DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean has no intro price and no renewal price: the listed price is what you keep paying. The cheapest Basic Droplet is $4/mo ($0.00595/hr), and the cheapest paid App Platform container is $5/mo. Droplets are billed per second with a 60-second minimum, capped at the flat monthly price, and there is no minimum term. Extra outbound bandwidth costs $0.01 per GiB on Droplets and $0.02 per GiB on App Platform. The terms say prices exclude tax unless stated, and the tax page says invoices are in US dollars.

The terms say you sign with DigitalOcean, LLC, and give its address at 105 Edgeview Drive, Broomfield, Colorado. The privacy policy names the same company and address as data controller. The About page says DigitalOcean was founded in 2012 and works remote-first. We didn't see a company registration number on the pages we read, or a separate company for EU customers.

A public status page tracks about 28 parts of the service, most of them broken out by region. It lists recent incidents, each with updates and a resolved status, and links to a full incident history. Separate SLA pages promise 99.99% monthly uptime per Droplet and 99.95% for App Platform, with service credits you claim by email.

Every account gets free ticket support, 24/7, with a stated response time under 24 hours. Paid plans shorten this: Developer ($24/mo) under 8 hours, Standard ($99/mo) under 2 hours with 24/7 live chat, and Premium ($999/mo) under 30 minutes with a Slack channel. Support is in English, and other languages are handled with translation tools. We didn't see phone support.

The terms and the pricing FAQ say plainly that fees are non-refundable, so there is no money-back period. You can cancel from your account settings or through support, and billing stops when you destroy resources or deactivate. The pricing page says you're invoiced on the first of each month for the previous month's usage. The terms allow price changes at any time by updating the pricing pages, with no fixed notice period unless a separate agreement says otherwise.

Droplet backups are a paid add-on you turn on yourself. Weekly backups cost 20% of the Droplet price and are kept for four weeks; daily backups cost 30% and are kept for seven days. Usage-based backups can run as often as every 4 hours, from $0.01 per GiB a month, kept for a period you choose. You can restore from the control panel, and we didn't see a stated restore fee. The docs say backups and snapshots can't be downloaded.

App Platform sets up HTTPS for your domain automatically and includes DDoS mitigation. On Droplets you install a free Let's Encrypt certificate yourself, and Cloud Firewalls are free. Account two-factor login works with an authenticator app or SMS, with backup codes. We didn't see malware scanning on the pages we read.

The docs list 16 data centres by city, including Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London in Europe, and you pick a region when you create a Droplet. A data processing agreement covers the GDPR, as an addendum to the terms. It relies on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, with EU standard contractual clauses as the fallback.

Every Droplet plan lists vCPUs, memory, SSD storage and monthly transfer as numbers. The $4 Basic Droplet has 1 vCPU, 512 MiB of memory, 10 GiB SSD and 500 GiB of transfer. App Platform plans list vCPU, memory and included transfer, and the limits page says each container has a 4 GiB temporary disk and no persistent volumes. We didn't see "unlimited" used for resources, only for team members.

You can cancel from your account settings, and we didn't see a fee for leaving. Backups and snapshots can't be downloaded, so the docs suggest copying your data off a Droplet with tools like rsync or SFTP. The terms ask you to export your data before closing, as DigitalOcean deletes it afterwards. DigitalOcean isn't a domain registrar, so there is no domain to transfer out.