Containers and container services are great but sometimes you need a full server and doing a PaaS with containers has it's own challenges to ensure isolation, have network setup work easily and other factors. I use containers for some of my own stuff but other things are just better with a full VM.
SMTP ports are blocked and we recommend using a transactional mail service if your server needs to send mail.
We're implementing a number of things to profile abusers and prevent abuse on the platform and will be strictly enforcing policies against abuse. The lack of an API and prohibition on automating the creation of servers combined with required Github profile for ssh keys help to make the service unattractive for most abuse cases. Our goal is to use these methods to prevent abuse while keeping a very low barrier to entry for legitimate users.
It's not and until your comment I wasn't familiar with Diply. Doesn't look like we offer anything similar but if I heard from them with concerns we'd consider changing our logo font to prevent confusion.
Thanks. A lot of this feedback I've been hearing from others today. We'll be updating the serer name field to stand out visually better and doing updates to the home page and informational pages to both highlight the button capability and better present details like pricing. An "expire now" option for servers on the free plan will be in place this weekend which will allow you to delete a free server before it expires.
DO absolutely allows (and encourages) resellers and SaaS platforms on their service. My day job is with DO and Dply was built as a side project to meet some needs I have heard from developers, students, and open source projects.
Dply operates with DO's blessing but is otherwise unrelated in any official sense. We launched under a credit like those offered in the Hatch program for startups: https://www.digitalocean.com/hatch/
One of the biggest pieces of feedback we've received and near the top of the list to fix. To start with, we'll be giving this field a white background so it's not so easy to miss.
DigitalOcean does it's billing based on a per-minute basis based on their hourly rates. We have already implemented a feature in our backend code to allow users to "expire" free servers and are working on adding that to the dashboard UI and this option should be available this weekend.
Each Droplet is billed per hour up to its monthly cap.
Do I have to pay the cost of the server every time I create a new one?
No—you only need to pay for 1 hour of usage. For example, spinning up a new 512MB server just to test something for a couple of minutes will only cost you $0.0074
