DigitalOcean Pricing & Costs: Important Details in 2023

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DigitalOcean Pricing on which is the best plan

DigitalOcean is one of the leading cloud hosting providers right now. They provide Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which businesses and developers can use to host their websites and applications. This article will review DigitalOcean pricing according to the offered products and services.

DigitalOcean prices are generally reasonable but depend on a number of factors. In terms of quality of service and performance, the platform is right at par with the industry leaders. So let’s find out if it’s also a winner when it comes to value for money.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Are DigitalOcean’s Pricing Plans Worth Your Money?

Before we get into the details of the DigitalOcean hosting plans pricing, let’s discuss whether it’s even worth it in the first place. The company has mastered the pay-as-you-go pricing model offering both convenience and value to its customers.

When you sign up, you basically design your own DigitalOcean hosting package. That means you even decide the price you’ll pay hourly and monthly. Moreover, there’s a monthly cap on the hours, after which you’re charged a flat rate.

How Much Does DigitalOcean Cost Per Month?

DigitalOcean has a rich ecosystem of products and services, most of which work together for hosting purposes. For hosting websites or applications, you’ll need to buy and host a Droplet; that’s the main product you need to be concerned about.

Even if you are using Kubernetes, you would be paying for the Droplets essentially. However, the pricing of Droplets differs by the type and size of the Droplet. Fortunately, when you’re setting up, they do have a guide that can help you choose.

All plans include some basic standard features, such as security, daily backups, monitoring, SSL certificate, CLI, and API, as well as the 99.99% uptime guarantee.

All in all, the pricing model can be described as good value, if not dirt cheap. Here’s a snapshot of their pricing:

  • DigitalOcean’s cheapest plan is the Basic Droplet at $4 per month.
  • DigitalOcean’s most expensive plans are Storage-Optimized Droplets starting at $125 per month.

Again, all the costs, whether for Droplets, Blocked Storage, Spaces, and other add-ons, are based on the usage. Similarly, if there are any overages, those are charged separately, but the rates are quite market-competitive.

In any case, DigitalOcean costs are predictable, which is what we like the most about it. You know how much it would cost you even if you ran over your resource limits in a month. That’s something that can be hard to achieve with many other hosting providers because as soon as you cross your resource quota, often prices skyrocket.

Which DigitalOcean Plan is the Right One For You?

There are plenty of choices when it comes to choosing the hosting plans on DigitalOcean. These are designed to cater to different business needs.

As such, DigitalOcean hosting is generally very developer-friendly. Still, you need to pivot your selection according to the resource or performance needs for your particular application. It wouldn’t make sense to pay more for resources that you don’t really use.

Below is a detailed guide for you to choose the right DigitalOcean pricing plan for all the different type of options.

DigitalOcean Droplets Pricing

DigitalOcean Droplets are Linux-based virtual machines (VMs) that run on top of virtualized hardware and every Droplet created is a new server that you can use.

It is important that you choose the right plan according to your needs and workload as an undersized Droplet running at full memory will cause performance issues while an oversized Droplet will cost more and underuse its resources.

Basically, there are 5 Droplet plans – one shared CPU plan and four dedicated CPU plans. Here are the DigitalOcean monthly costs for the 5 types of Droplet plan:

Basic Droplets

This is the shared hosting plan of DigitalOcean, starting at $4 per month or $0.006 per hour. This plan features regular Intel CPU and SSD storage (1 vCPU, 512GB memory, 10GB SSD disk, and 500GB transfer).

There are 6 other plans going all the way up to $96 per month or $0.14286 per hour.

For Basic Droplet, you can choose Premium Intel or Premium AMD CPUs with NVMe SSD storage. Both of these options start at $7 per month or $0.01042 per hour and go up to $112 per month or $0.16667 per hour.

Basic Droplets have the most efficient CPU usage at a lower cost for workloads and are ideal for applications such as small databases, blogs, lower traffic sites, repository hosting etc.

General Purpose Droplets

General Purpose Droplets are a little richer in terms of resources, as these are designed for more dynamic applications, e-commerce websites, SaaS websites, medium-to-high traffic sites, and medium-sized databases. They have a balanced ratio of memory suitable for workloads that require dedicated computer power.

The General Purpose Droplet starter plan offers 2 vCPU, 8GB memory, 25 GB SSD disk, and 4TB transfer at $63 per month or $0.09375 per hour.

There is 11 other plans, the highest-tier costs $1360 per month or $2.02381 per hour with 40 vCPU, 160 GB memory, 1000GB SSD disk, and 9 TB transfer.

