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Why does 5 vs 10 dollar boxes get you double everything but CPU. There are all sorts of pricing inconsistencies.

Comparing the 5 dollar to the most expensive using all 5 dollar instances you get:

960 GB more storage

160 more "vCPUs"

180 TB more network bandwidth

Memory is the only thing that actually scales logically. Very annoying IMO. I like DO otherwise. I think it fits in nicely between GCP/AWS/Azure and other lower cost providers having object store and block storage and a good UI/responsiveness.

You cannot always scale a piece of software horizontally to multiple servers (think running Postgres), so your only real option for more performance is more resources on a single box. You pay a premium for that.
Sure but there is no cost basis for the non-linear increase. If anything it should be slightly less expensive for them. If you look at GCP/OVH/AWS their pricing are all roughly linear.
It's probably a pricing strategy to make more money of those running higher demand stuff.
Probably they do not make much money out of the 5 dollar droplet, they see it as a way of introducing you to DO.
The price inconsistencies are all the way up the entire product mix. 80 vs 160 instance is 4vCPU-6vCPU and 6TB-7TB transfer.
Have they even started tracking transfer yet? For years, it was unlimited. Then, they implemented the tiers but told people they weren’t actually tracking it, and that all old accounts were grandfathered in.
This brings a lot of their plans in line with Linode and Vultr, but the new plans that allow flexibility between memory and CPU are quite interesting.
Does anyone know why this was flagged when submitted a few days ago?
No idea, I wanted to know to. Someone said Techcrunch was simply advertising for DO.
I feel that this similar article is an advertisement.

In the other hn post comments...a lot of people brought up Vultr as a great alternative and competitor to DO...those comments may be lost now..

Because apparently third party writeups on a news site are "advertising" whereas words a company says directly are "news" :-D
Will they automatically double memory on existing droplets or do we need to recreate them from scratch?
Per their comments: either issue a resize to an existing droplet or create a new droplet to take advantage of the new tiers.
I love the ease and concept of digital ocean, but for some reason my billing for $5 droplets always charged $5 a month per droplet and then some seemingly random smaller amounts of money here and there during a month.

I never could figure out the plan, mainly because I thought it was just $5 a month period

Scheduled backups and ad hoc snapshots can both add small amounts to the monthly bill, if you use them. I haven't ever had enough variance to feel too upset - the difference between a $5/mo. server and a $6/mo. one doesn't really impact their value proposition for me (and I like to keep at least one known-good snapshot around...).