Load Balancers Pricing

DigitalOcean Load Balancers are a fully-managed, highly available network 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.


Load balancers cost $12.00 per month for each node they contain.

Each additional node increases the load balancer’s maximum:

  • Requests per second by 10,000
  • Simultaneous connections by 10,000
  • New SSL connections per second by 250

You can add up to 100 nodes to a load balancer.

You can scaled load balancers up or down at any time to meet your performance needs. The more nodes a load balancer has, the more simultaneous connections and requests per second (RPS) it can maintain. The load balancer’s costs are prorated by the number of hours it runs at each size. The amount of hours it runs at each size will be displayed on a separate line in your invoice. You can resize a load balancer only once per minute.

Performance may vary depending on the load balancer’s workload. Using different protocols and package management settings will produce different results. Therefore, we cannot provide specific performance metrics for each load balancer size, and we strongly recommend that you run your own benchmarks to see what size works for your application’s specific needs.

There is no additional cost to use Let’s Encrypt with load balancers.

The maximum number of new SSL connections does not apply to load balancers configured for SSL passthrough.

Bandwidth

DigitalOcean Load Balancers by themselves don’t generate bandwidth charges; they are bandwidth neutral.

The public outbound traffic that originates from your resources and passes through the load balancer counts towards your bandwidth limit. In this scenario, the aggregated bandwidth is reported as part of the load balancer and not attributed to the individual resources behind it.