Droplets

DigitalOcean Droplets are Linux-based virtual machines (VMs) that run on top of virtualized hardware. Each Droplet you create is a new server you can use, either standalone or as part of a larger, cloud-based infrastructure.

Plans and Pricing

We offer five different kinds of Droplet plans: one shared CPU plan and four dedicated CPU plans.

Basic Droplets come in Regular and Premium versions. Premium Droplets are guaranteed to use the newest CPUs we have and NVMe SSDs.

Learn more about shared CPU vs. dedicated CPU, CPU details for Premium Droplets, and the best use cases for each kind of plan in Choosing the Right Droplet Plan. You can view all available Droplet plans on the pricing page.

Droplets are billed hourly with a minimum charge of one hour. If you create a Droplet and destroy it less than an hour later, you will still be charged the minimum charge.

Note

You are still billed for Droplets that are powered off because the compute resources for the Droplet stay reserved on the hypervisor, even when they are not in use. To end billing, destroy the Droplet.

Bandwidth

Each Droplet includes free outbound data transfer, starting at 1000 GiB/month and scaling up. Outbound data transfer is shared between all Droplets each billing cycle. Additional transfer is billed at $0.01 per GiB, but most users don’t exceed the amount included with their Droplets.

You can view your accumulated monthly transfer allowance on your account’s billing page in the Droplet transfer section. For an in-depth description of how data transfer accrual works, read our detailed bandwidth billing page.

Regional Availability

Basic Droplets are available in all regions. Most other Droplet plans are available in all regions. Learn more in the regional availability matrix.

Due to limited capacity, NYC2, AMS2, SFO1, and SFO2 are currently disabled for users who don’t have resources in those regions already. Basic plans larger than 48 GB of RAM and all optimized plans are unavailable in these regions.

Features

Linux and Container Distributions

We support the following Linux distributions:

We support the following container distributions:

Tags

Tags are custom labels you apply to Droplets that have multiple uses:

• Filtering. Tagging multiple Droplets with the same label lets you organize your resources and view a filtered list of Droplets that share that particular tag.

• Automatic inclusion in firewall rules and load balancer backend pools. Automatically include Droplets in a firewall or load balancer configuration by tag, minimizing administration overhead when adding new Droplets to your infrastructure.

• API call execution on multiple Droplets at once. Initiate an action across all Droplets with the same tag using the DigitalOcean API. Identifying groups of Droplets and administering all of them at once reduces the time required to manage resources.

Floating IPs

DigitalOcean Floating IPs are publicly-accessible static IP addresses that you can assign to Droplets. A floating IP provides an additional static address you can use to access a Droplet without replacing or changing the Droplet’s original public IP address.

Block Storage Volumes

DigitalOcean Block Storage is a flexible, convenient way of managing additional storage (in units called volumes) for your Droplets. Volumes are independent resources that you can move between Droplets within the same region. You can increase the size of a volume without powering down the Droplet it’s attached to. They’re most useful when you need more storage space but don’t need the additional processing power or memory that a larger Droplet would provide,

Firewalls

DigitalOcean Cloud Firewalls are a free, network-based, stateful firewall service for your DigitalOcean Droplets. They block all traffic that isn’t expressly permitted by a rule. You can define the Droplets protected by a firewall individually or by using tags.

Load Balancers

DigitalOcean Load Balancers are a fully-managed, highly available load balancing service. Load balancers distribute traffic to groups of Droplets, which decouples the overall health of a backend service from the health of a single server to ensure that your services stay online.

Limits

• Some Droplet network traffic is restricted to help prevent malicious actions, like reflected DDoS attacks. We know these restrictions also prevent functionality like configuring direct server return and using Droplets as routers and site-to-site VPN gateways. Future changes to our network will support this functionality. Until then, some workarounds include using a VPN mesh network or overlay network.

  The following types of traffic are restricted:

  • TCP and UDP traffic on port 11211 inbound from external networks (due to the Memcached amplification attacks in March 2018).

  • Multicast traffic.

  • Traffic not matching a Droplet’s IP address/MAC address.

  • SMTP via Floating IPs and IPv6.

• Droplets have a maximum network throughput limit of 2 Gbps.

• By default, users can create up to 100 volumes and up to a total of 16 TiB of disk space per region. You can contact our support team to request an increase. You can attach a maximum of 7 volumes to any one node or Droplet, and this limit cannot be changed.

• You can’t create more than 10 Droplets at the same time using the control panel or the API.

• SMTP port 25 is blocked on all Droplets for some new accounts to prevent spam and other abuses of our platform. We recommend against running your own mail server in favor of using a dedicated email deliverability platform (such as Sendgrid and Mailgun), which are better at handling deliverability factors like IP reputation.

• /proc/cpuinfo shows your Droplet plan, either DO-Premium or DO-Regular. You can see which processors each plan uses in the Plans and Pricing section of this page.

• Root password resets are not available for operating systems with internally-managed passwords, including FreeBSD, Fedora, and RancherOS.

Known Issues

• Due to our network design, traceroute diagnostics between Droplets may display 100% packet loss during the last two hops. The packet loss is expected and does not have any impact on the connectivity between Droplets.

Latest Updates

8 December 2021

• Rocky Linux 8.5 x64 (rockylinux-8-x64) base image is now available in the control panel and via the API.

15 November 2021

• The Droplet Console now supports running the SSH daemon, sshd, on a custom port. Previously, it required sshd to listen on port 22.

9 August 2021

• The Droplet Console is now in General Availability.

• Released v1.63.0 of doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI. This release includes a number of new features:

  • The database firewall sub-commands now support apps as trusted sources
  • New monitoring alert sub-commands for creating and managing alert policies
  • The --droplet-agent flag was added to the compute droplet create sub-command to optionally disable installing the agent for the Droplet web console

For more information, see all Droplets release notes.