DigitalOcean is a leading American company that provides reliable unmanaged web hosting services with data centers all over the world.
They have many products for cloud hosting solutions, and every product comes with a package of plans pricing. The best known is Droplets, their cloud VPS servers, starting at $4/month. Since 2026, Droplets are billed per second (with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01), and a monthly bill is capped at 672 hours, so you never pay more than the listed monthly price for a plan. If you go over your included transfer, extra outbound traffic costs $0.01 per GiB.
DigitalOcean Droplets Pricing
DigitalOcean droplets (cloud VPS servers) are Linux-based virtual machines (VMs) that run on virtualized hardware. When you add a droplet you are creating a new virtual server that you can employ.
In other words, the DigitalOcean droplets are cloud VPS servers that share the physical machine but come with their own resources such as vCPU cores, RAM, bandwidth, and so on.
These droplets are the best match for low – medium websites such as blogs, small-to-medium businesses, small online stores, CMS apps, and PHP.
Basic droplets come in three CPU options: Regular, Premium Intel, and Premium AMD.
Regular basic droplet pricing:
Regular basic droplets are the cheapest, starting at $4/month. For that you get 1 vCPU core, 512 MiB of RAM, 500 GiB of transfer bandwidth, and 10 GiB of SSD storage.
At the top end, a Regular droplet gives you 8 vCPU cores, 16 GiB of RAM, 6,000 GiB of transfer and 320 GiB of SSD storage for $96/month.
And for the 1 GB RAM plan, you get 1 core CPU, 1 TiB Bandwidth, and 25 GiB SSD disk. This plan costs $6/month.
Premium Intel droplet pricing:
If you want more powerful Intel CPUs with advanced NVMe SSD technology, there are premium Intel servers.
Back in 2023, DigitalOcean changed its Premium Intel lineup. The plans got a little more expensive, but each one now comes with more storage space.
The older Premium Intel plans were removed from the control panel, but you can still create them through the API or the doctl CLI with their old prices.
That route isn’t very beginner-friendly, though. If you create a Premium Intel server from the dashboard, you’ll get the newer plans and prices listed below.
DigitalOcean premium Intel droplets pricing starts at $8/month and offers 1GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 1 TiB transfer bandwidth, and 35 GiB NVMe SSD storage.
The biggest Premium Intel basic plan gives you 8 vCPUs, 32 GiB of memory, 10 TiB of transfer, and 640 GiB of NVMe SSD storage for $192 per month.
Premium AMD droplet pricing:
This package offers to host your application with an advanced AMD CPU on an advanced NVMe SSD storage space.
It works like the Premium Intel option with an AMD processor instead, but the plan sizes and prices aren’t identical. The AMD plans start a dollar cheaper and come with a bit less disk space.
The 1 GiB RAM plan on AMD costs $7 per month and comes with 1 vCPU, 1 TiB of bandwidth, and 25 GiB of NVMe SSD storage. The largest Premium AMD basic plan has 8 vCPUs, 32 GiB of RAM, 10 TiB of transfer and 400 GiB of NVMe storage for $168 per month.
Regular vs Intel and AMD Premium
- The Regular droplets come with a mix of first-generation or older Intel Xeon Scalable processors and AMD EPYC processors, plus standard SSD storage.
- The Premium Intel droplets come with second or third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and fast NVMe SSD storage.
- The Premium AMD droplets use newer AMD EPYC processors with faster memory (3,200 MHz versus 2,933 MHz on Premium Intel) and fast NVMe SSD storage.
The main differences are the CPU and the storage drive. The premium servers deliver more performance and faster loading, especially for demanding applications. For small blogs and websites, though, the difference is small.
| Comparison | Regular | AMD | Intel | Intel (API/CLI only) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | Intel/AMD | AMD | Intel | Intel |
| Processor type | 1st gen. or older | 2nd or 3rd gen. | 2nd or 3rd gen. | 2nd or 3rd gen. |
| Storage drive | SSD | NVMe SSD | NVMe SSD | NVMe SSD |
| 1 GiB Plan | $6/mo | $7/mo | $8/mo | $7/mo |
| Cheapest plan | $4/mo | $7/mo | $8/mo | $7/mo |
| Most expensive plan | $96/mo | $168/mo | $192/mo | $112/mo |
Conclusion: Which Is Best For you
DigitalOcean is one of the best known cloud hosting providers, and its pricing is easy to understand once you know the three CPU options.
If you are on a budget or want to create a simple website or blog, you can go with the regular plan. It’s quite enough to start with.
But if you want a more powerful server with the latest technology, you can go with the Premium Intel or AMD droplets.
Read also:
Install WordPress on DigitalOcean.
DigitalOcean vs Vultr vs Linode.
