DigitalOcean Snapshot Pricing Explained

Simon Bennett
Simon Bennett · Jul 10, 2017
DigitalOcean Snapshot Pricing Explained Artwork

At Digital Ocean you pay for the amount of storage your snapshot takes. This is priced at a simple $0.06 per gigabyte per month. This is different to Digital Ocean backups which are priced at 20% of the cost of the droplet no matter how much disk space you use. Backups are limited to once a week and only the last 4 weeks are retailed, where you can have as many snapshots as you wish.

How much does DigitalOcean Charge for a SnapShot?

$0.06 Per GB per Month

How to work out how big a snapshot will be?

If you want to know how much disk space your server is currently using so you can work out how much a snapshot will cost, you can run a simple command.

SSH into your server and run the df command

df -h /

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 984M 0 984M 0% /dev
tmpfs 200M 704K 199M 1% /run
/dev/vda1 25G 21G 3.6G 86% /
tmpfs 997M 0 997M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
tmpfs 997M 0 997M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/vda15 105M 6.7M 98M 7% /boot/efi
tmpfs 200M 0 200M 0% /run/user/1000

Your command will output this table, you're looking for the /dev/vda1 drive which under the used column is tell me it's using 21GB. 21*0.06=$1.26 per month storage costs.

How to Work out how much a Snapshot will cost?

We have also created a command for doing this all in one go and calculating the storage cost from terminal

$ df -k -h / | tail -1 | awk '{print "$"$3*0.06}'

Which in our case will output $1.26

Update July 2022

This article was updated in July 2022, after DigitalOcean did a pricing shuffle and Snapshots went from $0.05 to $0.06 per GB per month.