6-of-1, half a dozen of the other. Halving their prices on all current instances gives you the same specs at the same pricepoints.

I don't particularly care if they keep around a 512MB/$2.50 instance at that point.

I would, however, love that price point. It would be nice if I could run a few light-weight services on a VPS for $2.50 a month and then put my websites and other projects on a beefier VM.

I currently use Linode, but if DigitalOcean offered something at that pricepoint they would be getting $2.50 more from me a month than they currently do.

Pure guess, but I'd imagine that payment processor fees don't make it particularly profitable to offer price levels much lower than $5.

It's more about support costs if I were to guess. How many support tickets does it take for their profit on $25 a year to disappear? (if $2.50 a month is discounted to $25 a year).

I always like prgmr.com's stance on that. "Please note that these plans include $2.50 worth of support"

One thing that could help is having the ability to pre pay/load credits, so you could have a small discount that way

This is the same theory that NearlyFreeSpeech.net uses.

Linode / AWS already offer prepaid discounts.

Where Could i find that ? For Linode AND AWS Discount.

For Linode: https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/prepaid-billing-and-pay...

For AWS look at "reserved instances"

I'm not sure about Linode

Make it so you have to buy at least 2 months then

Or even pay up front for the year. Perfect for the hobbyist market. I'd probably buy four of them.

ARIN charges for IPv4 address allocation (https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html) and I read that below $5 a month it becomes unprofitable for hosting companies just because of the cost of leasing IP addresses. If your services can run on shared hosting there are a bunch of hosts for less than $1 a month around.

Charge a dollar for ipv4, or ipv6 is free?

Well, you get a 10 Gbps pipe with DO, while only 75 Mbps with Linode, lol!

We did an on-the-spot upgrade to that speed, the new floor for all plans will be 1000Mbps.

The blog should be updated now, might need a refresh to see:

https://blog.linode.com/2017/02/14/high-memory-instances-and...

That 10gbps is highly variable.

I use one of my DO instances as staging for file transfers. 2 days a month, I can barely get more than 30K/s from their sf data center to comcast. Other days, I get 5M/s. Their network is shitty.

And I don't think I'm being rate-limited; it's 1-2G transfer per day.

Keep in mind that bandwidth bottlenecks can happen on both sides - depending on the peering that is chosen between Comcast and DigitalOcean, there might be a significant oversubscription between two peering providers that's causing this.

DigitalOcean might happily be able to push 10g to their next hop, but beyond that things are significantly more outside of their control. This is mistaken as 'throttling' a lot, but is actually just ISPs not investing in peering to handle their peak demand. Similar to the Netflix and Cogent issue that happened a couple of years back.

At times, I can get better speeds by tunneling or proxying using a DigitalOcean Droplet and downloading something from overseas than I can doing it directly. The path taken from my home internet to the DO Droplet uses different peering than my path to Europe, and the speeds are faster overall even though it creates more hops.

Only new locations (FRA, SFO2) have the 10 Gbps pipe, and I am constantly able to push 2-5 Gbps through it in Frankfurt.

Appears to have been a typo. It now starts at 1000 Mbps on the smaller instances.

Linode is 40Gbps IN, 1Gbps out for the $5 instance. The 75Mbps was a misprint.

From Soh (Linode) in the comments [0]: "We’ve deliberated and brought the floor for all plans to have 1000Mbps. Thanks for your feedback!"

So it appears that 75Mbps was the initial speed but after some internal deliberation (possibly influenced by feedback), they raised it to 1000Mbps.

[0] https://blog.linode.com/2017/02/14/high-memory-instances-and...

Had not seen that, thanks!