Introducing new DigitalOcean Load Balancers for higher-scale business applications

UPDATE: As of July 1, 2022, Load Balancer pricing has changed. Visit DigitalOcean’s pricing page for current plans.

Many of our largest customers run successful, high-traffic web and mobile apps, which use load balancers to spread traffic across compute resources. DigitalOcean provides a managed Load Balancer that thousands of our customers run in front of their Droplet VMs. Other customers pair our Load Balancers in conjunction with our easy-to-use managed Kubernetes service.

As more businesses have realized they could save huge sums of money by migrating their bandwidth-intensive apps to DigitalOcean, we’ve heard some say that they need more robust, scalable load balancers than the ones we provide for just $10 per month (now $12/month).

That’s why we’re introducing more scalable Load Balancer plans today.

Our new ‘Medium’ Load Balancer is a great fit for transaction-driven sites or services with moderate traffic, and costs just $30 per month. Our ‘Large’ Load Balancer is ideal for higher-traffic sites or API endpoints, and costs $60 per month. Users of our existing $10 per month Load Balancer will find that these are now classified as ‘Small’.

To get a sense of how these Load Balancer options compare, here’s an example of a synthetic HTTPS workload’s performance. The Small Load Balancer maxes out at ~8.3k RPS (requests per second); Medium at 23.9k RPS; and Large at ~41.9k RPS. Your own workloads, which might feature different protocols and packet sizes, will produce different results.

Bunnyshell, which describes itself as a second-generation cloud infrastructure solution with which to build and run your app or website, helped us test the new sizes. Here’s what their CEO had to say:

“The new DigitalOcean Load Balancers are just amazing! The Large Load Balancer helped us deliver 100% uptime in high traffic periods like Black Friday to over 2000 e-commerce customers.”
- Alin Dobra - CEO Bunnyshell

To get started with the new Load Balancers, you can sign into the DigitalOcean control panel, or use our CLI, API, or extensions like our Terraform provider to create them programmatically. You might also provision a Load Balancer specifically for use with DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

Visit our product documentation page to know more about our Load Balancers. At this time, you can’t resize an existing Load Balancer, but we’re intending to introduce this ability early next year.

If you have any feedback or questions, please leave us a comment.

Happy coding!
Rafael Rosa,
Senior Product Manager