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DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

digitalocean.com

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Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#182
post #132

Hetzner is a very good alternative. They now have VPS in Virginia/USA.

I have a very small number of VPS with DO, so while this price increase is not impactful to me, it is somewhat shady how they portrayed this new pricing...not evil, just less than what i expected from DO. In paralell, for a couple of years now, i had heard of and been curious about Hetzner. But i was not as interested because their focus was in/around Europe, which i can't blame them. But, now that i see they have a data center in virginia area...well, now i'm going to start looking into them seriously. Their pricing is quite awesome...plus i have also recently heard of Contabo, and wow, their pricing is really awesome! Again, i'm not thinking that DO is evil or anything, but i appreciate that more and more i - as a small consumer fish - have much more choice!

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#183
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish I could get the same experience, we have frequent issues with INSERTs to small tables randomly taking 5-15 seconds and SELECTs from small tables going on infinitely. Their built in stats reflect this as well, so it doesn't appear networking or application related. I'm just frustrated and ready to self-manage my own clusters again. The first reply took around a day to begin with.

Interesting, this is the same issue I had. This was around 3 years ago, though. Have you tried spinning up your own Postgres instance to see if the same thing happens? It might help to be able to show them that you’re able to resolve it when you don’t use their DB.

We're using the MySQL product, but it's interesting the exact same problem is happening on multiple products under the umbrella. It's not my job to deeply diagnose their issues, and their support wasn't able to even comprehend what I was asking in very plain English. What I could have gained in offloading the maintenance to them was lost in hours wasted so far, and I'm probably better off bankrupting the experiment. When I say small, I really mean it: less than 10k rows in the database. Queries only interacting with primary IDs, etc. It's mind boggling.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#184
I'd love to know how much of their business is the formerly $5 tier, vs all the other tiers put together. I assume it's the majority. I also assume these popular, lower tier droplets also have a lower profit margin than the more deluxe tiers.

Shipping and inflation probably hurt their profits, but what are the chances that it's an even 20% across the board? I am assuming they're padding it with a bit of extra profit, to make it a round number. $1 a month per droplet is probably not enough reason for me to migrate all my projects to another service, and assuming most people are as lazy as me, they'll probably end up squeezing me for a tiny bit more profit.

I like DigitalOcean, I've been very impressed with their service so far. This is the first time they've done something that made me hesitate to recommend them. However, I'm reserving my outrage until there are a few more examples like this.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#185
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I operate a service called RunBuildRun that sells managed GitLab runners that run on DigitalOcean droplets. I have lots of droplets. I may need to bump up my price a bit :)

Sorry for the tangent, but can you provide more info on your service? Without signing up from an account on your site, I'm unsure on how the interface here compares to GitLab runner registration (which I always felt was a bit convoluted due to how GitLab structures their user and organization accounts) and how the hardware compares to what GitLab offers.

RunBuildRun makes creating a runner a one click operation. We give you a registration token for your runner, which you then register in the GitLab interface like usual.

The primary value over GitLab's runners is that RunBuildRun doesn't have any CI/CD minute quota. With GitLab, you get a finite quota (e.g. 400 minutes on the free tier) and then you have to upgrade to a per seat premium plan or buy additional CI/CD minutes.

Also, RunBuildRun gives you a dedicated runner so you don't have to wait on shared runners and you don't have to setup/manage a runner on your own server.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#187
post #110

So the price increase for the managed database is... 100%? Currently paying $240/mo for 16 GB RAM / 6vCPU / 270 GB Disk. The new price is $480/mo. We have a bunch of these databases at work, so I'm sure we'll be considering other providers now.

AWS RDS is significantly cheaper

And that is ridiciously expensive imo haha ;)

tbf, its about 2x the EC2 instance cost, so I guess is actually kinda reasonable for a kinda managed service.

But the (backup) storage is really how they get you in my experience. And do not turn on auto growth for diskspace, it will just grow to the limit and then you are paying for 200GB of daily backup storage you are not even using.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#188
So, just to be clear, this is a 20% increase on the lowest tier, and a smaller increase on the more expensive options.

I can't see how this change doesn't push their small (hobby) users away entirely.

It sounds crazy, but this may actually push my personal usage into "AWS might be cheaper" territory.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#189

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.

It is not like hardware costs are the only costs. My electricity costs are going to be nearly doubling shortly. They could be seeing the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if employee retention/turnover is another issue they are facing.
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