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Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

Digital Ocean really needs to cut their prices at this point. There's no compelling reason to pay them 50% more for the same thing.

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Rather than cut prices (I think $5 is low enough), I would prefer if they would beef up their specs. For $5, DO gives you only 512MB vs 1GB from Linode.

6-of-1, half a dozen of the other. Halving their prices on all current instances gives you the same specs at the same pricepoints.

I don't particularly care if they keep around a 512MB/$2.50 instance at that point.

I would, however, love that price point. It would be nice if I could run a few light-weight services on a VPS for $2.50 a month and then put my websites and other projects on a beefier VM.

I currently use Linode, but if DigitalOcean offered something at that pricepoint they would be getting $2.50 more from me a month than they currently do.

Pure guess, but I'd imagine that payment processor fees don't make it particularly profitable to offer price levels much lower than $5.

One thing that could help is having the ability to pre pay/load credits, so you could have a small discount that way

This is the same theory that NearlyFreeSpeech.net uses.

Linode / AWS already offer prepaid discounts.

Where Could i find that ? For Linode AND AWS Discount.

For AWS look at "reserved instances"

I'm not sure about Linode

For Linode: https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/prepaid-billing-and-pay...

Make it so you have to buy at least 2 months then

Or even pay up front for the year. Perfect for the hobbyist market. I'd probably buy four of them.

It's more about support costs if I were to guess. How many support tickets does it take for their profit on $25 a year to disappear? (if $2.50 a month is discounted to $25 a year).

I always like prgmr.com's stance on that. "Please note that these plans include $2.50 worth of support"

ARIN charges for IPv4 address allocation (https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html) and I read that below $5 a month it becomes unprofitable for hosting companies just because of the cost of leasing IP addresses. If your services can run on shared hosting there are a bunch of hosts for less than $1 a month around.

Charge a dollar for ipv4, or ipv6 is free?

Well, you get a 10 Gbps pipe with DO, while only 75 Mbps with Linode, lol!

Appears to have been a typo. It now starts at 1000 Mbps on the smaller instances.

Linode is 40Gbps IN, 1Gbps out for the $5 instance. The 75Mbps was a misprint.

From Soh (Linode) in the comments [0]: "We’ve deliberated and brought the floor for all plans to have 1000Mbps. Thanks for your feedback!"

So it appears that 75Mbps was the initial speed but after some internal deliberation (possibly influenced by feedback), they raised it to 1000Mbps.

[0] https://blog.linode.com/2017/02/14/high-memory-instances-and...

Had not seen that, thanks!

We did an on-the-spot upgrade to that speed, the new floor for all plans will be 1000Mbps.

The blog should be updated now, might need a refresh to see:

https://blog.linode.com/2017/02/14/high-memory-instances-and...

That 10gbps is highly variable.

I use one of my DO instances as staging for file transfers. 2 days a month, I can barely get more than 30K/s from their sf data center to comcast. Other days, I get 5M/s. Their network is shitty.

And I don't think I'm being rate-limited; it's 1-2G transfer per day.

Only new locations (FRA, SFO2) have the 10 Gbps pipe, and I am constantly able to push 2-5 Gbps through it in Frankfurt.

Keep in mind that bandwidth bottlenecks can happen on both sides - depending on the peering that is chosen between Comcast and DigitalOcean, there might be a significant oversubscription between two peering providers that's causing this.

DigitalOcean might happily be able to push 10g to their next hop, but beyond that things are significantly more outside of their control. This is mistaken as 'throttling' a lot, but is actually just ISPs not investing in peering to handle their peak demand. Similar to the Netflix and Cogent issue that happened a couple of years back.

At times, I can get better speeds by tunneling or proxying using a DigitalOcean Droplet and downloading something from overseas than I can doing it directly. The path taken from my home internet to the DO Droplet uses different peering than my path to Europe, and the speeds are faster overall even though it creates more hops.

