What DigitalOcean can do for you‍

DigitalOcean is a cloud service provider specializing in infrastructure as a service (IaaS), a model where computing resources — such as storage, network, servers, and virtualization — are supplied by the vendor, eliminating the need for the customer to maintain an on-premises data center. The primary offering within DigitalOcean’s platform is called a ‘Droplet’, a highly efficient virtual machine that runs on Linux. Droplets can act as standalone servers or as part of a larger network, and can be configured to suit your needs through optimizations for memory-, CPU-, or storage-intensive applications.

Generally, DigitalOcean’s solutions are aimed at developers, startups, and small to midsize businesses (SMBs). The platform is designed to be user-friendly and an easy entrypoint to cloud computing whilst striking a balance between affordability, simplicity, and granular customization and scalability.

As well as Droplets, DigitalOcean offers several other solutions beyond traditional IaaS, including managed services like databases, Kubernetes, cloud hosting, and AI/ML. As a result, DigitalOcean can meet a wide range of business needs through its easy-to-use platform. Keep reading for an in-depth breakdown of the services DigitalOcean offers, along with what they cost.

DigitalOcean pricing structures and tiers‍

Rather than offering different subscription tiers, DigitalOcean pricing is highly flexible and can be customized to your precise requirements. Below you’ll find the menu of available solutions and what they cost.

DigitalOcean pricing – Droplets

Price: from $4 per month

Droplets are cloud virtual machines (VMs). They can be deployed in seconds and offer granular configurations to suit whatever workload you need them for.

DigitalOcean provides multiple types of Droplet for a range of purposes:

• Basic Droplets are the cheapest option, starting at $4 per month for 512 MiB of memory, a single vCPU, and 10 GiB of SSD storage.
• CPU-Optimized Droplets best suit applications requiring fast and consistent performance. Prices start from $42 per month.
• General Purpose Droplets can be used for a wide range of applications thanks to a balanced ratio of CPU and memory. A single Droplet starts from $63 per month.
• Memory-Optimized Droplets provide 8 GiB of memory per virtual CPU (vCPU). They’re perfect for memory-intensive workloads and prices start from $84 per month.
• Storage-Optimized Droplets leverage technologies like non-volatile memory express (NVMe) and parallelism to deliver significantly greater disk performance. Prices start at $131 a month.

DigitalOcean pricing – Kubernetes

Price: from $12 per month per node

If you need easier deployment and scaling of your applications, DigitalOcean offers a Kubernetes solution. You’re only charged for the underlying resources, such as Droplets, storage, and load balancers — the DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) control plane is included for free.

There are multiple DOKS pricing options to suit your needs:

• Basic from $12/month/node;
• CPU-optimized from $42/month/node;
• General purpose from $63/month/node;
• Memory-optimized from $84/month/node;
• Storage-optimized from $163/month/node;
• Premium CPU-optimized from $1,310/month/node.

DigitalOcean pricing – App Platform

Price: from $0 per month

The App Platform product is a fully managed solution that lets you easily build, deploy, and scale web apps quickly, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. There are three pricing tiers:

• Starter – $0 per month;
• Basic – $5 per month;
• Professional – $12 per month.

DigitalOcean pricing – Functions

Price: from $0 per month

DigitalOcean offers FaaS (function as a service) capabilities via its serverless computing solution, Functions, so you can run code without having to manage servers yourself. Each account gets 90,000 free GiB-seconds of compute per month, with anything over this amount charged at $0.0000185 per GiB-second.

DigitalOcean pricing – Databases

Price: from $15 per month

Managed databases are available with DigitalOcean, so you don’t have to deal with running your own database server. Options include MongoDB, Kafka, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Managed Databases for Redis, with free daily backups included.Pricing varies depending on your chosen database engine, resources, and customization options such as type of CPU and number of nodes. Prices start from $15 per month for all engines other than Kafka Clusters, which starts at $147 per month.

