How does hourly pricing work? All Droplets are billed hourly, up until a monthly cap. We have estimated that each month has about 672 hours (28 days). If you use your server for less than 672 hours during the month, you will be billed for each hour that you used it. If you use your server for more than 672 hours that month, you will be billed at the monthly cost, which is no greater than 672 hours.
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How DigitalOcean estimate my Droplet usage time? Isn’t it metered if I don’t access to server? Plus, is data transfer fee charged separately?
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Hello there,
DigitalOcean billing cycles are monthly only. Your account balance accrues over the course of the calendar month based on the cost of the resources you use. DigitalOcean is also required by law to apply taxes for certain countries. DigitalOcean automatically invoices and charges your account’s primary payment method on the first day of each month for the previous month’s usage, or partway through the month if you exceed your account’s usage threshold. You can read more about it here:
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/
The amount depends on the service/droplet you have and the network you use. Basically, in addition to your billing, you can be billed based on Bandwidth. Droplets include free outbound data transfer, starting at 1,000 GiB/month for the smallest plan. Excess data transfer is billed at $0.01/GiB. For example, the cost of 1,000 GiB of overage is $10. Inbound bandwidth to Droplets is always free. More about it here
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/billing/bandwidth/
Hope that this helps!
Hey friend!
This is a great question. Usage will be defined as the droplet existing. Halting usage will be destroying the droplet. If you only spin up the server to use for small amounts of time, you should treat the server as disposable and automate it’s creation. You can use snapshots to save data, and doctl [1] is a good tool to assist in basic automation (I’m thinking in terms of bash scripts).
[1] https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl
Jarland