DigitalOcean Basic 1 GiB: Per-Second Billing, 25 GiB SSD

Plan details (official data)

Inclusions and features (official data)

• Flat monthly price (no intro discount)

Prices were checked on DigitalOcean's official pricing page on Oct 1, 2026. The renewal price listed there is the same as the sign-up price (no intro discount). Prices change, so confirm on the official site before you buy.

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All values in this table come from each host's official pricing page. This plan was checked on Oct 1, 2026; every compared plan was checked within the last 60 days.

What the official data lists for this plan

The resources on the official pricing page are 1 vCPU, 1 GiB of memory, 25 GiB SSD storage and 1,000 GiB of bandwidth. The term is listed as 1 month, which in this case describes the billing cycle over which the monthly cap applies rather than a period the account is tied to. The only feature line is Flat monthly price (no intro discount).

Because this is a self-managed server, SSH and root access are the normal way to work with it and are not in question here. What the data does not cover is almost everything else a developer tends to ask about: operating system images, data center regions, IPv6, snapshots or backup add-ons, a provider-side firewall, monitoring, uptime figures and support channels are all absent. Absence from this data set does not mean DigitalOcean does not offer them; it means they should be verified on the provider's own pages before signing up.

How per-second billing up to a monthly cap works

The billing field reads: USD per month; billed per second up to the monthly price (capped at 672 hours a month). In practice the monthly price shown in the table is a ceiling. A server that exists for part of a month accrues per-second charges toward that ceiling and never beyond it, and the 672 hours figure is the point at which the cap is reached within a month.

The feature wording Flat monthly price (no intro discount) should be read alongside the billing field rather than instead of it. Flat here means the cap is the published price with no promotional first-term rate, and the renewal price is the same as the first-term price. It does not mean the account is charged the same fixed amount every month regardless of how long the server exists, since the charge builds up per second.

The data does not say whether a powered-off server keeps accruing charges, or how destroying a server affects the bill. Developers who plan to run an API only part of the time should confirm those details with DigitalOcean before assuming an idle or stopped server costs less.

Who this plan suits

The resource line of 1 vCPU and 1 GiB fits the shape of a side project or a small API: a single application process behind a reverse proxy, a lightweight database or an external managed one, and traffic that comes in bursts rather than constantly. The 25 GiB SSD leaves room for an operating system, application code, logs and a modest database, while 1,000 GiB of bandwidth is generous relative to what a hobby API usually serves.

The plan is also a fit for developers who want to experiment without committing to a long stretch of hosting, because per-second billing up to a monthly cap means a server created for a weekend prototype is charged for the seconds it existed rather than a full month, subject to the caveat above about stopped servers.

It is a weaker fit for anyone who wants the provider to patch, back up and secure the machine. Nothing in the data describes managed services, so updates, hardening and recovery are the account holder's job.

What a self-managed server needs from the developer

SSH access is the first thing to secure. Use key-based login, disable password authentication, and consider restricting the login user so that root is not reachable directly over SSH. Keep the private key somewhere that is itself backed up, because a lost key on a server with password login disabled means recovering through the provider's console or rebuilding.

Updates are the second responsibility. On most Linux distributions the base system and the packages that serve the API need regular patching, and unattended security updates are worth enabling so that a quiet side project does not sit unpatched for months. Application runtimes installed outside the package manager need their own update routine.

A firewall is the third. Whether DigitalOcean offers a provider-level firewall for this plan is not confirmed by the data, so plan on a host-based firewall such as ufw or nftables that allows SSH, HTTP and HTTPS and denies everything else by default. If the database listens on the network, bind it to localhost or restrict it to the application host only.

Backups are the fourth, and the one most often skipped on small projects. The data does not list snapshots or a backup add-on, so treat off-server backups of the database and the configuration as something to build yourself: a scheduled database dump copied to object storage or another machine, plus the deployment scripts kept in version control so the server can be recreated from scratch.

How the alternatives compare

DigitalOcean Basic 512 MiB uses the same billing wording, the same 1 month term and the same Flat monthly price (no intro discount) feature. It lists 1 vCPU, 512 MiB of memory, 10 GiB SSD and 500 GiB of bandwidth. Its SSD and bandwidth figures are smaller than the 25 GiB SSD and 1,000 GiB of the 1 GiB plan, which makes it a candidate for a very small API with little state and a tight budget, while the 1 GiB plan gives more headroom for a database or a heavier runtime.

Vultr Cloud Compute 1 GB lists 1 vCPU, 1 GB of memory, 25 GB SSD and 1 TB of bandwidth, with the feature Regular Performance (previous-gen Intel, regular SSD) and billing described as USD per month; billed hourly up to the monthly price. Its units differ from DigitalOcean's GiB figures, so the two should not be read as identical or ranked against each other; the data simply lists them in different units.

Vultr High Frequency 1 GB lists 1 vCPU, 1 GB of memory, 32 GB NVMe SSD and 1 TB of bandwidth with the feature High Frequency (3GHz+ Intel Xeon, NVMe SSD). Vultr High Performance AMD 1 GB lists 1 vCPU, 1 GB of memory, 25 GB NVMe SSD and 2 TB of bandwidth with the feature High Performance (AMD EPYC, NVMe SSD). Both are billed hourly up to the monthly price and both carry the feature flat monthly price (no intro discount). A developer whose API is disk-heavy may prefer the NVMe SSD descriptions; one whose main concern is simplicity within a single provider's tooling may prefer staying with DigitalOcean. None of the data includes benchmark or uptime figures, so performance differences cannot be stated from it.

What to check before signing up

Read the billing field literally: charges accrue per second up to the monthly price in the table, capped at 672 hours a month, and the renewal price is the same as the first-term price. Confirm with DigitalOcean how charges apply to servers that are powered off or destroyed, because the data does not say.

Confirm the operating system images, regions and IPv6 availability on DigitalOcean's own pages, since none of those appear in the data. Decide in advance how backups will work, because nothing here confirms a provider-side option, and budget the developer time for SSH hardening, updates and a firewall that a managed host would otherwise handle.