I keep reading the 5/month plan mentioned - what happens when you exceed...

Question

As per the title, yeah 5/month is great, but no one mentions what happens when user exceeds bandwidth, or other things that I should be aware off?

Do users get a warning they are approaching their allowance? Will the server shut down ? Is there even an option to say “continue to run server and charge me” or “stop serving and don’t charge me”.

Yeah you can tell me go and RTFM, but it’s probably buried somewhere in the fine print…

Bobby · Accepted Answer

Hi there,

You can set up billing alerts via your DigitalOcean Control panel:

Go to: https://cloud.digitalocean.com/account/billing
Then scroll down to the Alerts section
Then click the Add Alert button
There you can set up automated billing alerts to receive emails when a specified usage amount is reached.

Regarding the bandwidth, outbound data transfer is shared between your Droplets each billing cycle. If the outbound transfer exceeds the amount included with your Droplets at end of the cycle, you will be charged $0.01 per excess gigabyte.

DigitalOcean includes this charge on your running invoice to let you know where you stand throughout the billing period. A spike in outbound transfer early in the month might display overage charges. However, if your Droplets accrue enough free data transfer by end of the billing period, there will not be overage charges.

For more information on how bandwidth charges you can take a look here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/billing/bandwidth/

Also for more information about bandwidth make sure to check out this calculator here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tools/bandwidth

Regards, Bobby

StrugglingDeveloper · Answer

I totally reject that answer as acceptable because it is on the side of digitalocean and not the customer’s. If the site has been hacked, digitalocean will continue charging the client to bankrupt him to death never mind the notifications, or is the customer going to be 24 hours on alert to check for all mails? If resources exceed the contract, everything should be shutdown or deactivated instead of overcharging the customers. In fact, this is the reason I have refused to sign up for digitalocean (or any provider like amazon or google who do the same thing). Some customers at amazon have committed suicide because they were slapped with a $200,000.00 bill as they made some coding mistake that was exploited by a hacker and they launched instances at his expense but Amazon happily let it go instead of immediately stopping it. It is unacceptable to say “we sent you a notification”, by the time he gets it, it may have gone to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Stay away from “pay as you use” policies. Demand a fixed flat monthly tariff.,

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I keep reading the 5/month plan mentioned - what happens when you exceed...

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