In the billing FAQ there is this statement: If you use your server for less than 672 hours during the month, you will be billed for each hour that you used it.
My question is: what constitutes use? Is this just how long the droplet is active or is it time you exceed some cpu/ram usage?
Sorry if this is a super obvious question!
Thanks.
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.
Want to learn more? Join the DigitalOcean Community!
Join our DigitalOcean community of over a million developers for free! Get help and share knowledge in Q&A, subscribe to topics of interest, and get courses and tools that will help you grow as a developer and scale your project or business.
Billing is charged hourly, so that’s what use is. So if you have a droplet up for 600 hours, you’ll be charged for 600 hours. This goes all the way up to the monthly cap of 672 hours, at which point you’ll be charged the monthly cost – even if you use 744 hours (that’s 31 days). Basically, if you keep your droplet up for over 672 hours, you’re essentially saving money as you’re not charged past that amount of hours; you’re charged the monthly cost (28 days). So you get three days for free during months with 31 days.
The droplet needs to be destroyed for you not to be charged. So even if you power it down, it’s still using up time.
Deploying a droplet any time, even just for five minutes, will cost the hour.
As noted in the FAQ at the bottom of the pricing page the 512MB droplet rate is $0.0074 which accounts for the difference you are seeing. The total cost of your droplet for the month is calculated based on this and rounded to the nearest cent.