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 they have made changes to their infrastructure and prices will be going down to pass along those savings.
Quite frankly, I feel this only happens when we're in a time of wealth and growth. I suspect many more companies will start acting this way. It's simply a logical conclusion based on the current market sentiment and the view that I outlined above.
I was going to say that the email subject said prices "are going up", but it turns out the subject line was "DigitalOcean prices are changing July 1st. Here’s what you need to know." and I just assumed changing went up so strongly I remembered it wrong.
Seems like a really reasonable price increase (though the timeline is short), but they ought to have been a little clearer about exactly what the before-and-after picture was.
Ive quit them long time ago when they did not adjust price to compete. They also had for a few years, inferior performance per dollar as others in same range.
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.
I've been using both DigitalOcean (~5years) and Hetzner (11months) and I can definitely suggest Hetzner, very good service and good pricing - plus they offer dedicated servers at very reasonable pricing (and even vSwitch! You can create private network between them - very useful when you need a beast server and another one not too powerful).
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.
I switched out of digital ocean because their docker apps don’t allow persistent access to the disk and don’t allow you to add any disk.
This eliminated a whole bunch of apps. I real head scratcher.
Render.com works a lot better for me. The disk is symlinked in automatically to ‘/var/data’ and I can add it in with an environmental variable set in the dashboard.
I have no idea why digital ocean cripples its app offerings like this. If anyone works there see this please add disks to docker apps.
The servers (I just tried booting the second-cheapest one) do seem much faster than DigitalOcean's and in my case they're actually cheaper, even without the coming price increase. However, one thing I noticed is that you have to pay extra for a floating IP (€3 + VAT) which is AFAIK free with DigitalOcean—or at least I didn't notice in on my bill. Something to keep in mind. I will probably switch over anyway.
Just switched everything over. I can live without the floating IP for now. I now pay slightly less than what I did at DigitalOcean while doubling the specs. Thanks for the tip!
The only problem is that now those other comments made me consider Contabo...
It doesn't take into account though:
- update guarantees
- quality of customer support (I had very bad experiences with Scaleway for example)
- score normalisation across many instances, to compensate different loads on VM hosts into account
At my company we used Contabo servers. They were Windows VMs, I can’t tell anything about Linux ones. But, the ones we had felt underpowered for what we expected. It might have been subjective, we haven’t performed any benchmarking, just a feeling. Also, their UI is straight from the 90s, in a bad way.
Interesting. Looks like more than half price. Are their interface / setup as easy as DO droplets? What's the catch? Are DO just expensive because they are market leaders?
I tried to create an account and got the following error message:
Invalid characters, allowed are: A-Z a-z 0-9 ä ö ü ß Ä Ö Ü ^ ! $ % / ( ) = ? + # - . , ; : ~ * @ [ ] { } _ ° §
What year is it, that we cannot use &?
I recommend it as well, and one added benefit is you're in the same network as their cheap "storage box" servers (AKA SMB/CIFS/WebDAV/SSH storage server), so you can connect the two and get faster block storage compared to combining two clouds.
I have been using Backblaze/Wasabi. If you get their European servers, you can rclone mount on a Hetzner VPS and get very good speeds. If you have a fiber connection/very fast disks at home then maybe it will bottleneck. But for file storage and basic playback (for example, through SMB mount) then it is pretty good.
Tbf though, Hetzner auctions with 6TB*2 of disk at 45EUR are a good alternative. It is really a trade-off between having a server with decent power or having the flexibility of scalable S3 storage.
I preferred them to DO as they had newer (AMD CPU) hardware but then had a very bad experience with them as a customer, causing me to move my business away back to DO.
I've been using Linode instead of DigitalOcean since ~2015 IIRC. I just checked their pricing page [1] and find it pretty hostile and confusing. First, you won't see any tech spec at all without clicking on a card; "starts at $blah/mo" means precious little without tech specs. Then, once you click on "Droplets" you get another grid(s) of cards where the tech specs are teeny-tiny and comparison is very painful. Compare this to the classic table-based pricing page from Linode [2], where everything is very straightforward. I won't go to Wayback Machine and dig out DO's pricing page from back when they were still the HN darling, but I'm pretty sure it was a straightforward table-based layout. Who the heck prefer this new mess?
