Will I still be charged if I power off my droplet ?

Posted September 24, 2013 81.6k views
What will happened to the environment and data on the droplet when I power it off ?
  • “At this time, there is no charge for using DigitalOcean snapshots.”
    From this post

  • Digital Ocean Team,
    I wonder why, after bunch of complains, there are no any mentions anywhere that you’re charging powered off Droplets.

    Moreover, you have the next text at the pricing FAQ (

    “If you use your server for fewer than 672 hours during the month, you will be billed for each hour that you used it. …”

    It is provoking to think that powered off droplets aren’t going to be charged and I haven’t found the definition of term “use” for droplet anywhere. I assume I can miss it - there are vast count of “use” word in “terms of usage” document.

    All mentions of Droplets charging I’ve found on your site are hushing up of this nuance.

    It’s definitely not “Transparent and predictable pricing” you are promising so glaring.


8 answers
When you power off your droplet it is simply powered off. Your disk space and data is still there and is preserved.

Keep in mind that you are still billed for droplets that are powered off becase your diskspace, CPU, RAM, and IP address are all reserved while it is powered off. If you want to save a Droplet for future use take a snapshot of it and then destroy it. You'll be able to create a new Droplet from the snapshot image anytime to bring it back online.
Answered by Kamal Nasser
Appears that Kamal is right. If you take a "snapshot" (requires powering if off first) then "destroy" the image, even though the destroy button doesn't explicitly mention it (feature request: update the destroy button text to mention snapshots are not destroyed), the snapshot remains.

So next you go to "create droplet", select the same data center, then under "select images" you select the (oddly titled) My Images tab (suggestion/feature request: rename to "my snapshots" for consistency) then create it. It seems to reset the root password [huh wuh?] but besides that, you have the original box back. You can even create multiple clones of the original box whoa!

First Of All, Awesome Guys. DO Rocks.

So, If the Users are made to pay for Instances which are not Used. Then why do we have to mention it as Hourly or Cloud or Pay for what you Use ?

I wonder, It’s a Flat Rate Like VPS Hosting then ! Whats the Fun in Cloud Only Expansion ? Partial Cloud ;)
You can make it default to 10 $ / Month right ? I think this is misguiding the New & Dumb Users Like Me.

Anyway, I like Digital Ocean in my 5 hours of Interaction with DO Systems because of its simplicity. And I already said Bye to AWS.
But, It would be honest if this is mentioned in the Website Homepage. “Partial Cloud”

  • This is what makes me sad about all the “cloud hosting” companies around. You have DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, Google Cloud, all of them keep charging you even if you stop the instance, it is like “dude, let me pay for the storage but I’m not using any other resources” and this is where Azure smokes them all, Azure actually won’t charge you for resources you are not using, they will only charge you for the storage, and that’s it. Say you have some apps installed on some windows flavor on Azure, well, you stop the VM and you want to turn it on again in a couple of weeks you pay once you turn it on and all the apps you have installed and files remain there (it isn’t like they are reinstalling everything), but oh well. I think you are right, resources should be paid when used.


      This is incorrect.




      A stopped instance does not incur charges, but all of the resources that are attached to the instance will still be charged.

      Linode is the only other one that bills this way, but unlike DigitalOcean they are entirely upfront about it on their website:

      If my Linode is powered off, will I be billed?

      Yes. We maintain your saved data and reserve your ability to use other resources like RAM, transfer, etc. even when your Linode is powered off.

      What does DigitalOcean say on the matter? Nothing, other than the incredibly misleading:

      All Droplets are billed hourly, up until a monthly cap of 672 hours (the number of hours in 4 weeks).


      I’m not sure about you, but I can’t wrap my brain around the definition of “using your server” including “it exists in an unpowered state”.

Yes, you will be charged. The reason is that your storage and all other resources are reserved for your droplet. However, if you make a backup and delete the droplet, you will not be charged.... This question was already asked by the way.

if i know this sooner i can save at least 200 eur…

So you don’t pay for snapshots?

So when a droplet is powered off what exactly is happening (if all the data and files are accessible)?

I found out about this today and I am, let’s say not amused. I get billed 60$ per month even though I’m only using 3 out of my 12 droplets. What is more is that the Dashboard keeps telling me that the estimated monthly costs are 4.98.

I highly appreciate the service that DO does and the platform runs well and smooth but the way this topic is handled leaves me with a bad gut feeling.

As far as active resources like RAM and CPU go a turned off droplet and a snapshot are the same. So why one costs some cents per month and one costs the full 5$ must be one of the big mysteries of life left to answer…

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