Virtual machines for every use case
Get dependable uptime with our 99.99% SLA, simple security tools, and predictable pricing with DigitalOcean's virtual machines, called Droplets.
Private Droplets are now generally available - no public IP, no rearchitecting, same price
Eliminate firewall drift and ace your security audits with Private Droplets, compute instances architecturally isolated from the public internet.
Comprehensive, cost-effective cloud computing
Easily deploy and manage Droplets
Interact with your Droplets how you want. Our intuitive UI, CLI, API, and Terraform Provider make it simple to manage your virtual machines.
Reliably scale as demand shifts
Resize a Droplet or scale horizontally with many of them. Deploy across globally distributed data centers each with our 99.99% uptime SLA.
Build, monitor, and secure your apps for less
Get exceptional bandwidth pricing and 500 GiB per month of outbound data transfer—plus monitoring and firewalls—for free with every Droplet.
Simple enough for any user, powerful enough for fast-growing businesses
Basic
For simple applications
Low-traffic web servers
Blogs and forums
Small databases
General Purpose
For critical apps
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
E-commerce sites
High-traffic web servers
Memory-Optimized
For RAM-Intensive apps
High-performance DBs
In-memory caches
Real-time data processing
CPU-Optimized
For CPU-intensive apps
Media streaming
Data analytics
Batch processing
Storage-Optimized
For extra large apps
NoSQL databases
Monitoring software
Other data warehouses
GPU
For AI/ML workloads
AI/ML training
High performance computing (HPC)
Graphics and video rendering
Join the many businesses saving up to 50% or more with DigitalOcean
See what you can save
Pay-as-you-go or monthly pricing mean your bill is never a surprise.
Basic virtual machine costs
Easy, fast, and flexible compute built for a range of needs.
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GCP
Azure
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Monitoring
Collect metrics on visibility, monitor Droplet performance, and get alerts when problems arise in your infra—at no additional cost.
Cloud Firewalls
Easily help secure your infrastructure with free Cloud Firewalls and define what services are visible on your Droplets. Perfect for staging and production deployments.
Team management
Securely and efficiently collaborate on projects with unlimited users, get two-factor authentication, and have all of your projects on a single bill.
Backups
Snapshots
Snapshots are on-demand disk images of your Droplets that you can keep indefinitely and use them to create new Droplets.
Volumes Block Storage
Attach secure and scalable SSD-based Block Storage to your Droplet when you need more storage space and not the additional processing power that a larger, more expensive Droplet might provide.
Spaces Object Storage
Store and deliver vast amounts of content with S3-compatible Spaces Object Storage with a built-in CDN to minimize page load times, improve performance, and reduce bandwidth and infrastructure costs.
Load Balancers
Distribute incoming traffic across a group of Droplets and increase your application's availability with Load Balancers—a highly available, fully managed service.
Reserved IPs
Assign static IPs to your Droplets for seamless traffic redirection within the same data center. Reserved IPv6 ensures address stability across reboots and rebuilds, plus you can bring your own IPs to preserve trust.
When we tried Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, we moved a workflow that was in AWS, and with the Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets our workloads got faster by several hours and we saved $2000 a month with DigitalOcean.
Kenneth Kinion,
Managing Director, Validin
DigitalOcean was super easy to understand and use, and instead of having to focus on correctly configuring everything, we were able to spend our time on writing code.
Patrick Wingo,
Head of Product
One of the reasons we've been able to grow as quickly as we have is because of how scalable everything is and how easy it is to add new features on our DigitalOcean platform. We use every single one of your products now.
Tim Osborne,
CTO
Frequently asked questions about DigitalOcean Droplets
What is a DigitalOcean Droplet?
A DigitalOcean Droplet is a Linux-based virtual machine (VM) that runs on top of virtualized hardware. Each Droplet is a new server you can use, either as a standalone server or as part of a larger cloud infrastructure. They are designed to be simple, scalable, and developer-friendly.
What is the difference between a Droplet and a VPS?
A Droplet is DigitalOcean's brand name for a virtual private server (VPS). Essentially, they are the same thing. A VPS is a virtualized server that mimics a dedicated physical server, providing you with your own set of resources and a dedicated operating system.
Is a Droplet a form of IaaS or PaaS?
DigitalOcean Droplets are a form of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). This means you are provided with the virtualized hardware (computing, storage, and networking) and you are responsible for managing the operating system, applications, and data.
What operating systems can I run on a Droplet?
You can choose from a variety of popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and CoreOS. You can also use pre-configured 1-Click Apps for LAMP, Docker, WordPress, and more.
Do Droplets come with a dedicated IP address?
By default, each Droplet you create comes with its own public IPv4 address. You can also assign Floating IPs to your Droplets for high availability. For Bundled Plans, a public IPv4 is included at no extra cost. Public IPv4 addresses for Droplets with v5 configurations are billed separately from the v5 configuration and appear as their own line item on your invoice. The introductory line-item price is currently $0.00/hour, but is subject to change in accordance with the DigitalOcean Terms of Service. You can also create a Private Droplet, which isn't assigned a public IP address, so there's no IPv4 line item on your bill. This is a good fit for workloads that don't need to be reachable from the public internet, which keeps them more secure.
