DigitalOcean Pricing: How to calculate the Costing of Hosting?

DigitalOcean Pricing helps you calculate how much it will require for you to run your app on DigitalOcean. In fact, DigitalOcean is one of the most popular cloud hosting services. This bootstrapped startup has really given a touch competition to AWS in the cloud hosting era.

When the cloud hosting arrived on the horizon with Amazon AWS leading the pack, the hosting industry saw a complete overhaul. You might also be keen to know how you as a user are being charged for these hosting services.

AWS pricing was a complete game changer. Since, the charging moved from flat fee to being charged on pay per use basis. This meant that instead of being charged flat for a month, the user was now charged hourly. So, you shall be billed for the number of hours and resources that you use.

As simple as this may sound, the pricing based on resources is a complex ask. Moreover, when you host your site on a cloud hosting provider, you must know the resources for which you are being charged. Otherwise be prepared for a surprise in your hosting bill for sure!!

So, here we look at how to calculate the cost of hosting a web application on a DigitalOcean Hosting. In addition, we shall analyse and account for all possible kind of resources that DigitalOcean Charges for.

DigitalOcean Pricing

The Server: 5USD per month to 960USD per month

Just like your typical hosting provider, the DigitalOcean servers (also called as droplets) vary in cost as per the amount of RAM that you want for your application. Digital Ocean pricing is available per hour as well. So, if you use the drop for lesser number of hours than the hours in a month, you will get charged hourly instead.

The month in DigitalOcean is capped at 28 days. So, in case of months with more than 28 days, you save money due to monthly cap.

Example: Let’s say that you launch a 5 USD per month droplet. After 10 days, you realise that you don’t need this droplet anymore. So, you can destroy the droplet and be billed only for 10 days hourly instead of 5 USD. However, powering off the droplet doesn’t give you the benefit of hourly billing. You still are being billed even if you power it off. Only destroying the droplet gives you the billing benefit.

SSD Storage: 0.10 USD per GB per month

SSD storage is another parameter that you need to pay for. However, you should know that every droplet comes with an intrinsic drive attached with it. Like a 1 GB RAM droplet comes with 25 GB SSD block storage attached with it. Now, if you need only that much storage, you wont be charged extra. But, if you need to attach more disks/volumes, you’ll be charged a bit extra of Storage Used.

Load Balancer: 0.03USD per hour

Load Balancers are billed on hourly basis per month (remember, the billing in DO is capped at 28 days per month .. :). So, this requirement is with apps that scale to that level. Smaller apps don’t need to worry about this cost.

Data Transfer

Each of the Droplets comes with sufficient free bandwidth. E.g. 1 GB droplet comes with an inbuilt available bandwidth of 1 TB transfer (in/out). This should be very much sufficient for a normal app that is hosted on 1 GB droplet.

Similarly, as the size of droplets increase, the available bandwidth also increases. In rare case, you need more data transfer. You can anyways contact support and get additional data transfer at very nominal price.

Auxiliary Storage

Auxiliary storage is the storage that is required by your app for storing files that are accessed less frequently. Now, let’s say pictures in a user gallery or storing different variants of the same image. Such files will lead to a lot of storage requirement. Hence, the price of a SSD volume might not justify the price.

In that case, you will need to arrange for slower storage like Amazon S3. If your application has such requirement, you should consider adding this cost as well to your plans.

References: Official Digital Ocean Pricing Page

Digital Ocean Pricing: A Final Take

That’s it to the DigitalOcean Pricing and Plans. With that said, DigitalOcean has one of the most transparent pricing available in the cloud hosting market. Don’t ever worry about the pricing on DO at least. Just go ahead and launch your droplet on DigitalOcean.. 🙂 !!

You can select from Standard or Optimized droplets as per your needs. Attach more storage, Save your time and meet your increasing customer’s demands.

Do share your experience with DigitalOcean hosting otherwise as well in the comments.