CPU-Optimized Droplets

The CPU-optimized Droplets are virtual machines with more computing power and provide a 2:1 ratio of memory to CPU. These Droplets utilize hyper threads with premium Intel processors and are suitable for applications that demand consistent and fast performance from dedicated vCPUs. These plans are designed for applications such as machine learning, heavy loaded servers, CI/CD, ad serving etc.

These plans start at $42 per month or $0.06250 per hour with 2 vCPU, 4GB memory, 25GB SSD disk, and 4TB transfer.

With many scaled-up tiers on offer, the top-shelf CPU-optimized Droplet costs $1128 per month or $ 1.6786 per hour with a whopping 48 vCPUs, 1200GB SSD, 96GB RAM and 11TB transfer.

Memory-Optimized Droplets

These plans use dedicated vCPUs providing 8GB memory for each vCPU. These are memory-rich Droplets that can ultimately speed up operations with more memory at disposal. They are great for huge databases, real-time big data processing, resource-intensive apps, and other applications that process a lot of data.

The prices start at $84 per month or $0.12500 per hour, offering 16GB RAM for the 2 vCPUs, along with 50GB SSD storage and 4TB transfer. The most expensive plan comes with 256GB memory, 32 vCPUs, 6x 4.69TB SSD,10TB transfer, and costs $2096 per month or $3.11905 per hour.

Storage-Optimized Droplets

Storage-Optimized Droplets use NVMe (non-volatile memory express) which can deliver faster disk performance than the regularSSD disks and are the most expensive kind of Droplet on DigitalOcean. They are designed for huge databases like NoSQL, TimeScaleDB, MongoDB, other data warehouses and analytics software monitoring.

This DigitalOcean price plan starts at $131 per month or $0.19494 per hour. In this plan, you get a 300GB SSD disk along with 16GB memory, 2 vCPU, and 4TB transfer.

These plans go up to $2608 per month or $3.88095, offering up to 7.03TB SSD, 256GB memory, 32 vCPUs and 10TB transfer.

DigitalOcean VPS Pricing

DigitalOcean’s range of VPS hosting options are provided through their Virtual Machines (VM), in other words Droplets.

From small websites to large and scalable streaming applications, there are different offerings to cater for your needs. You can also choose to go for shared CPU or dedicated CPU offerings based on your needs and usage.

So here’s the DigitalOcean VPS pricing table to let you recap on the various Droplet options and help you choose the right plan for your needs.

Type of Droplet Plan


Best For

Not For

Cheapest Price/ Month

Basic Droplet

● Blogs

● Web applications with balanced resourced needs

● Testing and staging environments

● Static websites

● Small databases

● In-memory caching

These droplets may be too basic for resource-intensive applications that require a high amount of a particular resource or all resources like e-commerce websites or enterprise web applications.

$4 per month or $0.006 per hour

General-Purpose Droplet

● Web applications

● Blogs with high traffic

● E-commerce websites

● Medium-sized databases

● Enterprise applications

These may not be ideal for very small businesses that don’t require a lot of resources or ones that require even more of a particular one (like more CPU cores).

$63 per month or $0.09375 per hour

CPU-optimized Droplet

● CI/CD applications

● Video encoding

● Gaming applications

● High computation applications like tools

● Front-end web servers

These may not be for applications that require normal CPU computation that can be covered by Basic or General-Purpose Droplets.

$42 per month or $0.06250 per hour

Memory-Optimized Droplet

● Big data processing applications

● Databases

● Other memory-intensive applications

Not ideal for blogs, e-commerce, and other general-purpose applications with more well-rounded use of resources.

$84 per month or $0.12500 per hour

Storage-Optimized Droplet

● Streaming applications

● Large databases

● Data warehouses

● Analytical systems 

Too expensive for any other kind of application with not such big storage needs.

$131 per month or $0.19494 per hour

DigitalOcean Kubernetes Pricing

DigitalOcean’s business-ready Kubernetes is priced reasonably and is designed to scale with a 99.95% high availability Service Level Agreement (SLA), a free and powerful control plane, and low-price bandwidth for CNCF Certified Kubernetes.

