Snapshot and Backup Roadmap

1. Offsite Snapshots and Backups Storage on Amazon Glacier

We’ve already begun the initial framework for storing all snapshots and backups on Amazon Glacier to ensure that there is a copy of each snapshot and backup that is stored on another provider. This provides an added layer of redundancy that is completely outside of DigitalOcean’s network, ensuring that a single failure will not lead to any dataloss for customers.

Snapshots and backups will begin syncing to Amazon Glacier on Tuesday and we will provide an update when the sync of all existing snapshots and backups are complete. All new snapshots and backups will be automatically synced starting Wednesday.

This will allow us to always pull snapshots and backups out of Glacier and make them available for customers if for any reason one of our NAS systems experience an issue.

2. Snapshot and Backup Downloads

Customers have already been requesting that we provide a way for them to directly download their snapshots and backups so they can store them locally and allow for data portability. We will be implementing this as soon as possible. While this may seem like a trivial item to add, the complexity in rolling out this feature is to ensure security in the rollout because data will need to be made available from the backend NAS systems (which are completely off of the public network currently).

3. Communication

As a startup, often times we develop rapidly and there are a lot of internal conversations that we have about the merits of particular features and their development. We try to push this communication back to customers through our UserVoice forum, but we also need to curate this conversation better to keep customers better informed of our overall product roadmap. To that end, we will be using our blog and updating more frequently not only with feature announcements, but also development updates to let everyone know what planned changes we are currently working on.

4. Backup Pricing

Part of being a startup is sometimes admitting when you’ve made a mistake, correcting it, and improving the overall service having learned from those issues. When we initially launched, we planned to offer pricing for bandwidth, snapshots, and backups; however we simply were more focused on developing the core functionality than introducing those pricing guidelines.

The main reason we are introducing pricing for backups and snapshots is to ensure that we can build out a robust backend storage solution, as well as pay for the costs for off-site backups which are $0.01 per GB and thus ensure customer data is safe and redundant with multiple providers at all times.

These pricing changes will go into effect June 1st, giving customers two months to adjust any of their service selections accordingly. The first time they will see an invoice item for backups will be on the July 1st invoice.

5. Snapshot Pricing

We will also be introducing pricing for snapshots to ensure that we can provide the level of service that customers expect, including data redundancy and offsite backups as well. The price for snapshots will be $0.02 per GB of snapshot storage. These rates will also go into effect as of June 1st, also giving customers two months to adjust their snapshot usage as they like without incurring any fees in the interval.