I've been a Linode user since 2011, my only minor complaint is I wish they had kept the 10% annual payment discount. Seems like they jumped over to hourly billing to match the competition (I suppose if you really are spinning up VMs for less than a month, hourly is nice. But if you're running your VM 24/7 for 11 years... you just get to pay slightly more than you were previously.)
I’m also a happy Linode user since … a decade? more? I remember the phpBB forums for their customers from forever ago. I’m sure there are cheaper out there, but given the already pretty low cost, I’m not interested in jumping ship. I hope their recent acquisition doesn’t change much.
I don't know why it is convenient to ignore the "managed" aspect of it.
DO's or AWS's managed databases do more than just stick it on an server VM. It has a firewall built it, replicas, backups, logs, API access to manage it, etc.
The reason why these managed database services even exist is because people are willing to pay for it. It provides them value. If it didn't, they'd stop working on them.
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.
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.
I think it's because they included an additional node in the price by default. So it's double because they have a read only node added in there, the price for managed DBs doesn't seem to have changed mostly.
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.
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)
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 it's been rock solid performance for years, and it's quick to get access to competent tech support. I wish I had more infra hosted there actually.
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.
Changing the dynamics how when it is already overpriced. This is like all the businesses during COVID saying... It's COVIDs fault our customer service is terrible.
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.
Electricity costs are going up, and hardware is harder to source due to the chip shortage (and thus likely more expensive, if you pay to get ahead of the line). Perhaps these are part of the reasons.
This is why cloud providers build in as much lock in as possible in the form of managed services - eventually they won't want to decrease prices every year and you'll have so much code written against their proprietary cloud widgets that it'll be more expensive to move than to pay their increases.
If you ever take a vendor specific certification, it's all about how you should use their specific cloud features in order to "properly" architect the solution for the cloud. Often these services do in fact result in cheaper bills, but there are other costs - and no provider I've seen has ever made any commitment regarding future prices like you mention expecting.
Electricity costs are going up. Replacement hardware is more expensive (and in some cases impossible to find). Inflation means you have to pay employees more. All vendors have bumped up their prices as well.
There is a balance. Computers are getting faster. Bandwidth is nominally cheaper. However, inflation is hell right now and supplies are still tight. A lot of components are just as expensive as they were years ago.
> We are still on exponential curves for compute and storage and DC bandwidth.
So what’s the angle here, power makes up so much of the service or the cost of power has increased so much that it warrants doubling the price for managed databases?
Digital Ocean are entitled to do whatever they want with their prices, regardless of their costs. Frustrated customers have some good alternatives to switch to.
So right now, if you were choosing an on-demand cloud provider (like digital ocean), which would you chose if your requirement would be expecting that next year your bill would be lower than it is today?
You know the answer. Which cloud providers routinely drop prices, which ones stay flat and which ones sneak in price increases?
You cant trust a cloud provider that raises prices. They are either a) mis-managed and can't calculate their own costs b) greedy and short sided or c) not in charge of their own prices. None of those qualities should be someone you enter into a relationship on this magnitude.
The battle between cheaper hardware and inflation was something I found interesting and wondered which would affect prices first. I personally won't change anything, I'll pay the extra $1 a month for my cheap droplet to not have to move anything. DO's big selling point to me (as a hobbyist) was the simplicity. Now that I work with AWS every day, I feel very comfortable getting some basic infra set up, but I still really like DO's smooth setup.
It's a shame they had to do it. I wonder how difficult it is to compete with all the big providers? They still fit my use case just fine (still a big cheaper than the AWS equivalent too I think, but maybe not) and I'm fortunate to not be in a situation where the extra dollars are a deal breaker.
Is it important that they're losing the branding of the $5 droplet? It seems that's significantly more of an impressionable number than 4 or 6, in my understanding of the factors that made them popular. To me they've simply lost the #1 thing that people remember them by and don't stand out with that simple change. That's the only change that worries me.