Here is the overview of DigitalOcean’s Kubernetes pricing plans:

Plan

Features

Kubernetes Price

Basic Node

● For variable workloads

● Up to 500MB of container registry for free

● Free control plane

● Add on High Availability for $40/month

$12 per month per node

CPU-optimized Node

● Includes everything that is in the Basic node

● Dedicated vCPU with lower cost

● Requires lesser memory-intensive workloads with 2:1 memory-CPU ratio

$42 per month per node

General Purpose Node

● Most popular and highly recommended plan

● Dedicated vCPU optimal for wider range of workloads

● 4:1 memory-CPU ratio

$63 per month per node

Memory-Optimized Droplet

● 8GB RAM per dedicated vCPU 

$84 per month per node

Storage-Optimized Droplet

● 225GB per vCPU (1.5X SSD) and 150GB per vCPU (1X SSD)

● Guaranteed NVMe

● Low latency and high IOPS

Choice to choose up to 7TB of local storage


$163 per month per node

As mentioned in the pricing table above, there’s no charge for the control plane itself though you just need to add $40/month for High Availability.  Customers will also get Kubernetes management for free, they only need to pay for the underlying droplets, load balancers, storage and bandwidth.

As for the bandwidth, customers get free bandwidth depending on the nodes they run and there isn’t any charge for internal transfers. Overages are charged at $0.01/GB.

Billing for node pools is more predictable as the worker node is capped at 28 days (672 hours). This means that if a cluster runs for more than 672 hours, there will be no extra charge and you will be billed for 672 hours.

DigitalOcean Serverless Cloud Function Pricing

The DigitalOcean Functions is a newly added fast, scalable, and cost-effective compute solution in their ecosystem. This serverless computing solution enables you to build quickly and scale automatically without the need to maintain servers, thus helping you to save costs for your business.

DigitalOcean Cloud Function pricing starts at $0.0000185 per GB-seconds for additional memory and runtime and every account will enjoy 90,000 GB-seconds of compute free per month. There is a minimum runtime of 100ms per function invocation.

DigitalOcean App Platform Pricing

App Platform is ideal for hosting static pages, databases, and other dependencies on DigitalOcean for mobile applications. This allows app developers to create, deploy, and market their applications quickly.

There are three pricing tiers. The Starter plan costs nothing as it’s just for static websites (up to 3 and then $3 per additional static website). The Basic plan starts at $5 per month providing 1 CPU at 512GM memory, and goes up to 4 dedicated CPUs with 16GB memory.

The Professional plan starts at $12 per month with 1 CPU and 1GM memory, and the most expensive plan costs $300/month providing 4 dedicated CPUs with 16GB memory

If you require additional resources that are outside of the Starter, Basic and Professional tiers, there will be additional product pricing for functions, development and managed databases, outbound transfer and Spaces object storage.

DigitalOcean Database Pricing

DigitalOcean also offers full managed database service for a variety of databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, Redis and PostgreSQL. Of course, this is an extra service you can avail at a price. The prices depend on two things: the type of database and the size.

MongoDB is a database program for high-volume storage and uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas.

The prices vary by the plan you choose for your specific database needs. With a basic shared CPU, plans start at $15 per month or $0.02 per hour which includes 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU and 15GB disk. The top-end plan costs $2,880.00 per month or $4.29 per hour with 64GM RAM, 16 vCPUs and a 1016GB disk.

MySQL

MYSQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) and is based on structured query language (SQL). It is a powerful and flexible program that can add, access, store and process data for many applications.

MySQL pricing starts at $15 per month or $0.02232 per hour and it comes with 1GB memory, 1 vCPU and 10GB disk. The highest end plan costs $2,880 per month or $4.28571 per hour and comes with 64GB memory, 16 vCPU and 1.12TB disk.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a free, highly-stable and powerful open source relational database system that supports both SQL (relational) and JSON (non-relational) querying. It has a focus on data integrity, extensibility, and speed, and is used as the data warehouse for many applications such as web, mobile, analytics and geospatial.

DigitalOcean PostgreSQL pricing is similar to MySQL pricing. The price plan starts at $15 per month or $0.02232 per hour and it comes with 1GB memory, 1 vCPU and 10GB disk. The highest plan is $2,880 per month or $4.28571 per hour and comes with 64GB memory, 16 vCPU and 1.12TB disk.

Redis

Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store and key-value database that emphasizes speed. It supports many types of abstract data structures such as strings, lists, maps, sets, sorted sets, Lua scripting. bitmaps, streams, and others.

Redis pricing is also similar to both PostgreSQL and MySQL price plans.

DigitalOcean Spaces Storage Pricing (with CDN)

If you want content delivery network (CDN) for your nodes, you can opt for Spaces which is a S3-compatible object storage service. Spaces can be used to store, serve and archive web content, images, and media files for your web apps.

This is a simple and easily scalable storage service that costs only $5 per month for 250GB storage and 1TB outbound transfer. You can add up to a total of 100 nodes and can add or remove when you need to. Additional storage and transfer are charged at $0.02/GB and $0.01/GB respectively.

