DigitalOcean Basic 8 GiB: 4 vCPU, 8 GiB, Per-Second Billing

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 15, 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.

Compare plans in this category (official data)

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All values in this table come from each host's official pricing page. This plan was checked on Oct 15, 2026; every compared plan was checked within the last 60 days.

What the official data lists for this plan

The pricing page lists four resource figures for DigitalOcean Basic 8 GiB: 4 vCPU, 8 GiB of memory, 160 GiB SSD storage and 5,000 GiB of transfer. The plan sits in the Cloud VPS category, and as a self-managed server it is the kind of machine where the operating system, web server, database and deployment process are all under the developer's control.

The single listed feature is a flat monthly price with no intro discount. The term is 1 month, the billing field says USD per month, billed per second up to the monthly price and capped at 672 hours a month, and the renewal price is the same as the first-term price. Everything else on this page is drawn from those fields; the price itself appears in the verified price table.

How per-second billing and the monthly cap work

The billing line is the part developers most often misread. Charges build up by the second while the server exists, and they stop growing once they reach the monthly price shown in the table; the data states that this cap corresponds to 672 hours a month. The 1 month term is therefore the billing cycle of that cap, not a period the account is tied to.

Because the feature list says flat monthly price while the billing line says per second, the billing line is the one to plan around: the monthly figure is a ceiling on what a single server can accrue in a cycle, not a fixed charge that posts every month regardless of usage. The official data does not say what happens to charges when a server is powered off, resized or kept idle, so confirm that behavior with DigitalOcean before relying on it in a cost estimate.

Since the renewal price is the same as the intro price, there is no discounted first month that later jumps. The figure in the table is the figure to use for every cycle, which makes month-over-month budgeting for a staging or production box straightforward.

Matching 4 vCPU and 8 GiB to the app

The 4 vCPU figure is the number to weigh against how the app uses the processor. A Node, Go or Python service with a worker-per-core model, a queue consumer, or a build step that runs on the same host all benefit from having more than a pair of cores to spread across. A single-threaded app that spends most of its time waiting on a database or an external API will not use four cores evenly, and the Basic 4 GiB size with 2 vCPU may be the more proportionate choice.

The 8 GiB of memory is usually the figure that decides the size. Add up the resident memory of the application processes, the database buffer pool if the database lives on the same server, any cache such as Redis, and the headroom the operating system and page cache need. If that total already sits near the memory of a smaller size, the 8 GiB plan leaves room for traffic spikes and for running a test instance side by side; if it sits far below, the larger size is paying for headroom the app will not touch.

The official data does not name the processor family, clock speed or storage interface behind the 4 vCPU and 160 GiB SSD figures, so per-core performance cannot be inferred from this listing. If single-core speed matters for the workload, that is a detail to confirm with the provider or to measure on a short-lived instance before committing a production deployment to it.

Storage and transfer: 160 GiB SSD and 5,000 GiB

The 160 GiB SSD is the local disk that holds the operating system, application code, logs, uploads and any database files stored on the same server. For a typical web app the code and system take a small fraction of that, so the question is what accumulates over time: user uploads, database growth, Docker images and layers, and logs that are never rotated. Plan log rotation and image pruning from the start so that disk growth is predictable.

The 5,000 GiB of transfer is the monthly allowance listed for this size. Estimate usage by multiplying the average response size by expected requests, then adding backups moved off the server, container image pulls and any media the app serves directly rather than through a separate object store or CDN. The official data does not say how overage is charged if the allowance is exceeded, so check that policy before serving large files from the server itself.

Resizing later: what the data confirms

A common plan is to start on a smaller size and move up when metrics show the need, or to start here and move down if the app turns out to be lighter than expected. The official data for this plan does not describe a resize feature, whether a resize keeps the same disk, whether it requires a reboot, or how the per-second rate changes mid-cycle, so those details should be confirmed with DigitalOcean before building a scaling plan around them.

What the data does support is that the family includes a Basic 4 GiB size with 2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 80 GiB SSD and 4,000 GiB of transfer, billed on the same per-second basis with the same monthly cap structure. Both sizes are charged in USD per month and both have the same price at renewal as at the start, so moving between them is a resource decision rather than a pricing-tier decision.

Compared with the Basic 4 GiB and the Vultr sizes

DigitalOcean Basic 4 GiB is the same product line one size down: 2 vCPU, 4 GiB of memory, 80 GiB SSD and 4,000 GiB of transfer, with the same per-second billing up to the monthly price, the same 1 month cycle, the same flat monthly price with no intro discount and the same renewal price. It suits an app whose measured memory and processor use sit comfortably below half of the 8 GiB plan's figures.

Vultr Cloud Compute 8 GB / 4 vCPU lists 4 vCPU, 8 GB of memory, 160 GB SSD and 4 TB of transfer. Its features describe it as Regular Performance (previous-gen Intel, regular SSD) with a flat monthly price (no intro discount), and its billing is USD per month, billed hourly up to the monthly price, with a 1 month term and the same renewal price. Vultr lists memory and storage in GB and transfer in TB while DigitalOcean lists GiB, so these figures should be compared on the providers' own pages rather than treated as identical.

Vultr High Frequency 8 GB / 3 vCPU lists 3 vCPU, 8 GB of memory, 256 GB NVMe SSD and 4 TB of transfer, described as High Frequency (3GHz+ Intel Xeon, NVMe SSD) with a flat monthly price (no intro discount) and hourly billing up to the monthly price. It trades one vCPU for a stated clock speed and NVMe storage, which may fit an app that is bound by a single hot thread or by disk latency rather than by core count.

Vultr High Performance AMD 8 GB / 4 vCPU lists 4 vCPU, 8 GB of memory, 180 GB NVMe SSD and 6 TB of transfer, described as High Performance (AMD EPYC, NVMe SSD) with a flat monthly price (no intro discount), also billed hourly up to the monthly price on a 1 month term with the same renewal price. It is the option in this set with a named processor family, the largest listed transfer figure in TB and NVMe storage, which matters for apps that push a lot of outbound data or do heavy disk I/O.

No option here is the right answer for every app. The DigitalOcean plans are the only ones in this set whose billing is stated per second rather than hourly, and the only ones that state the hour cap. The Vultr plans are the only ones that name the processor generation and storage type. Choose on the resource that limits the app, and read the price table for the monthly cap of each.

What to check before signing up

Read the price table for the monthly cap and keep in mind that charges accrue per second up to that cap, with the 1 month term being the cycle of the cap. Since the renewal price is the same as the intro price, no change in the figure should be expected after the first cycle.

The official data for this plan does not list server locations, operating system images, included backups or snapshots, IPv6 availability, or a resize procedure. Each of those affects a web app deployment, so confirm them on the provider's site before creating the server rather than assuming they match another provider's defaults.