What kind of storage do Droplets use?
All Droplets use high-performance Solid State Drives (SSDs) for storage. This ensures fast disk I/O, which is crucial for the performance of your applications. For additional storage, you can use DigitalOcean Volumes Block Storage.
How much bandwidth is included with each Droplet?
Each Droplet includes a generous amount of free outbound data transfer. The specific amount depends on the Droplet plan you choose, starting from 500 GiB/month. Inbound bandwidth is always free.
How much does a DigitalOcean Droplet cost?
DigitalOcean Droplets are available at a variety of price points. Bundled Plans start from as low as $4 per month, with pricing based on the amount of RAM, CPU, SSD storage, and bandwidth included in your plan. v5 Droplets are priced hourly based on the resources you configure.
How am I billed for Droplets?
Bundled Plan and v5 Droplets are both billed on a per-second basis, with a 60-second minimum. Bundled Plans have a monthly cap, so you'll never pay more than the flat monthly price for that plan. v5 Droplets are billed on actual hours used each month and are not capped at 672 hours. Learn more about v5 Droplet pricing.
Is there a free trial for DigitalOcean Droplets?
DigitalOcean often provides promotional credits for new users, which can be used to try out Droplets and other services for free. Check the DigitalOcean website for the latest offers.
What can I use a DigitalOcean Droplet for?
Droplets are incredibly versatile and can be used for a wide range of applications, including:
- Hosting websites and web applications (e.g., WordPress, Node.js, Python)
- Development and testing environments
- Databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB)
- CI/CD pipelines
- VPN and proxy servers
- Game servers
- Machine Learning and AI applications (with GPU-optimized Droplets)
Are Droplets suitable for e-commerce websites?
Yes, Droplets are a popular choice for hosting e-commerce websites. They provide the performance, scalability, and security needed to run online stores of all sizes.
How does DigitalOcean Droplets compare to AWS EC2?
DigitalOcean Droplets are often praised for their simplicity and developer-friendly interface, making them a great choice for individuals and small to medium-sized businesses. AWS EC2 offers a wider range of instance types and services, which can be more suitable for large enterprises with complex requirements. In terms of pricing, DigitalOcean is generally more affordable for comparable resources.
What is the difference between DigitalOcean Droplets and Google Compute Engine?
Similar to the comparison with AWS, Google Compute Engine (GCE) is a more enterprise-focused platform with a vast array of services. DigitalOcean Droplets are known for their straightforward pricing and ease of use, which makes them a popular choice for developers and startups.
How do I create a Droplet?
Creating a Droplet is a quick and easy process. You can create a new Droplet from the DigitalOcean control panel in just a few clicks. Simply choose your operating system, Droplet plan, and datacenter region, and your new server will be up and running in under a minute.
How do I connect to my Droplet?
You can connect to your Droplet using SSH (Secure Shell). You will need to use an SSH client and the root password or an SSH key to log in to your server.
Does DigitalOcean offer managed Droplets?
DigitalOcean's core Droplet offering is unmanaged, which means you are responsible for managing the server. However, DigitalOcean offers a Managed Kubernetes service for containerized applications, and you can find managed hosting providers that specialize in managing DigitalOcean infrastructure.
Where are DigitalOcean's datacenters located?
DigitalOcean has data centers in multiple locations around the world, including San Francisco, Richmond, NYC, Kansas City, Atlanta, Toronto, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Bangalore, Singapore, and Sydney. This allows you to choose a datacenter that is closest to your target audience for lower latency.
Can I get a Droplet with a server in the UK?
Yes, you can create a Droplet in the London (UK) datacenter. This is an excellent choice for businesses and developers who need to serve customers in the United Kingdom and Europe.
Are there any datacenter options in India?
Yes, DigitalOcean has a datacenter in Bangalore, India. This is ideal for serving the rapidly growing Indian market and the surrounding regions.
What are v5 Droplets?
v5 droplets are purpose built to deliver higher performance for demanding workloads such as compute-intensive agentic AI platforms, AI/ML tools, batch and transcoding, high-traffic distributed applications, and high-throughput pipelines. v5 Droplets deliver up to 30% higher performance per core than our previous-generation Droplets (based on DigitalOcean internal testing).
What workloads are v5 Droplets designed to support?
More teams are building AI applications, agent platforms, and high-traffic products on DigitalOcean than ever before, and those workloads demand higher performance. They need faster cores, flexible memory ratios, and compute configurations that meet their workload needs. v5 droplets are built for exactly this and support large-scale, high-throughput services, transactional workloads, high-traffic web apps and APIs, bursty data pipelines and background workers, agentic platforms and AI/ML tooling. Customers can choose Shared Droplets (s5) for bursty, variable work that doesn't need a full core, so they pay only for the compute they use, or General purpose Droplets (g5) for guaranteed, dedicated CPU, with memory ratios from 2x to 8x per vCPU, so a database workload gets the higher RAM it needs and a build server doesn't pay for memory it never touches.
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