DigitalOcean Load Balancer Pricing

Load balancers are an additional service that can improve the performance, availability, and scalability of your application by balancing and spreading traffic across different resources. This may be ideal for high-traffic applications.

Pricing for DigitalOcean Load Balancers starts as low as $12 per month. You can add or remove nodes when you need to and can add up to 100 nodes. Every node will increase Load Balancer capacity by 10,000 requests per second, 10,000 simultaneous connections and 250 SSL connections per second. If you require more nodes, you will have to contact the company for a custom quote.

Container Registry Pricing

DigitalOcean Container Registry is a service or repository to store and access private container images and the registry integrates directly with Kubernetes.

There are 3 plans – Starter, Basic and Professional. The Starter plan is useful for testing purposes and costs nothing with 500Mb of storage and outbound transfer. Basic plan costs $5 per month and comes with 5 repositories, 5GB storage and outbound transfer. Professional plan is great for professionals and it costs $20 per month, comes with unlimited repositories, 100GB storage and outbound transfer.

Storage and Transfer overages for all 3 plans are charged at $0.02/GB and $0.10/GB respectively except for Starter plan where there is no storage overage.

Volumes Pricing

DigitalOcean Volume block storage offers flat prices across all data centers. There are only 3 tiers of plans. The most basic one starts with 100GB storage and costs $10 per month or $0.015 per hour. The middle plan costs $50 per month or $0.074 and comes with 500GB. The highest end plan costs $100 per month or $0.149 and comes with 1000GB.

DigitalOcean Bandwidth Overage Charges and Fees

Any bandwidth overage is considered an additional usage on DigitalOcean, just like how it is on many other hosting platforms. The DigitalOcean overage prices are pretty decent. For outbound data transfer, excess data transfer is billed at $0.01/GiB whereas inbound bandwidth to Droplets is freeIn other words, the cost of 100 GiB of outbound data transfer overage is $1.

Note that bandwidth overage charges are applicable across all products when the allowed limit ends. You can learn more about this, as well as the bandwidth pricing estimate tool here.

DigitalOcean Free Tier

You can get a $100 free credits in the DigitaOcean Free Trial and try their products and services for 60 days. There are a lot of things you can do with this DigitalOcean free trial. You can use the credits to host websites, build applications, run open source software and more.

You can find out more about the DigitalOcean Free Tier promotion here.

DigitalOcean Pricing Calculator

Fortunately, it is easy to predict and figure out the prices and cost with the DigitalOcean pricing calculator. DigitalOcean has an easy-to-use, drag and drop pricing calculator on their website that you can use to estimate the costs by choosing from a selection of pre-configured bundles or from your custom build.

Digitalocean Pricing Calculator

For the above example, a preconfigured infrastructure package is selected and the bundle comes with Droplet, Spaces, Managed Database and Snapshots. The bundle costs $27.05 per month but you can further customize each of the individual features.

DigitalOcean Backup Pricing

Backups are disk images of Droplets and are automatically created so that customers can revert to an older state of their Droplet or create new Droplets. These are system-level backups and are done at weekly intervals.

If you enable backups for a Droplet, you will be billed a flat rate of 20% the droplet cost. So for example, enabling backups on a $10 droplet will be $2 per month. Therefore the total backup costs you will be billed is $12.

Do note that DigitalOcean backup pricing are commonly confused with snapshot’s prices but they are not the same.

DigitalOcean Snapshot Pricing

Snapshots are on-demand disk images of Droplets and Volume which are backups used to create new Droplets and volumes with the exact same content. Creating a Snapshot of a Droplet does not capture the Volume so you have to create them separately.

The DigitalOcean snapshot pricing is one of the costs that developers tend to overlook when they are taking snapshots for their Droplets. These are separate from normal backups and are charged separately. You can have as many snapshots as you wish though.

Droplet Snapshots are priced at $0.06 GB per month and Volume Snapshots cost $0.06 GiB per month. There is a minimum charge of $0.01 for very small Snapshots taken.

Example 1

You created 10 Droplet Snapshots with a size of 50GB. For creating and storing these Snapshots, you will be billed 10*50GB*$0.06 GB = $30 in addition to your Droplet cost.

Example 2

If you want to know the total storage cost which is different from the size of Snapshot, you can run a command by SSH into your server and type the df command below.

df -h /

You will then get the screen below which indicates that 20GB disk space has been used up and the total storage cost is 20GB*$0.06 GiB = $1.20 per month.

Filesystem      Size  Used  Avail  Use%   Mounted on
/dev/vda1        50G  20G   30G   40% /

DigitalOcean Renewal Costs

Since DigitalOcean follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, you don’t really need to worry about your renewal pricing getting jacked up. The prices remain the same as at the time you signed up unless they are revised, which is normally done according to increasing rates in the market.

