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Comment by throwaway_98554 | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think the price increase is fair?

If anything I would expect it to go down as computation and memory get cheaper.

I don't just pay DO for servers, I'm paying them for a cohesive integrated UX, decent support (for the price), and nice hosted database and load balancer options. That's always been what separates DO from the rest of the market. Servers are cheaper elsewhere, that extra stuff is all pretty competitively priced.

All of those things are subject to the prices of people, which are nuts right now.

I also have deployments at hetzner and OVH and the management angle is day and night (although Hetzner is almost there now). Multiple different logins and dashboards by product, country, etc.

I'm sure some of it is just driven by being public as well. I'll keep paying them if they can keep those other factors great, but little things like wasting my time on the pricing table above are damaging the one thing that I really like about DO.

I’m not saying you don’t - but my experience has been different. In my experience Linode has customer service that is in a different league than DigitalOcean has ever provided. I’ve never gotten what I would call great, or perhaps memorably good, customer service from DigitalOcean. I haven’t gotten awful customer service either. It’s the kind I would expect from any turn key solution that doesn’t employ support agents who are already well versed in what they’re working on.

Because Digital Ocean is a company with employees and investors, not just an automated conglomeration of servers. A 20% increase in prices after 12 years of basically stable prices seems fair.

but aws ec2 price always go down

I just checked one of the node types and EC2 is about 20% more expensive, even after the price hikes. AWS may have more baked-in margin than DO. Also, I didn’t include Transfer costs in the cross-check, so AWS may be much more expensive.

Depending on your needs, AWS is hands down one of the most expensive ways to put workloads into the cloud.

At the same time it’s a bit difficult to compare them apples-to-apples. In my experience EC2 instances aren’t designed for reliability as much as they are designed to meet exactly what AWS can put on the invoice as being the value exchanged for money. I’m not bashing their design goals, they’re just different from “traditionally VPS-first” firms.

If you’re running not-huge On Demand instances you can definitely get much better performance for your dollar on something like Linode or DigitalOcean, OVH, Hetzner, etc. And then you can still some of the AWS services where they have much less comprehensive competition. IMHO, you can beat EC2 all day but feature-wise it’s extremely difficult to beat S3.

Seems like AWS has really only gone down in price on the pre-provisioned EC2 instances, not the on-demand. On-demand is more inline with what Digital Ocean provides.

not saying aws ec2 is cheaper. it's just that over the year, the prices are always going down. I can't recall the last time it went up.

I disagree, CPU performance per $ is getting cheaper. Increasing pricing on the $5 droplets by 20% is significant and their deceptive email is also an issue. I'm going to cancel my droplets.

One of the upsides of only being 50% cloud is that I get some perspective.

The cheaper, better, faster assumption is being challenged in most segments. Shipping costs have been crazy and eating margins for just-in-time delivery for some time. Containers are 5x-10x from China vs 2018, a tractor trailer costs $1400 to fill with diesel today in my region.

Also, commodities like storage aren’t getting cheaper.

It is not like hardware costs are the only costs. My electricity costs are going to be nearly doubling shortly. They could be seeing the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if employee retention/turnover is another issue they are facing.

Yeah, I thought this is surely to do with electricity prices. They have doubled or tripled in Europe recently.

Yes, the price of computation is going down, but the prices for real estate and electricity are going up, often way up. Computers use lots of electricity and sometimes the price of electricity over the lifetime is more than the cost of the machine. Gasoline prices don't track electricity prices in the short term, but eventually the prices of energy catch up with each other. They can't escape inflation.

Both the price of, and electricity consumption of computation goes down over time.

How much the consumption reduction counteracts the rise in electricity prices, I don't really know.

Inflation, and chip shortages interrupting their (presumably linear) asset lifecycle costs.

Possibly also gearing up for a sale, and keen to test the elasticity of the market.

Computation needs electricity, computers need maintenance, and the maintenance is done by people with salaries. People have to drive to work which uses gas. Parts of computers have to be shipped, which also needs gas.

Gas and electricity are going up.

You have no clue what you're talking about. Computation prices are not going down.

They're not getting cheaper

Is it getting cheaper? Pretty sure the chip situation is driving up prices.

People forget those rack servers still need a CPU to run everything and controllers for all the drives.

That, and the demand for cycles. That's the real shame these days. The new hotness is burning cycles just to show that that you did.

Everything from wages to electricity to real estate to the CPUs themselves have gotten more expensive.

Saying it's just computation and memory is ignoring 99% of what it takes to run that business.

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