Correct me if I am wrong, but if you enable this option when you make a droplet a popup comes up and tells you it will cost 20% of the droplet's fees per month. This isn't news to me as I don't use it because I have such a small amount that I pull it down to my own machine.

You are not wrong. What is newsworthy is that they are going to begin actually collecting that 20% which they have not been actually charging for in the past. This is more of a heads up for those that see an increase in their monthly bill/charge.

agree this is nuts. EC2 always an option

It's an option for people who want the convenience. DO has free snapshots and you can roll your own backup system anyway.

If their original prices were 20% higher, I don't think you'd be saying Digital Ocean pricing is nuts. Backups are just an easy way to get people who don't mind spending money to spend money. Everyone else can do their own backups or take free snapshots (which has an API as well).

20% for four backups per month? That's insane.

I still think it's too bit high after reading through the comments. Don't get me wrong, I like DO and where they're going, but they're not there yet.

Ok sure, mention the $5 droplet being 1.25. Let's go to the opposite side, $128/month.

What' more annoying is that a snapshot costs 2c/gb/month. A backup is literally a "scheduled" snapshot. "Scheduled" as it's seemingly random, and not even guaranteed. They explicitly mention that you won't get charged if their service fucks up and doesn't work. The fact they even mention it seems to mean they expect it to happen.

So, the service is $128/m for "automatic" + $12.8 storage. Do the snapshots manually and you save $128. Yes, I realize you can't make a snapshot while powered on making it useless for production environments.

That being said, they still don't even offer floating IP's, so it's not suitable in the first place. Personally care a lot less about backups than this point since you can implement your own backup system. DO articles say to rely on DNS LB with low TTL for HA - lol.

Not surprising, but another negative is that there isn't a way to view anything within a backup prior to restoring.

One more vent - they don't even guarantee you can keep an IP address if you recreate a server from a snapshot.

Short of adding latency using some external service like Amazon's Route 53, DO really isn't suitable for anything if HA is a requirement. The backup cost is just another straw on the back.

Add basic HA features and I'll shut up about the backup cost. The base prices are very competitive.

I'm confused. Where did $128/month come from?

You other points on unable to view contents of backups as well as no guarantee of keeping the same IP are noted.

It is opt in in fairness. You have to set it to backup when you create the droplet.

20% flat is not THAT crazy, backup services and EC2 and Azure both nickel and dime a bit via bandwidth and storage fees.

Lets break this down...

$5 for 20Gb droplet so $1.25 for backups.

Assuming shadow copy backups (no compression, just straight bit for bit) then 4 backups times 20Gb is 80Gb. 80Gb of AWS S3 storage on the most expensive tier is $.03 / Gb which would be $2.40 if backed up to S3.

I agree it's not THAT crazy.

Devil's advocate but you could push that to Amazon's Glacier storage. Also Amazon charge for bandwidth in addition to the storage cost.

Yes you could which would reduce the price for AWS storage (highest priced tier is $.03/GB for S3 and $.01/GB for glacier).

I mention in another comment the cost of bandwidth.

To play devils advocate... I assume (and hope) that when you need to restore a droplet from a backup that it a LOT more seamless and streamlined than trying to restore from AWS S3 or Glacier.

To snapshot EBS volumes in EC2 is pennies per GB. 20% flat is crazy.

Its really not though, as long as you are using the smaller droplets.

$5/month 20 GB droplet would be 80 GB of backups for $1.25 on AWS S3 that would cost $2.40

$10/month 30 GB droplet would be 120 GB of backups for $2.50 on AWS S3 that would cost $3.60

$20/month 40 GB droplet would be 160 GB of backups for $5.00 on AWS S3 that would cost $4.80

$40/month 60 GB droplet would be 240 GB of backups for $10.00 on AWS S3 that would cost $7.20

$80/month 80 GB droplet would be 320 GB of backups for $20.00 on AWS S3 that would cost $9.6

ADD: Then if you compare outgoing to internet bandwidth costs DO is better.

Assume you use all 1 TB of your small droplets bandwidth. That's included in your $5 while on AWS that will cost you an extra $89.91.

UPDATE: Bandwidth pricing for droplets is for incoming and outgoing, so assuming 50/50 (bad assumption) then AWS would cost you $44.91 more per month.

DO also do snapshots. This is about their backup offering.

I agree. I expected backups to happen every day and being rotated at weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. I may have to reconsider relying on DO backups.

Relying on DO backups hasn't really ever been an option. I've had 3 weeks go by without one happening. Didn't complain at the time as they weren't charging and used another system. I just think at this point charging for this "service" is a little premature.

That's a lot to expect without looking into it at all.

Having worked in Backup/Recovery for over a decade, I consider this to be the minimum requirement. Instead of offering 4 backups in a month for 10% of hosting cost, DO should have let users decide how many backups they want and charge per backup unless DO has no desire moving beyond hosting toy apps. Serious apps need serious data protection.