DigitalOcean Droplets pricing
Virtual servers in US dollars from $4 a month, billed by the second up to a monthly cap, with a public IPv4 address included.
| Plan | Price | Unit | Billing | Seats | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic 512 MiB | $4 | per month | billed monthly | — | 1 vCPU, 10 GiB SSD, 500 GiB transfer |
| Basic 1 GiB | $6 | per month | billed monthly | — | 1 vCPU, 25 GiB SSD, 1,000 GiB transfer |
| Basic 2 GiB | $12 | per month | billed monthly | — | 1 vCPU, 50 GiB SSD, 2,000 GiB transfer |
| Basic 2 GiB / 2 vCPU | $18 | per month | billed monthly | — | 60 GiB SSD, 3,000 GiB transfer |
Read from the vendor’s pages on , in USD, excluding tax. Where a page did not say whether a price is annual or monthly, the table says “billing period not stated”.
What you get, and the catch
- Best for
- Small teams that want predictable US-dollar pricing, a simple control panel and a public IPv4 address on every server.
- Watch out
- The $4 server has only 512 MiB of memory, which is too little for most databases or app stacks.
DigitalOcean calls its virtual servers Droplets. The pricing page starts the Basic range at:
| Monthly | Memory | vCPU | SSD | Transfer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $4 | 512 MiB | 1 | 10 GiB | 500 GiB |
| $6 | 1 GiB | 1 | 25 GiB | 1,000 GiB |
| $12 | 2 GiB | 1 | 50 GiB | 2,000 GiB |
| $18 | 2 GiB | 2 | 60 GiB | 3,000 GiB |
Billing is per second with a 60-second minimum, and bundled plans have a monthly cap, so a server that runs all month costs the price in the table. Each Droplet gets its own public IPv4 address, and for bundled plans the page says that address is included at no extra cost. Inbound bandwidth is free. Outbound transfer is included up to each plan's allowance.
For a small business app, the useful entry point is usually the 1 GiB or 2 GiB server, not the $4 one. A CRM, a help desk or an analytics tool run on your own server typically needs a database next to the app, and 512 MiB leaves little room for both.
There is no standing free tier. The FAQ says DigitalOcean "often provides promotional credits for new users".
For one small app server: $6 to $12 a month. Compare the per-month cost with euro-priced servers and with a self-hosted deployment panel in the hosting category.
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