Inbound and outbound bandwidth is the same

Heya,

Just came across this answer and decided to write some general guidelines for anyone who comes across this in the future despite the old question.

Droplets include free outbound data transfer, starting at 500 GiB/month for the smallest plan. Bandwidth allowances are determined by the Droplet’s size and type.

Excess data transfer is billed at $0.01 per GiB. Inbound bandwidth to Droplets is always free. To calculate bandwidth costs for your Droplets and databases, use our Bandwidth Calculator.

Any data transfer sent by a Droplet using a public network interface will count against the transfer pool for that Droplet’s account. All IPv6 traffic uses the public interface. Data transfer between Droplets over the VPC network uses a private network interface. We do not bill for outbound data transfer that we determine is dropped by a DigitalOcean firewall rule.

In DigitalOcean, both inbound and outbound data transfer is counted towards your bandwidth usage. When you stream videos from 3rd party servers by proxying through your droplet, the data is technically “inbound” when it arrives at the droplet and then “outbound” when it leaves the droplet headed to its final destination. Therefore, it gets counted as outbound bandwidth.

The constant 4-15kb/s in/out bandwidth could be due to various reasons like system updates, the activity of installed applications, background tasks, or even the droplet communicating with the DigitalOcean’s metrics system for monitoring purposes.

Bandwidth usage is updated every 15 seconds and it’s visualized in droplet graphs accordingly. If you have recently changed to show full graphs, it should show the correct information. Despite this, if you feel the readings are off, please share more details so I can help you better.

For more detailed understanding on bandwidth billing and usage, I will recommend going through DigitalOcean Documentation on Bandwidth.

Hope that this helps!

Heya,

On top of what has already been mentioned I would like to add the following. In order to check the current follow these steps:

• Log in to your DigitalOcean Control Panel
• Then click on ‘Billing’
• Scroll a bit down until you get to the ‘Droplet transfer’ section
• There you will be able to see the Estimated Droplet Transfer Pool and the current status

In case this is helpful, here is how the usage works:

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

Hope that this helps!