I thought Linode's "Nanode" ($5 VM) was several years after DO. I remember wishing Linode had a lower tier option and contemplating moving to DO back when Linode started at $20 for their lowest spec.
Readit News
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.
Seems like a really reasonable price increase (though the timeline is short), but they ought to have been a little clearer about exactly what the before-and-after picture was.
All that behaviour let linode and vultr flourish
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).
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...
I get maintenance emails quite often, but I think it's from an abundance of caution. I can't remember it actually ever going down.
Terrible support. https://community.oracle.com/tech/apps-infra/discussion/4496...
This eliminated a whole bunch of apps. I real head scratcher.
Render.com works a lot better for me. The disk is symlinked in automatically to ‘/var/data’ and I can add it in with an environmental variable set in the dashboard.
I have no idea why digital ocean cripples its app offerings like this. If anyone works there see this please add disks to docker apps.
The only problem is that now those other comments made me consider Contabo...
I'm a bit sad they don't have anything closer to the UK: I'll miss the 4ms ping to my DO VPS.
EDIT: holy shit, I looked into Contabo mentioned below and it's even cheaper! €5 for 4 cores and 8 GB RAM, what's the catch?
It doesn't take into account though: - update guarantees - quality of customer support (I had very bad experiences with Scaleway for example) - score normalisation across many instances, to compensate different loads on VM hosts into account
No managed databases or kubernetes clusters though. Hoping that’s in the works as it will really level up their offering if they do.
Hetzner Cloud looks modern and it's easy to use. They don't have the same services as DO though.
If you go the dedicated server way, you'll use the old control panel. I don't find it hard to use, but it's not as good looking.
"You get you pay for", even if it is half true accounting for DO's shareholder's pressure, I think Hetzner is impossibly cheap.
Tbf though, Hetzner auctions with 6TB*2 of disk at 45EUR are a good alternative. It is really a trade-off between having a server with decent power or having the flexibility of scalable S3 storage.
I use it for all my projects for 3 years, and very satisfied
[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing
[2] https://www.linode.com/pricing/
Deleted Comment
We have a bunch of these databases at work, so I'm sure we'll be considering other providers now.
Not saying you should do the same, just was a bit shocked and decided to share.
DO's or AWS's managed databases do more than just stick it on an server VM. It has a firewall built it, replicas, backups, logs, API access to manage it, etc.
The reason why these managed database services even exist is because people are willing to pay for it. It provides them value. If it didn't, they'd stop working on them.
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.
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.
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 it's been rock solid performance for years, and it's quick to get access to competent tech support. I wish I had more infra hosted there actually.
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...
Usually - well before inflation - this tier was $2.50.
We are not and we haven't been at it for quite some time already. Only compute is dropping in price but it is hardly on an exponential curves.
>A $100 workload from last year should not cost more than a $100 this year.
That is on the assumption that cost of are the same for other part of business even if hardware cost are dropping. Which isn't true.
And ignoring all the above, we are currently experience component shortage which means everything cost more, and energy price increase.
If you ever take a vendor specific certification, it's all about how you should use their specific cloud features in order to "properly" architect the solution for the cloud. Often these services do in fact result in cheaper bills, but there are other costs - and no provider I've seen has ever made any commitment regarding future prices like you mention expecting.
Why do you think prices “should be going down”?
> We are still on exponential curves for compute and storage and DC bandwidth.
So what’s the angle here, power makes up so much of the service or the cost of power has increased so much that it warrants doubling the price for managed databases?
I don’t know about DC bandwidth, but for compute and storage… really? Feels like we are in the upper portion of an S-curve.
You cant trust a cloud provider that raises prices. They are either a) mis-managed and can't calculate their own costs b) greedy and short sided or c) not in charge of their own prices. None of those qualities should be someone you enter into a relationship on this magnitude.
It's a shame they had to do it. I wonder how difficult it is to compete with all the big providers? They still fit my use case just fine (still a big cheaper than the AWS equivalent too I think, but maybe not) and I'm fortunate to not be in a situation where the extra dollars are a deal breaker.
- Hitting the machine with the hammer: $5
- Knowing where to hit the machine to get it working again: $995