Why DigitalOcean Load Balancing service is so expensive?

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…)

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.

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.