back to article DigitalOcean tries to take sting out of price hike with $4 VM

DigitalOcean attempted to lessen the sting of higher prices this week by announcing a cut-rate instance aimed at developers and hobbyists. The $4-a-month droplet — what the infrastructure-as-a-service outfit calls its virtual machines — pairs a single virtual CPU with 512 MB of memory, 10 GB of SSD storage, and 500 GB a month …

  1. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Also cut

    DigitalOcean's abuse desk has been reduced to an unhelpful bot. That's not exactly helping their image of being a cheap place to launch network attacks.

    Expect connectivity to evaporate soon. People are already creating lists of their IP addresses pre-formatted for different types of firewalls and gateways.

    1. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

      Re: Also cut

      Much like with Linode, the only traffic I get from DigitalOcean is attempted intrusions. Thems be the facts.

      1. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Also cut

        That's not really surprising, given that these are hosting locations, not residential users. Yes, some people may VPN through these, but overeager blocking means it's difficult to do that without seeing a lot of captchas or people who block altogether. How many packets do you get from other places that primarily expect inbound connections? For my services, I don't see much normal traffic coming from AWS or CloudFlare either, but they're obviously not just a haven for spammers.

        1. VoiceOfTruth Silver badge

          Re: Also cut

          I get a few (very few) attempts from AWS. I reported a couple of cases to AWS. One they followed up on diligently, asking for timezone info for my logs. The other I reported... was AWS Security Scanner. They are doing pre-emptive scanning. I have no problem with that. They acknowledged it.

          What I see from DO and Linode is quite a few SMTP auth attempts (not just spam - a tiny amount of that which isn't worth my time to worry about), and web scanning looking for known misconfigurations and should-not-be-visible config files. These I put down to being badly secured instances rather than actual crackers running their stuff. I could be wrong about that. I did report one case to DO, and they replied that they notified their customer.

  2. thejoelr

    Poor execution of price hike.

    I got the email yesterday and it really annoyed me that they refused to just show the price changes compared to old prices.. or even process my account and calculate the new prices. Sure, they are depending on me to be lazy and just accept the change, but I'm sort of motivated to dig deeper now. I don't know about everyone else, but I'm totally on there because of the low price for my personal projects and a reasonably close location for low lag. If they cleaned up their image as a host for all kinds of shady stuff, I'd agree more that they have business clients who want the best. Using them has subjected me to mass blocks of IP space by various services. If they're looking to shed customers, this is how you do it.

  3. Lon24

    Pi in the Sky

    If you are lucky enough to snag a RPi4 for £54 you get 4Gb RAM, 4 cores and for say an extra £25 maybe 240GB SSD. Less if you can get the VAT back. Enough to run a decent headless LAMP server. That's all you need for small scale 'private' development. If you want to 'sky' it then even if your decent ISP hasn't given you a fixed IPv4 - you can use Cloudflare to proxy your IPv6 connection to the world for free.

    For me the bottom has already dropped out of the droplet market. And what serious 'developer' doesn't already have a few spare RPis in their drawer ;-)

    Spinning up a VM on your laptop costs even less.

    1. l8gravely

      Re: Pi in the Sky

      That's a good plan, but how many people support IPv6 properly? And if you want to host your own email server, it's also getting difficult. I was at Digital Ocean and they were fine, until they got blocked on all the spam lists. So I moved to Linode and I've been quite happy there.

      But moving my main domain to an IPv6 only service just wouldn't work out well, too many systems and sites don't support it well enough yet.

      1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

        Re: Pi in the Sky

        But moving my main domain to an IPv6 only service just wouldn't work out well, too many systems and sites don't support it well enough yet.

        Mythic Beasts have had IPv6 only hosting with IPv4 proxying for years. Worth a look.

        Full disclosure: just a happy customer, no financial connection.

  4. Arthur the cat Silver badge

    DO are dropping FreeBSD as well

    It's a niche market admittedly, but DO are going to stop supporting FreeBSD as a standard OS.

  5. sten2012

    As much as I like DO, their service offerings are very limited compared to the bigger competitors and pricing was definitely what made them attractive.

    Don't get me wrong there were cheaper, but it was a good compromise point.

    Now I'm probably going to split across AWS (if I'm paying more anyway) and the cheaper providers. I suspect I'm not the only one that will move that way, and also suspect their customers, even the SMB's are much less locked in and sticky than azure, aws, Google cloud customers are.

    Also woo. It frees me up to use lambda and equivalents.

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