Digital Ocean Secretly Wants You to Switch to Larger Droplets?

Server memory usage may be stable but there are likely to be some cold spots that rarely (maybe never) actually get accessed so having a some swap space should have very little negative performance impact and give you a little more headroom before you hit the limit and processes start dying on you.

If you hit the point when it thrashes because the working set isn't fitting in memory then that is obviously a bad place but there is a fair chance you can stay a host size smaller and save money by running some swap.

As for what the cold spots might be I can easily imagine libraries being included/required in an interpreted language and only small fractions of their functionality used. Unlike native libraries they won't just be memory mapped in without using real memory.

"Except every other provider enables swap by default."

This is false and 100% incorrect.

Most AMI's on AWS don't enable SWAP by default whether supplied by a 3rd party or AWS themselves. Its not a forced thing either way.

In October Rackspace announced that they would be getting rid of SWAP by default: http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/changes-to...

Linux VM's in Azure don't have Swap by default: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/07/29/swap...

On any host, physical or not, with more than 2GB of RAM people haven't run SWAP for years now. On cloud providers, even hosts with less than 2GB it is rarely worth it. It has horrible performance ramifications even when backed by SSD for the local host and any other tenants on that shared host.

This isn't a scam or them trying to upsell you. This is smart people who know systems operations making the right call for their customers.

I use Digital Ocean because my requirements are bounded by disk, not RAM. If I need more RAM, swapping would not save me, SSDs are still slow compared to RAM.

I've got no issues with this. Of course they want people to upgrade themselves. They do provide a very nice guide to using swap which I followed myself.

They want to look the best they can and as fast as they can. If your server is heavily using swap people will think it's slow. Also SSDs do not like being written to again and again. This is exactly what using it for swap does so this could be another little reason against it being on by default.

To be fair, I've got a small Wordpress website with Apache, MySQL and PHP on a $5 droplet. After several weeks of working fine MySQL ran out of memory and stopped. Adding swap space has fixed this and the server can still handle 100 connections at once OK. This isn't amazing but it's enough for me for now. So I'd say, add a little swap but be sure you don't have to use it often. I'm totally happy with it being off by default. More RAM will give much better performance than more swap and $5 is incredibly cheap.

I'm a new DO customer as well and I have no problem with this either. The $5 is for devs and designers- $10-$15 gets me something the public can use.

No contracts.

I have a couple of laptops in the office I use for devs as well- but it's on a dsl with a dynamic ip. To make it static is $30/mo (last I checked). To upgrade from dsl-- I have to switch providers, get a bigger bundle, etc.

This is waaaay better. I can still use the office machines- and do- but have something easier for most worker to use on a daily basis.

(The office ip is tracked with ddclient and I use dnsdynamic.org to follow it. I also email it to myself 4 times a day because dnsdynamic is free, and a little spotty. By the time I start paying for real ip stuff, I might as well go with DO.)