DigitalOcean pricing – Storage

Price: from $5 per month (object-based) and $10 per month (block-based)

DigitalOcean offers two types of storage: the Spaces solution for object storage, and Volumes solution for block storage. Both are charged based on how much space you require.Spaces starts at $5 per month for 250 GiB of storage and 1 TiB of outbound transfer. Above this, it costs $0.02/GiB for additional storage and $0.01/GiB for additional transfer.

The Volumes pricing tiers are $10 per month for 100 GiB of storage, $50 per month for 500 GiB, and $100 per month for 1,000 GiB.

DigitalOcean pricing – Load Balancers

Price: from $12 per month

DigitalOcean can provide load balancing for your app, improving availability and performance by spreading traffic across your compute resources. You can scale the number of nodes from 1 to 100 as needed.

‍Additional DigitalOcean costs to consider

In terms of additional costs, DigitalOcean is incredibly transparent thanks to its à la carte pricing structure. There are a few extra services you might want to consider on top of the solutions themselves.

Container Registry

Price: from $0

If you’re using the DigitalOcean Kubernetes containerization solution, you might want to consider the Container Registry add-on for easy storage and management of your container images. A single repository of 500 MiB is free, while $5 gets you five repositories and 5 GiB, and $20 gets you unlimited repositories and 100 GiB.

Support Plans

Price: from $0

DigitalOcean offers various support plans depending on your needs. All customers get general email support for free. The three paid plans are Developer ($24/m), Standard ($99/m), and Premium ($999). Response times range from eight hours to 30 minutes, and more expensive plans get access to additional channels and staff with greater expertise.

Uptime

Price: $1 per check

The Uptime service can check your URL endpoints and alert you if they’re down or slow. Users get one free Uptime check per month, with each one after that costing $1.

Backups

Price: from 20% of Droplet cost

Your Droplet virtual machines can be automatically backed up to disk images, which you can use to revert to older states or create new Droplets. Weekly backups cost 20% of your Droplet cost and are retained for four weeks, while daily backups cost 30% and are retained for seven days.

Bandwidth

Price: varies by service

The various tiers of each DigitalOcean solution come with a certain amount of bandwidth included. If you exceed this, you’ll be charged overages. For example, excess data transfer for Droplets is billed at $0.01 per GiB.

Other vendors offering infrastructure as a service‍

Pricing among IaaS providers often feels convoluted due to complex pay-as-you-go structures and varying vendor capabilities. Here’s how DigitalOcean compares to some popular alternatives.

DigitalOcean pricing vs Google Cloud

Google Cloud is one of the biggest vendors in the IaaS space. It offers significantly more solutions than DigitalOcean and is more complex to use, so it may not be so well-suited to SMBs. Google pricing is pay-as-you-go so it’s hard to directly compare costs with DigitalOcean — Google is generally more expensive, but there’s an interactive pricing calculator to estimate what you’ll pay.

DigitalOcean pricing vs Vultr

Vultr offers similar capabilities to DigitalOcean, and is likewise geared more towards the SMB market. It’s easier to use than alternatives like Google Cloud or AWS. Vultr pricing is slightly cheaper than DigitalOcean, with single VMs available from $2.50 per month compared to $4 for a sole DigitalOcean Droplet.

DigitalOcean pricing vs AWS

Many businesses use AWS for their IaaS needs. Like Google Cloud, this provider runs on more complicated pay-as-you-go pricing and is likely less accessible for SMB users and developers. On the plus side, AWS pricing includes a generous Free Tier to help you get started.

DigitalOcean pricing – the Vertice verdict‍

On the whole, DigitalOcean’s pricing structure is straightforward and easy to understand. That’s a major benefit to its target audience, many of whom will be getting started with cloud computing and IaaS for the first time. That said, acquiring the right DigitalOcean solution can be a complicated process. That’s where the Vertice platform can help — we negotiate with the vendor on your behalf according to your business needs, helping you procure DigitalOcean at the lowest cost by leveraging our market intel. Just get in touch to begin.