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DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

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Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#301

Post by skrtskrt »

donatj wrote: post #228
pchm wrote: 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.

I so badly wanted to use their managed databases, but they priced me out of it. It's so much cheaper just to manage the database myself, and thus far at least not that much more effort.

I think this is probably the right positioning for anyone's decision on managed database vs. running it yourself, or any cloud managed product for that matter.

If you feel you either don't need the managed offerings and/or can manage it to a point where you're spending less of you or your company's time resources on it, then by all means manage it yourself.

If the managed-ness of the cloud offerings are a high enough value for you, then you will pay for it.

Creating, maintaining, constantly upgrading and improving a managed database product takes a hell of a lot of expensive engineer hours. It's probably a better bet for cloud providers to have relatively fewer high-margin customers on that product than they would if they tried to squeeze margins to compete with "I can provision a VM and install Postgres myself" which is also a product they already offer - just buy the VM.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#302

Post by istillwritecode »

I've been on digital ocean for maybe ten years but I now want a place where I can run a mail server. That rules out digital ocean because thei IP address blocks are on too many blacklists. I'd be curious to hear other suggestions (but not aws, whose pricing model is too complex).

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#303

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

showerst wrote: post #134
throwaway_98554 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't just pay DO for servers, I'm paying them for a cohesive integrated UX, decent support (for the price), and nice hosted database and load balancer options. That's always been what separates DO from the rest of the market. Servers are cheaper elsewhere, that extra stuff is all pretty competitively priced. All of those things are subject to the prices of people, which are nuts right now. I also have deployments…

I’m not saying you don’t - but my experience has been different. In my experience Linode has customer service that is in a different league than DigitalOcean has ever provided. I’ve never gotten what I would call great, or perhaps memorably good, customer service from DigitalOcean. I haven’t gotten awful customer service either. It’s the kind I would expect from any turn key solution that doesn’t employ support agents who are already well versed in what they’re working on.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#304

Post by malfist »

bdlowery wrote: post #267
stjohnswarts wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's overcharging customers to see how much they can get away with, like netflix. Jump on the "iTs inFlAtIoN" bandwagon and see how much profit you can squeeze out and see how well you can handle customer attrition while doing it. If it goes bad just say "oh looks like inflation is lightening up a bit now". I call it the Netflix Gambit (circa 2022)

Armchair hacker news CEO knows what is REALLY going on behind the scenes at digital ocean.

Your comment does not add to the discourse here

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#305

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

dfinninger wrote: post #167
tuananh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but aws ec2 price always go down

I just checked one of the node types and EC2 is about 20% more expensive, even after the price hikes. AWS may have more baked-in margin than DO. Also, I didn’t include Transfer costs in the cross-check, so AWS may be much more expensive.

Depending on your needs, AWS is hands down one of the most expensive ways to put workloads into the cloud.

At the same time it’s a bit difficult to compare them apples-to-apples. In my experience EC2 instances aren’t designed for reliability as much as they are designed to meet exactly what AWS can put on the invoice as being the value exchanged for money. I’m not bashing their design goals, they’re just different from “traditionally VPS-first” firms.

If you’re running not-huge On Demand instances you can definitely get much better performance for your dollar on something like Linode or DigitalOcean, OVH, Hetzner, etc. And then you can still some of the AWS services where they have much less comprehensive competition. IMHO, you can beat EC2 all day but feature-wise it’s extremely difficult to beat S3.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#306

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

999900000999 wrote: post #284

HN, the place where almost everyone makes at least 120k TC, with many of you hitting 300k. Yet a 1$ increase after 12 years is unreasonable ?

I totally get the sentiment.

At the same time, plenty of us are trying to build businesses with no external funding, where every dollar might matter.

Recently Datadog surprised me with a nearly 21x-over-typical bill for features that had previously communicated as being disabled and non-billed, by their own billing team. Just weeks before. No changes on my side since.

If it were my spouse’s company they’d spend more money (in terms of paid time) retrieving that than they’d get back. They wouldn’t care and it wouldn’t ever show up in the billions on their financials.

For my small business that was a shocker.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#307

Post by breakingcups »

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.

If the title doesn't mention lower prices, you can be sure it's going to be a rate hike.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#308

Post by raffraffraff »

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

I'm using Oracle Cloud always free tier, and I've got 4x VMs each with 1 Arm CPU, 6gb memory and 50gb disk. Free forever. You get a small amount of object storage and some free database (nosql/sql) but I'm mainly here for the 4 VMs to run a completely free k0s Kubernetes cluster.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#309

Post by turtlebits »

999900000999 wrote: post #284

HN, the place where almost everyone makes at least 120k TC, with many of you hitting 300k. Yet a 1$ increase after 12 years is unreasonable ?

To me, not showing existing prices is customer hostile and a bit shady. That said DO has always been expensive to me.

hetzner, OVH, or the swarth of VPS hosts on lowendbox.com is preferable to me.

Re: DigitalOcean: New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

#310

Post by nijave »

999900000999 wrote: post #284

HN, the place where almost everyone makes at least 120k TC, with many of you hitting 300k. Yet a 1$ increase after 12 years is unreasonable ?

No, sending a vague email that makes me waste my time to figure out how much more I have to pay them is unreasonable. They could have just included prices side by side and a sample invoice under the new system with the last month's usage
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