Below are answers to frequently asked questions about the differences between the previous system and the current system. To see charges for all DigitalOcean products with transfer limits, see Bandwidth Billing.
In June 2018, we made three major changes to bandwidth billing:
To reduce the chance that you exceed your free transfer limits, we pooled the transfer allowance at the account level instead of the Droplet level.
For example, say you have two $5 Droplets (1000GB/month allowance) that run all month. One Droplet transfers 1500GB of outbound data and the other transfers 100GB.
By pooling the data transfer allowance at the account level, we aim to give you the greatest flexibility in how you use it.
Starting in 2013, each Droplet was billed at $.02/GB for data transfer beyond its included allowance. We halved the price of excess data transfer from $.02/GB to $.01/GB.
For example, the cost of 1000GB of overage would be $20 under the old plan and is $10 under the new plan.
In the early days, we billed manually for excess transfer — and to be honest, it didn’t always happen. Now we can’t forget to bill for overage, but based on historical usage patterns, less than 1% of our users will exceed their pooled allowance.
Starting on 1 June 2018, outbound data transfer in excess of the pooled allowance will be tracked. Charges will appear on the 1 July invoice.
Based on our analysis of the historical usage patterns of our customers, less than one percent of users will exceed their pooled allowance.
To help you understand how this change may affect you, we will collect usage data and display projections about your transfer pool starting on 24 April and throughout the month of May on your account’s Billing page.
The first bandwidth bill under the new pricing will appear on the invoice for 1 July based on usage during the month of June.
Spaces has its own allowance separate from Droplets. Spaces transfer usage does not count towards Droplets transfer usage.
We do not offer prepaid services specific to data transfer. However, if you add credit to your account using PayPal, that balance will be automatically used toward data transfer charges as needed.
No, all accounts grandfathered will continue to be treated as such.
While we do not have immediate plans to adjust prices, we do plan to continue offering the most cost-effective data transfer in the industry.
We do not provide per-Droplet bandwidth usage metrics yet. In the meantime:
Businesses should consult their DigitalOcean account managers with questions or concerns.
DigitalOcean team accounts provide a dedicated invoice for the team’s resources and can be used to isolate client infrastructure. The data transfer pool for a team is based specifically on the Droplets in the team account and can be used to isolate clients.
Application and infrastructure monitoring services like New Relic and command line tools like vnStat can provide insight on a per-server basis.