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seanmavley

High Memory Droplets? No, create option for the poor lone devs

September 26, 2016 1k views
Storage Ubuntu 16.04

The introduction of Block Storage was amazing, as I could add as low as 1 Gig to my storage, extremely great for the poor developers.

When Memory storage was introduced, I thought it was gonna have a similar approach until I realized starting price is 120$ per month. That's insane, I think. If I had 120$ to shed in the first place, I would have signed on to a bigger droplet from day one.

At the moment, I wish to pay for only 512 MB of additional memory for my droplet. CPU can remain the same, everything else can remain the same, just 512 MB of memory.

Please think of the poor guys too.

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2 Answers
gparent September 26, 2016

In the end, DigitalOcean needs to run as an actual business. If it were profitable to offer those plans, they would have.

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  • seanmavley September 26, 2016

    You've given me 512 MB RAM, 1 Core, 20 Gig SSD for 5$ each month, letting me pay for 1.5 or 2$ for (per week or month) an extra 512 is not/won't be "profitable to offer those plans"?

    I knew someone would throw in the 'needs to run as business' but didn't think it'll come up soon.

    I'm not saying DO should go bankrupt, I'm just saying there're also opportunities for those of us on the other side of the fence

    By giving blocks options, the developer has the opportunity to rig their droplet in ways of their choice, depending on their needs.

    Someone might need 2 TB of Storage but only needs 2 Cores, whiles another might need 224 Gig of RAM but only 20 Gig SSD. Whichever side of the scale, the dev is still paying, which is revenue for DO whichever the direction is.

    Flexibility and options, that's all I'm saying.

    I'm in a similar situation now where I neither need more storage nor CPU power, rather more RAM, but I can't, and will have to move my ENTIRE system to higher specs just because of 512 RAM I'm in need of

    • gparent September 26, 2016

      What you're describing doesn't work the way you think it does.

      Hypervisor capacity planning is a huge part of what plans you're able to offer to your customers. In order to give you a cheaper 1 GB plan by not giving you CPU and disk, they would have to take that extra RAM off other droplets, so they're unable to sell that particular VM you just stole all the RAM from. Sure, it's revenue for DO - less revenue than before, which is no way to run a business.

      There's a certain price point where you don't take as many losses creating high capacity droplets. Presumably that's the price point that DigitalOcean decided on before coming out with the new plans.

      It's possible that things will change and it becomes profitable to do custom plans, but it doesn't seem likely any time soon.

      • truemetalofsteel July 18, 2017

        There's no reason a hosting company can't provide flexible RAM choices. You can make up hundred of reasons why that's infeasible or you can just do that, provided people will use that.

        • gparent July 18, 2017

          Not wanting to lose money is a great reason for a business not to offer a service, actually.

          • truemetalofsteel July 18, 2017

            True, why earn less money by providing specific option if you can earn more from users who would buy that as part of more expensive package?

            That would be the case until there is considerable amount of users who would buy RAM-only upgrade or none at all. If there's enough interest in that, I'm sure businesses would roll it out. Just as it has been with block storage.

          • gparent July 18, 2017

            Your implication that DigitalOcean is not offering those custom plans because they make more money by selling you resources you do not need is absurd.

            You seem confused about how hardware allocation works. It's not that they would make less money, it's that there's a very real possibility that they would LOSE money.

            Keep in mind that DigitalOcean already offers high memory droplets.

          • truemetalofsteel July 19, 2017

            Good morning there!

            True, I don't know shit about rack hardware.

            I do know, however, that I can buy extra RAM, plug it into my desktop and just increase the RAM slider on a VM that runs on my desktop OS.

            And being a software engineer I also know that people tend to overcomplicate things and tell how great the problem are and provide 10 reasons why it can't be implemented. And that usually sounds very credible. Until the other engineer just gets the thing done.

            Cheers.

          • gparent July 19, 2017

            Never did I suggest there were technical barriers to implementing this, only business ones. Note the very first part of your message, though: Purchase more RAM. You're suggesting that DO revisits their entire hypervisor planning to accommodate you.

            This is why you cannot compare the desktop and an enterprise spanning thousands of VMs.

  • seanmavley September 26, 2016
    [deleted]
sierracircle September 26, 2016

Hi @seanmavley I think its a great idea. I would certainly increase memory on some of my droplets if this feature was available.

Have you added this as a suggestion?

https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean?query=memory

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