July 10, 2018 UPDATE: In order to provide a transition period, 1st Generation Droplet plans will continue to be available via the API using the legacy size slugs. We will provide additional notice before their removal.

May 31, 2018 UPDATE: We’ve updated our plans. Get the latest details here.

Last week, we shared our 2018 roadmap preview and today, we’re excited to announce the first of many new updates for developers: new Droplet plans. We know that price-to-performance is an important consideration when choosing where to host your application, whether it be a small side project or a large business. That is why we’re upgrading resources across our plans and introducing new plans to give you even more flexibility to choose the right Droplet for your application.

We have updates to share across all three classes of Droplet plans: Standard, High CPU, and High Memory Droplets. These updates are available immediately through the Cloud Control Panel and API in the majority of our datacenters. Here are the full details of the updated plans:

Standard Droplets

Standard Droplet plans have always offered a healthy balance of CPU, memory, and SSD storage to get blogs, web applications, and databases off the ground. With today’s changes, we have 14 brand new Standard Plans to ensure that these applications can grow and scale as your projects grow.

These updated plans are listed below, with some before and after looks at how resources have changed at various monthly price points:

These updated Standard Droplets offer more resources for either the same or a lower price than our previous generation.

We’ve also introduced three flexible plans, all priced at $15 with varying sets of CPU and memory combinations to give you resource flexibility without worrying about price.

Finally, all original “first generation” Standard Droplet Plans are still available via the API. This will ensure any applications you host that are hard-coded for those plans aren’t negatively impacted. We intend to fully deprecate those plans on July 1, 2018 and will send more updates throughout the year. [See: July 10, 2018 update.]

Optimized Droplets

High CPU Plans were released just six months ago and we’re excited to make our first upgrades to these plans which are great for CI/CD, batch processing, and other compute-intensive workloads. We’re also renaming High CPU Droplets “Optimized Droplets”. These Droplets are powered by dedicated resources from best-in-class Broadwell and Skylake CPUs, but now come with additional memory and local SSD disk for the same price. In the future, we’ll be looking to boost performance not only for CPU but also for memory and disk performance. The updates are shown below:

Competitively, these plans line up well with similar offerings from other providers in the market. Below you can see that DigitalOcean’s Optimized Droplets are priced competitively from a price-to-performance perspective:

High Memory Plans are being deprecated as a result of the upgrades made to Standard Plans, which come with ample amounts of RAM and SSD storage at competitive price points. The API will support High Memory Droplets created until July 1, 2018, but we recommend transitioning over to the new Standard Droplet Plans before then. (If you have an active High Memory Droplet, it will simply continue to be charged at the same rate for the duration that it remains active.)

Coming Soon: Per-Second Billing

We’re working hard at making continuous improvements to our billing system in order to align with changes in customer Droplet usage behavior. We’re happy to share that starting later this year, Droplets will be billed by the second instead of by the hour. This means that you’ll only be charged for exactly the amount of time you use your instance to the second. We understand it is important for customers scaling instances up and down regularly to have the best rate available and we’re happy to get this update shipped for you. Keep an eye out for a future announcement specifically on billing improvements.

Looking Ahead

We understand that price-to-performance ratios are of utmost consideration when you’re choosing a hosting provider and we’re committed to being a price-to-performance leader in the market. As we continue to find ways to optimize our infrastructure we plan on passing those benefits on to you, our customers.

Additional Information & Helpful Links

Ben Schaechter

Senior Product Manager, Droplet