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Comment by msbarnett | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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