Hi,
Why is it the same price to upgrade my CPU/RAM as it is to upgrade the CPU/RAM/SSD? I would think the option to upgrade only the CPU/RAM would be cheaper than the option to upgrade everything.
When it comes to resizing, the pricing is the same as you have the option. You'd need to pick the one that meets your specific needs. The two options may appear the same, though they are different.
When resizing CPU and RAM Only, you can scale up or down. You can start with 512MB and scale up to 1GB, then back down to 512MB. You can scale from 512MB to 8GB and then down to 2GB. There's more freedom when it comes to this specific option. You do sacrifice disk space though.
When resizing Disk, CPU, and RAM, you do not have the ability to scale down, only up. This is due to the disk resize that takes place. Resizing the disk up is safe, though resizing down, not so much. With this option, if you scale from 512MB to 1GB, your stuck with 1GB and can not scale back down to the 512MB (because of the disk resize). If you scale from 512MB to 8GB, you're stuck at 8GB (again, due to the resizing of the disk). This one offers a little less flexibility, but provides you with the increased disk space.
You can, however, mix the two.
If you start with a 512MB and you're absolutely sure you need to full deal, you can upgrade Disk, CPU and RAM to 1GB. From there, if you don't need disk but you do need resources, you can scale only the CPU and RAM to 2GB, 4GB, etc and then back down to 1GB.
There's a lot of options, though it all boils down to what you specifically need. Some applications don't need the Disk as much as they do the CPU and RAM, so there's an option for that. Some need a mix of both, and others only need the full deal.
Thanks for the explanation. I hope you understand where I am coming from though. It is the same price to upgrade to the same droplet with 64GB of Ram/20 cores/ 640GB SSD as it is to upgrade RAM/CPU only to the plan with 64GB of RAM/20 cores with still the original 30GB of SSD I have. DigitalOcean doesn't have to reserve the 640GB of SSD, even though we are still technically paying for it (same price as to upgrade).
I can also see how it makes sense to have to power down the droplet for the resize with the disk, but there shouldn't be downtime to resize with RAM/CPU only.
I happen to have upgraded from a 4GB, 2 vCPU, 80GB droplet to the 8GB, 4 vCPU, 160GB droplet configuration and immediately noticed an impact on performance . . . but . . .it's not what was expected. My first instinct was to take a look at what changed with the CPUs and sure enough the CPU changed from Intel(R) Xeon(R) e5-2650 v4 @ 2.20ghz to Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650L v3 @ 1.80GHz. My guess is that you are actually getting slower processors when opt for the same price configuration with larger storage. I am yet to test whether the vCPU option without the storage upgrade preserves the faster processor.
So in essense, they threw in 'free' double storage and exchanged two race horses for 4 donkeys.