Digitalocean price increase + new $4 droplet

pikachu

More details here:
https://www.digitalocean.com/try/new-pricing

Price increases across the board, except for the new $4 droplet, though if I'm looking at the big boys AWS Lightsail with their $3.5 droplet has served me well over the past few months.

Thoughts?

chimichurri

Many question marks inside my head...

• Are they already running at loss because of creeping inflation, or just trying to get extra profits?
• Or is this perhaps because of the IPO last year?
• Why did people choose DO over Vultr/Linode, (and perhaps Lightsail too) until now? Granted, I've never used any of them, but In my eyes they seem to be more or less the same (Lightsail providing the least amount of managed services), arguably, Vultr's HF plan looks the best, the only other difference that comes to my mind is their locations, with DO having the least, Linode being second and Vultr having the most. (Lightsail DC lineup is +/- the same as Linode's)
• Will there be any extra value added in exchange for higher prices, e.g. newer hardware? (Although TBH, doesn't really sound like it )

Arguably the only good thing about the upcoming changes except the new 4 dollar plan seems to be more granular billing for managed k8s, but given the overall price increase, I don't think it will make any difference unless you have really unpredictable load levels.

Lee

I got a $5 droplet in 2013, it's still $5 nearly 10 years later, they have increased the resource in that time, not the price. So from a financial point of view, it makes sense. In fact, you could say a price increase is long overdue.

Can't see many customers having an issue with it. Their overall product offering is very good vs other providers. They are not lowend, they have very real overheads that need to be paid for.

And for all those saying, ah but Vultr or Linode is now cheaper. It only takes one, the rest will wait until they pick up a few new customers from DO then increase pricing too. It's coming across the hosting industry, to be honest. As soon as those fixed contracts end the energy price hikes will hit everyone hard.

fan

One reason I keep using DO is because they have free bandwidth for grandfathered accounts, hope they won't end that in the future.

havoc

@chimichurri said: Why did people choose DO over Vultr/Linode, (and perhaps Lightsail too) until now?

They had some adjacent cloud-y services the others didn't. Object storage etc

szymonp

@fan said:
One reason I keep using DO is because they have free bandwidth for grandfathered accounts, hope they won't end that in the future.

Many hosts offer unlimited bandwidth for a better price

Nyr

@szymonp said: Many hosts offer unlimited bandwidth for a better price

Not that many.

Very few in fact offer unmetered gigabit for less than $4, without even taking into account location, bandwidth quality or service reliability.

vyas

From a lay person’s pov:
Which would be me.

DO tutorials are very good, detailed and easy to follow.

Google Cloud is the most confusing , AWS haven’t used much… Vultr and Linode need to pull up their socks to bring the docs at par with DO.

I believe DO had first mover advantage in the space with it comes to detailed How To’s. Community contributions also helped.

Service wise today probably not much difference among the non-enterprise oriented (read: google/aws/azure…) players.

I have used a few from the names from the services I mentioned. And had I not discovered LE world, I would have opted for DO.

@chimichurri said: Why did people choose DO over Vultr/Linode, (and perhaps Lightsail too) until now?

Indeed a good question to ponder upon

bikegremlin

Prices go up, currencies go down, pays remain more-less the same.

The way things are going, I'm happy as long as Serbia doesn't win the next Eurovision.

Advin

@szymonp said:

@fan said:
One reason I keep using DO is because they have free bandwidth for grandfathered accounts, hope they won't end that in the future.

Many hosts offer unlimited bandwidth for a better price

Not real unmetered. And DO iirc is 10 Gbps

szymonp

@Advin said:

@szymonp said:

@fan said:
One reason I keep using DO is because they have free bandwidth for grandfathered accounts, hope they won't end that in the future.

Many hosts offer unlimited bandwidth for a better price

Not real unmetered. And DO iirc is 10 Gbps

ok fair enough I guess it's a good deal for the few people who have used them for over a decade. for the rest of us it's not that great