DigitalOcean Snapshot Pricing 2022

One of the things developers overlook when they start using DigitalOcean Snapshot, is the cost.

Some developers only rely on Snapshots as a backup method, and to be aware of the costs involved when you take Snapshots for your Droplets,
we will give a couple an example of how much it costs to store your Droplet/Instance Snapshots on DigitalOcean.

This is unrelated to the DigitalOcean Backup feature which charges you a flat 20% of your server cost.

What is the cost of DigitalOcean Snapshots?

The pricing of DigitalOcean Snapshots is simple: $0.05/GiB of your Snapshot size per month.

Note: the unit of Snapshots pricing is GiB not GB (not a huge difference unless the Snapshots are really big).

Examples

Example 1

You have 10 Snapshots of your Droplet, each one has a size of 100 GiB, then you will be charged $25 a month for storing these 10 Snapshots on DigitalOcean in addition to the Droplet cost.

Example 2

It's important to note that the size of your Snapshot is different from the total storage allocated to your Droplet.
You need to look at the used storage on your Droplet.

In order to check your Droplet used storage, SSH into your server and type:
df -h /

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        25G  11G   14G  44% /

In this example your Snapshot size will be 11GB.

Here how pricing would be calculated with 3 different backup policies:

• 7 retention policy for daily backups: 7 11 0.05 = 3.85$/m
• 4 retention policy for a weekly backup: 4 11 0.05 = 2.2$/m
• 12 retention policy for a monthly backup: 12 11 0.05 = 6.6$/m

Good to know

• Creating a Snapshot of a Droplet does not capture volumes attached to the Droplet. These have to be created separately.
• DigitalOcean Snapshots are limited to 25 per volumes and to 1 per minute (for a given volume).
• When you destroy a Droplet, Snapshots from that Droplet remain accessible on the Images page in the Snapshots tab.