I don't get the whole VPS thing anyway. 5$ for playing around is great but anything that costs more is just not worth it.

60$/month for 16GB, 1CPU, 20GB disk for VPS... in comparison a root server with real remote console access, 16GB, 4 core AMD, 4TB disks, unlimited traffic costs me 30EUR/month (30$/month).

Or for 60EUR/month (60$) I could get a root server with 64GB Ram, 2x500GB SSD, i7-6700, 30TB traffic.

What company?

Mostly Strato and Hetzner.

I've pointed this out to people on numerous occasions, and the push-back I always get is concerns about timely provisioning if they ever need more capacity and/or new servers in case of catastrophe.

OVH et al can get you servers quickly if they have them "in stock", but supply fluctuates wildly, especially on the cheaper end.

Just being able to programmatically provision a server at a moment's notice—even in normal day-to-day (i.e. non-catastrophic) situations—is a critical tool in my toolbelt.

You can take a snapshot of a VM, you can move it to a different host, you can spin up a new instance to test a major upgrade, you can clone a cluster for a few hours of testing, you can scale up and down...

You pay for the scalability. Your 4 core AMD is always a 4 core AMD unless you migrate to a new server. Your 1 core Linode can become a 20 core Linode in a few minutes, for just a few hours while you need the capacity, and then go back to being a cheap 1 core Linode.

And one server will only ever be one server. For many deployments it makes more sense to have several smaller nodes distributed between different geographical areas than one big node in one datacenter. And/or multiple nodes in a a single datacenter so you can perform rolling upgrades.

What is your definition of a "root server" and where do you rent them? Do you mean a dedicated server? I've checked a few providers and none of them come close the costs/benefits you're listing. OVH's EG-16 (4c/8t, 16G, 2x4T) is $79/mo. 1-and-1's L4i (4c/4t, 12G, 2x1T) is $80/mo.

SoYouStart (OVH's lower tier brand) has 4c/4t 32 GB 3x120 GB SSD) for $49/mo. Or same price, same ram, 2x2TB and 8t with a slightly slower clock.

That's interesting. Thank you.

I realize that I am doing that thing where you try to rationalize your preconceived notions, but here are some high-level observations:

* Looks like there are normally setup fees associated with provisioning new servers, although they are suspended at the moment.

* Support seems next to non-existant, which I suppose is not surprising considering they're a low-cost provider.

* SSD-based servers appear to be frequently out-of-stock.

* If you need a KVM attached to your server, it is $30 for 24 hours or $200+ for a week.

* 250Mbps bandwidth (presumably in and out) cf. Linode which is 40G in and 1-10G out.

All that being said, my interest is piqued. I could see this being a good fit if 1. you have a more-or-less dedicated sysadmin, 2. need a lot of storage and/or memory and have solid sizing requirements ahead of time, and 3. cloud (VPS or otherwise) isn't an option due to cost or other facts. It could be great for running your own VM or container cluster. Thanks again for sharing!

Yes a dedicated server. Mostly german servers from Hetzner and Strato.

https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex51ss...

Depending on how the host configures things, VMs can be much more reliable. If I know my data is striped onto a 16-disc array, and can be live-migrated onto a different storage box in case the RAID controller goes funny without me having to care or even notice, that's more than I can reasonably set up with a $60/month server. Couple that to live migration of the VM process itself if the hardware it's running on goes wonky, and you've got a recipe for as much uptime as you want.

All this does depend on the VM host actually implementing these things properly, but they are out there.

Why? DIgitalocean tends to be easier to use and more reliable. I'm ok with paying a little more given these factors...

Easier maybe, but my experience of their comparative reliability has been the complete opposite.

I don't have the real numbers in front of me, but some back-of-the-phone math says we'd save something like $640 a month for equivalent RAM, which is our big limiter.

DO is slicker, but it's not 8k/year slicker. I can do better things with that money.

Love seeing competition at work. Two times in a week, after the T-Mobile/Verizon rate plan wars :)

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