So DigitalOcean renewal prices are the same as what you were charged in the first month or until you scale up.

This is true for virtually all DigitalOcean products and not just the Droplets. If you use other products like Spaces with CDN, the App Platform, or Blocked Storage, the rates remain the same as you get charged every month.

Keep in mind the services are automatically renewed until you cancel them manually.

If you’re using any third-party products within the hosting environment, the renewal rates depend on the provider of that particular product and not DigitalOcean. For instance, if you’re using an Extended Validation Certificate from one of the paid options like Comodo or Symantec, your renewal rates depend on their pricing.

Alternatively, you can get a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

DigitalOcean Money-Back Guarantee and Refunds​

DigitalOcean’s refund policy is that there aren’t any refunds or money-back guarantees. That’s because it is a pay-as-you-go service, so in most cases, there won’t be a need for a refund anyways.

While DigitalOcean billing is hourly, the payment is made monthly. So at the end of the day, you pay for what you have actually used. You may be able to get a refund if you’ve prepaid for service and credited your account.

While they do not offer a refund or money-back guarantee, they do offer a 60-day free trial with a $100 credit. What this means is that you can use $100 worth of services for 60 days absolutely free. You may have to enter a credit before signing up, but you aren’t charged until the trial is over.

In the $100 credit free trial, you can host quite a lot of stuff to test drive their services. This includes open-source software, up to 10 apps using Basic Droplets, and up to 20 static sites. You can also try a 5-node Kubernetes cluster.

Cancellation

You can cancel your DigitalOcean account whenever you want to. For that, you need to delete the Droplets. Before deleting a Droplet, make sure to save all the data externally. You must also delete any other products you’re using, like Spaces or Blocked Storage.

Once the Droplet and other stuff are deleted, you won’t be charged for it. However, to avoid any charge whatsoever, you may want to deactivate your account. You can go to Account > Settings > Deactivate Account.

If you ever want to return, you can activate the same account.

Are There Hidden Costs for DigitalOcean?

Many developers and businesses alike are wary of any hidden prices when signing up for a hosting service. First of all, the prices are available on their website, so when you sign up, you know exactly how much you’ll be paying. It also reveals prices for any extra or add-on services.

Secondly, DigitalOcean charges money very transparently, so you know what you are charged for and when.

With the Droplets, only the basic resources like memory, CPU, storage, and limited bandwidth is included. For add-ons, you may have to pay up hourly, monthly, or as per your usage.

Verdict on on DigitalOcean Pricing and Hosting Costs

DigitalOcean offers a number of Droplets, each with their specific type of ideal usages. You can choose from basic or optimized Droplets. In addition, you can also enhance your site system with other products like Spaces or Load Balancers.

Overall, DigitalOcean prices are market competitive. They may not be super cheap, but they definitely pack in some savings with the hourly billing model. When you take into account their SSD-based infrastructure and performance, the pricing gives good value.

All prices are pretty transparent. Although they don’t offer refunds, there is a free tier available to test out the service.

FAQs on DigitalOcean Price Plans

The DigitalOcean pricing works on an hourly basis. You are billed hourly for the use of resources and charged monthly. However, there’s a cap of 672 hours. If the usage exceeds 672 hours in a month, you are charged the monthly rate, which actually saves you money.

DigitalOcean accepts credit/debit cards and PayPal. Wire transfer and ACH may also be accepted on request.

It can cost as little as $5 per month to host a website on DigitalOcean.

Bandwidth overage charges are $0.01/GiB. This is charged once you exceed the bandwidth limit on your plan.

To cancel a DigitalOcean account, delete all the Droplets and other services associated with your account. After that, deactivate your account by going into Account, then Settings. There, select the ‘Deactivate Account’ option.

Yes. You can setup billing alerts in your account and DigitalOcean will email you if your spending exceeds the amount that you set.

DigitalOcean offers a free $100 credit trial plan for up to 60-days. You can try many options of their services using this credit.

New customers are eligible for the free trial. If you have never been a paying customer and have not previously signed up for the free trial, then you are eligible.

Both backups and snapshots are on-demand disk images of Droplets. DigitalOcean backups are automatically created at weekly intervals and retained for four weeks. Snapshots are created manually and they will be removed only when you choose to. A backup is standardized and incremental, but a snapshot is a disk image at the point of time we take it.

No, DigitalOcean doesn’t offer a refund or money-back guarantee as it’s a pay-as-you-go hosting service.

There are no hidden fees on DigitalOcean. Plans and pricing are very transparent.