Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

digitalocean.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 341 posts

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#141

Post by skippyboxedhero »

jakub_jo wrote: post #2

For the fellow European (edit: & US) HN crowd I can highly recommend Hetzner's Cloud offerings: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

Have used them for a long time (I had their 2EUR VPS for ages, let go of it a few months ago but they honoured the price even when they were charging 4EUR for that spec). Very good customer support. I am a little worried about future prices though with electricity costs in Germany (although they have VPS in the US and Finland).

Contabo and Netcup are alternatives. Contabo has options in the UK/US/Singapore but is also German. Netcup is German, and I don't know where their servers are. OVH is another one but have had mixed experiences with their customer support.

DO prices are ridiculous (imo).

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#142

Post by tinalumfoil »

kyledrake wrote: post #71
pritambarhate wrote: post #3

Oh! They have increased the prices! I went to the page hoping price reductions. Looks like inflation is changing the dynamics for the hosting business too.

Honestly I think enticing shareholders is one of their primary motivators here, and the inflation is more of the excuse. Nobody else I work with is raising their costs in this space right now (we'll see how long that lasts though), and DO isn't exactly the bottom of the list on pricing. The increase doesn't look too large, but if you need a similar alternative I like Vultr a lot, the Neocities CDN is hosted there and…

Hosting is naturally deflationary, since the cost of the underlying hardware becomes cheaper per unit over time. Take storage, which has gone from roughly 10 to 2 cents per GB over a decade [0]. I believe there's a quote somewhere about AWS initially selling EC2 unprofitably, with the expectation that their costs would go down.

Not sure the underlying economics here for DO or their motivation, but I don't think DO can expect to their customers to react to this the same way customers are reacting to inflated costs in cars, groceries and the like. If other providers follow suit, maybe that's a sign of slowing efficiency in the hardware, end of Moore's law, etc.

[0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/ch...

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#143

Post by xhkkffbf »

throwaway_98554 wrote: post #52
showerst wrote: post #32

I think this price increase is honestly pretty fair, but I really wish they'd show side by side prices, and offer me a tool to see what my total increase will be.

Why do you think the price increase is fair? If anything I would expect it to go down as computation and memory get cheaper.

Yes, the price of computation is going down, but the prices for real estate and electricity are going up, often way up. Computers use lots of electricity and sometimes the price of electricity over the lifetime is more than the cost of the machine. Gasoline prices don't track electricity prices in the short term, but eventually the prices of energy catch up with each other. They can't escape inflation.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#144

Post by selfhoster69 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #83
Dork1234 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this compare with prices for AWS/Google Compute Engine/Azure ?

You can get a GCP micro VPS for free, “forever”. I have a free VPS always running, and run beefier VPSs as-needed for my personal projects. For my needs, GCP and Colab (sometimes Pro, sometimes free) are convenient and time-savers. You can also get a free Oracle Cloud VPS, and Alibaba provides good cloud value also. Many years ago, I enrolled in Microsoft’s BizSpark program, and if they still do that, check them out.…

Isn't there terrible bandwidth restrictions for the GCP free tier VMs?

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#145

Post by 0des »

hotpotamus wrote: post #20
tpaksoy wrote: post #4

Why aren't they showing a comparison between old and new price? This seems deliberate...

> That’s why today we are announcing that for the first time we’re changing our prices to best serve you at every stage of your growth journey. To best serve you at every stage of your growth journey it would seem. Or if you'd like a translation from stilted corporate speak into plain language: we went public and the line's gotta go up and engineers and hardware don't come cheap.

It more and more feels like going public is the big mistake in a lot of tech companies, because everything gets real squirrely after that for customers and employees.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#146

Post by andix »

I had huge issues with IP reputation of Digital Ocean. some (smaller) providers seem to completely block their IP ranges. So you can’t reach some servers, and some people can’t reach your DO servers.

The reason for that seems to be, that they don’t take abuse reports very seriously, which is especially critical for mail/spam.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#147

Post by zasdffaa »

sitkack wrote: post #139

Prices should be going down , not up. Infact, I would expect out of my cloud provider a commitment to drop prices by some percentage each year. A $100 workload from last year should not cost more than a $100 this year. We are still on exponential curves for compute, storage and DC bandwidth.

Cost of power is going up now. It might not be reasonable to assume price falls this year. Or it might. Dunno.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#149

Post by systemvoltage »

jmartrican wrote: post #19

Seems like the $4 droplet is a smoke screen hiding price increases. I'm a long time DO customer. I wish they would have just said "prices are going up" and listed a comparison of the old price with the new increased price. In their new price list, they do not list the old price... so you cant tell if they are going up and down. Because the article starts off with the $4 droplet announcement, you get a feeling that th…

It is also not changing by $1 across the board. $6 droplet is going to $7. But, $12 droplet is going to $14 with the new pricing.

PR folks who work in tech companies need to realize that their customers are different from, say, a toothpaste company's customers.

Just be fucking transparent.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#150

Post by sitkack »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #53

To give some hobbyist level price increase numbers: I'm currently running two basic droplets at 8gb RAM and 4vCPU, which is basically just enough resources for a proper dev kubernetes cluster with Promethueus, Loki, 5-6 apps, etc (4gb 4vCPU is not enough, I tried). I also run a third 1gb1vcpu management droplet outside the cluster as well as a load balancer in front of my API gateway and a spaces instance to dump bac…

> 8gb RAM and 4vCPU

This is Raspberry Pi 4 territory. Your monthly cost is the price of hardware, per month. If you are on a home 1G connection, your home bandwidth is as good or better than what you are getting on DO. At the end of a year, you would have a 12 node cluster.

Post reply on HN