Why DigitalOcean Load Balancing service is so expensive?

Any reason why the LB does not allow setting of a floating IP or even a CNAME to ensure updates to the infrastructure don’t end up requiring a DNS update ?

Any reason why the LB does not allow setting of a floating IP or even a CNAME to ensure updates to the infrastructure don’t end up requiring a DNS update ?

There are a few reasons why a DO load balancer is more expensive than a $5 droplet…

• DO load balaners include all bandwidth that passes through them in the $20 cost.

• DO load balancers are a managed service. Our team manages the infrastructure required to ensure they work properly and are stable.

Creating your own load balancers is absolutely an option if you are willing to trade off the lower cost for the higher effort of installing, configuring, monitoring, and managing your load balancer and don’t expect your bandwidth use to go beyond what is included with your droplets.

Don’t know what do you mean by “network load balancer”. You are using vague terminology with no reference.

I know this is an old thread, but the Nginx LB and the DO LB are not apples to apples. The DO LB is a network/cloud LB, operating at the third and/or fourth layer of the OSI Reference Model. The Nginx LB would be operating at the application level, a significant difference in capabilities and use cases (at least in a production environemnt for the latter)

https://www.nginx.com/resources/glossary/layer-4-load-balancing/

Since I arrived here from Google Search and it is the first result I hit, I wanted to add an update for anyone coming here too.

The cost of this service is 1/2 the cost it was previously and is only $10 a month per load balancer node.

Additionally, all traffic is free and each load balancer node can handle 10,000 connections at a time.

I would argue it may make sense to utilize this as a an initial ingress load balancer and then add your own application load balancer on top as needed.

¡Hi @kyawkyawsoezhu ! I think the load balancer cost is “the just price for the just service”. With Nginx you need make all manually. The load balancer is automatic. I think for critical cases the automatization is all you need.

Digital Ocean load balancer is the product for your “enterprise” products or SAAS.

Tyler here, Product Manager for Load Balancers. I’d also add to Ryan’s answer that as part of the managed Load Balancer service, it’s also a redundant and highly available service whereas your single $5 Droplet could go down, causing your backend Droplets to also become unavailable.

If this isn’t crucial to your application, along with some of the other features, you’re right that a custom solution on your own Droplet may be a good fit too.

Keep a look out for some new improvements to the service very shortly! (sooner rather than later…)