo credits and free account trials are a great way to evaluate DigitalOcean for free before committing. For example, DigitalOcean is offering a free trial with a $200 credit for 60 days. Make full use of these introductory offers. 

‍

DigitalOcean's Core Features

Some of the key features that make DigitalOcean a popular cloud hosting choice include:

‍

Simple, Intuitive Infrastructure: DigitalOcean provides a simplified cloud infrastructure platform optimized for developers. The intuitive control panel and API make it easy to deploy and manage cloud servers, storage, databases, and other services without complexity.

Flexibility & Control: Developers have full root access to provision Droplets however needed. Pre-configured 1-click apps, load balancers, block storage, managed databases, and other tools provide flexibility. You control the infrastructure.

High Performance & Reliability: DigitalOcean Droplets provide fast SSD-backed cloud servers with excellent network throughput. Servers can be deployed quickly in data centers around the world. Reliability is ensured through redundant components.

Robust Security Features: DigitalOcean provides built-in security tools like firewalls, SSH key access, VPC private networking, SSL encryption, and monitoring to keep applications safe and secure.

Global Infrastructure: The platform operates in data centers around the world to deploy applications close to users. Fast networking provides low latency and high throughput connectivity anywhere.

Managed Services: In addition to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, DigitalOcean offers fully managed load balancers, object storage, databases, and more to simplify operations and reduce administrative overhead.

Ideal for Modern Workloads: With its developer focus, DigitalOcean is great for hosting web apps, APIs, microservices, big data apps, gaming servers, and other modern workloads at scale.

‍

DigitalOcean Alternatives

Some other popular services similar to DigitalOcean include:

‍

AWS Lightsail

Amazon Lightsail provides simplified virtual private servers that are comparable to DigitalOcean's core offering. Lightsail is designed to be easy to use for developers and small businesses. It offers hourly billing, preconfigured templates, and auto-scaling capabilities. While Lightsail may seem like an inexpensive way to get started on AWS, larger deployments may end up being more cost-effective on EC2 or ECS. But, for early-stage projects, Lightsail offers a strong DigitalOcean alternative.

‍

Vultr

Vultr emerged as one of the top challengers to DigitalOcean's cloud hosting service. Like DigitalOcean, Vultr focuses primarily on self-service VPS and bare metal instances. The interface is simple and intuitive for deploying cloud servers, block storage, object storage, load balancers, and more. Vultr aims to make infrastructure easy to manage. One advantage over DigitalOcean is that it offers reserved instances for longer-term discounts. However, Vultr has fewer data center regions available globally.

‍

Linode

Linode is a long-standing VPS provider that offers a streamlined experience similar to DigitalOcean. Developers have access to cloud servers, block storage, node balancers, object storage, and managed services. Linode supports major distros like Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS, as well as 1-click apps and NodeBalancers. Object storage starts at $5/month for 250GB.

‍

Google Cloud Run

For hosting containerized applications, Cloud Run provides a compelling serverless alternative with auto-scaling, pay-per-request billing, and a free tier. Cloud Run abstracts away infrastructure management, so developers just deploy container images. It can scale dynamically to zero and support spikes in traffic.

‍

Heroku

Heroku pioneered developer-centric application platforms. It abstracts away servers, allowing developers to focus on code. Automated CI/CD deployment and seamless scaling make Heroku very convenient. Paid dynos offer continuous uptime. Add-on services like Postgres, Redis, and Kafka are available. The fully abstracted approach sacrifices flexibility and control over the infrastructure layer, which may not suit all use cases compared to DigitalOcean.

How Spendflo Can Help You Get Better Deals on DigitalOcean

For larger DigitalOcean deployments, Spendflo can help you optimize your costs and get better pricing:

‍

• Monitor your DigitalOcean spend and get alerts for unexpected increases or waste.
• Leverage Spendflo's purchasing power to get better discounts - we've negotiated up to 70% off DigitalOcean for our clients.
• Right-size your workloads by analyzing usage data - avoid overprovisioning.
• Uncover alternate solutions like reserved instances or spot pricing to save over 30%.
• Automate cost optimization best practices.

‍

Whether you're spending $100 or $10,000 per month on DigitalOcean, Spendflo provides enterprises with visibility, savings, and control for their cloud environment. Request a demo to see how we can help optimize your DigitalOcean costs.

Frequently Asked Questions about DigitalOcean Pricing

What is the cheapest droplet plan on DigitalOcean?

The cheapest droplet on DigitalOcean starts at $4 per month for 512MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10GB SSD disk, and 500GB transfer. This is a good option for testing small apps or projects.

‍

Does DigitalOcean offer discounted pricing for annual plans?

Yes, DigitalOcean offers significant discounts when you prepay for Droplets annually or for 6-month terms. This can result in 20-50% savings compared to monthly pricing.

‍

Can you run a WordPress site on DigitalOcean?

Definitely. DigitalOcean offers preconfigured WordPress droplets that make launching a WordPress site simple. The $10/month droplet plan is recommended for small WordPress sites.

‍

Is DigitalOcean secure for production environments?

DigitalOcean incorporates multiple security features like firewalls, SSH keys, VPC private networking, SSL encryption, and more. This makes it suitable for hosting production apps and websites.

‍

What programming languages does DigitalOcean support?

DigitalOcean supports deploying applications in Node.js, Python, Ruby, PHP, Go, Java, and more. Any language compatible with Linux can be used to build apps on DigitalOcean.

‍

How does DigitalOcean pricing compare to AWS?

DigitalOcean is less expensive than AWS for running one or two small server workloads. But, AWS tends to offer more enterprise features and discounts at a larger scale.

‍

Does DigitalOcean offer a free tier?

DigitalOcean doesn't offer a free tier, but new user accounts come with a 60-day $200 credit to try it out risk-free. Open-source projects may also qualify for free promotional credit.

‍