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Droplet Features

Validated on 21 Jul 2025 • Last edited on 1 Aug 2025

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.

Droplet Plans

The Droplet plan you choose determines the amount of resources (like CPU, RAM, disk storage, and network bandwidth) allocated to your Droplet. You can choose shared or dedicated CPUs.

CPU Droplets

We offer the following CPU Droplet plan types:

Droplet Plan	CPU	vCPUs	Memory
Basic	Shared	1 - 8	1 - 32 GB RAM
General Purpose	Dedicated	2 - 48	8 - 240 GB RAM 4 GB RAM / vCPU
CPU-Optimized	Dedicated	2 - 48	4 - 120 GB 2 GB RAM / vCPU
Memory-Optimized	Dedicated	2 - 32	16 - 384 GB RAM 8 GB RAM / vCPU
Storage-Optimized	Dedicated	2 - 32	16 - 384 GB RAM 8 GB RAM / vCPU 146 - 225 GB SSD / vCPU

CPU Droplets can have Regular CPUs or Premium CPUs. You can choose between Intel and AMD for Premium CPUs. Droplets with Premium CPUs are guaranteed to use one of the latest two generations of CPUs we have. They also use NVMe SSDs and have higher network throughput speed.

Choosing the Right CPU Droplet Plan

In-depth comparisons of available CPU Droplet plans, including hardware and software, an explanation of shared CPU and dedicated CPU plans, and how to make a data-driven decision on which plan is best for your use case.

GPU Droplets

We offer GPU Droplets with the following hardware configurations:

NVIDIA GPU	H100	H100 (8x)	L40s	RTX 4000 Ada	RTX 6000 Ada
Size Slug	`gpu-h100x1-80gb`	`gpu-h100x8-640gb`	`gpu-l40sx1-48gb`	`gpu-4000adax1-20gb`	`gpu-6000adax1-48gb`
GPUs per Droplet	1	8	1	1	1
GPU Memory	80 GB	640 GB	48 GB	20 GB	48 GB
Droplet Memory	240 GiB	1,920 GiB	64 GiB	32 GiB	64 GiB
Droplet vCPUs	20	160	8	8	8
Boot Disk	720 GiB NVMe	2 TiB NVMe	500 GiB NVMe	500 GiB NVMe	500 GiB NVMe
Scratch Disk	5 TiB NVMe	40 TiB NVMe	None	None	None
Transfer Allowance	15 TB	60 TB	10 TB	10 TB	10 TB

AMD GPU	MI300X	MI300X (8x)	MI325X (8x)
Size Slug	`gpu-mi300x1-192gb`	`gpu-mi300x8-1536gb`	Available with contract
GPUs per Droplet	1	8	8
GPU Memory	192 GB	1,536 GB	2,048 GB
Droplet Memory	240 GiB	1,920 GiB	1,280 GiB
Droplet vCPUs	20	160	160
Boot Disk	720 GB	1,920 GB	720 GiB
Scratch Disk	5,120 GiB	40 TiB	40 TiB
Transfer Allowance	15,000 GiB	60,000 GiB	60,000 GiB

All GPU Droplets have a maximum bandwidth of 10 Gbps public and 25 Gbps private.

Like CPU Droplets, all GPU Droplets have a boot disk, which is a local, persistent disk on the Droplet to store data for software like the operating system and ML frameworks. Additionally, some GPU Droplets have a scratch disk, a local, non-persistent disk to store data for staging purposes, like inference and training. Non-GPU Droplets do not have a scratch disk.

Images

Linux Images

We support the following Linux distributions:

Ubuntu	Debian	CentOS	AlmaLinux	Rocky Linux	Fedora
25.04 x64 24.10 x64 24.04 (LTS) x64 22.04 (LTS) x64	12.0 x64	9 Stream x64 8 Stream x64	8.6 9	8 x64 9 x64	41 x64 42 x64

See the full list of Linux images for Droplets.

AI/ML-Ready Images

We provide AI/ML-ready images for NVIDIA and AMD GPU Droplets which have the necessary drivers and software preinstalled to use the GPUs.

Learn more about AI/ML-ready images.

Inference-Optimized Image

Our inference-optimized image for NVIDIA GPU Droplets is built for LLM setup and deployment. It includes Docker and vLLM, and has built-in support for:

Hugging Face model downloads
Multi-model (one, two, or four) concurrency: run one, two, or four models with customizable tensor parallelism settings to optimize hardware utilization
Speculative decoding, including the use of draft models
Special handling for FP8 quantization for efficient, low-precision inference
Prompt caching

It supports the following models:

GPU and model configuration	Supported models
H100x8 Single model	`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct` `meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct` `meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct` `deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B` Any custom model available on Hugging Face
H100x8 Two concurrent models	`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct` `meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct` `deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B`
H100x8 Four concurrent models	`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct` `meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct` `deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B` `meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-FP8-Speculative-Decoding`
H100x1	`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B` `meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-FP8` `mistralai/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407` `mistralai/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407-FP8`
RTX 400	`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-FP8`
L40S	`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B` `meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-FP8` `mistralai/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407` `mistralai/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407-FP8`
RTX 6000	`meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B` `meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-FP8` `mistralai/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407` `mistralai/Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407-FP8`

Learn more about our inference-optimized image.

Autoscale Pools

Droplet autoscale pools enable automatic horizontal scaling for a pool of Droplets based on resource utilization or a fixed size.

Integration with Other DigitalOcean Resources

Droplets integrate natively with other DigitalOcean products and features:

Tags are custom labels you apply to Droplets and other resources that have multiple uses: filtering, automatic inclusion in firewall rules and load balancer backend pools, and API call execution on multiple resources at once.
DigitalOcean Reserved IPs are additional static IPv4 and IPv6 addresses you can use to access a Droplet without replacing or changing the Droplet’s original public IP addresses.
DigitalOcean Volumes Block Storage are additional storage (in units called volumes) for your Droplets. You can move volumes between Droplets in the same region and increase the size of a volume without powering down the Droplet it’s attached to.

Volumes are most useful when you need more storage space but don’t need the additional processing power or memory that a larger Droplet would provide.
DigitalOcean Cloud Firewalls are a free, network-based, stateful firewall service for DigitalOcean Droplets. They block all traffic that isn’t expressly permitted by a rule.
DigitalOcean Load Balancers are a fully-managed, highly available load balancing service that distribute traffic to groups of Droplets.