Please explain me how Bandwidth Charges works

Hey there!

Bandwidth for droplets is pooled. That means that any droplets you create adds the droplet’s plan amount to your bandwidth pool. However when you create any droplet you don’t get that full bandwidth when it is created. The bandwidth is allocated across the full month. In your post you mentioned a 4TB droplet. As the 4TB is allocated across the month and not all at once, you would want to make sure you keep your bandwidth usage below the amount provided each hour. Droplets are billed per hour up to a maximum of 672 hours per month (28 days multiplied by 24 hours). For every hour the Droplet exists during the month, whether it’s powered on or not, it will earn 1/672 of its total allowance up to that limit. Once it’s been active for 672 hours, it has reached its full bandwidth allowance.

I’d recommend looking at our Pricing Calculator and our Bandwidth Docs for more info.

Hope it helps! Nate

Hello there,

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.

You can monitor the usage and set an alarm if the usage exceeds 1000GiB so you can be aware of the extra costs that may occur.

These docs will help you to create a monitoring alert. DigitalOcean Monitoring is a free, opt-in service that gathers metrics about Droplet-level resource utilization. It provides additional Droplet graphs and supports configurable metrics alert policies with integrated email Slack notifications to help you track the operational health of your infrastructure.

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/monitoring/how-to/set-up-alerts/

You can also check our Bandwidth calculator which is a tool to help calculate and explain bandwidth allowances for Droplets on DigitalOcean. For more info, see our bandwidth billing docs.

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

Regards