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How can a snapshot's size be bigger than the droplet's base size? Seems fishy to me.
I'm running a $5/mo droplet and the last time I made a snapshot, the overall size was 21.05GB. If I check disk usage on the droplet itself - I've only used 6.8GB of the 20GB allocated to me. If DO is going to charge me by the GB per month, I'd like to be charged accurately for what I use.
Please open a ticket about that to add to any other reports. We've definitely no intention of charging more than the actual usage, that is likely an incorrect display. That display needs to be accurate to what we charge though.
Understood. Thank you
Those. Bastards.
The .com was an early tipoff that they were just in this to make money.
How dare a company attempt to make money! This is an outrage!
Response clears this up @jarland
Thank you! And I learned something today
They use QCOW2 images on the node side but if at some point you did use all of your space, the image is now grown to the full size since all of the sparse space is dirty. Compressing won't fix that short of them zeroing the empty space on a disk image before packing it up.
Francisco
Yeah, that's the key. You'll probably use more actual GB on our storage than we'll charge for, as a result. I think it's reasonable for people to expect only the GB used as displayed by df to be billed. Maybe that'll later enforce some space saving creativity.
Not sure how they would be able to do that short of having to poke into peoples filesystems and well, you're DigitalNuggets now.
Francisco
OnApp does compressed data equivalent snapshots. Probably a freeze and FS copy.
DO is scam?
Seems likely. Anyone ever heard of them before?
If DigitalOcean starts terminating customer virtual machines without notice when customers complain about being charged for snapshots, then their reputation will rightfully fall. Comparing the two providers to criticize complaints about Wable is inane.
(And this isn't even considering that snapshots were never automatically enabled for DO users, and those users who did use them were informed in advance that they would eventually be charged; this again contrasts with Wable, who enabled snapshots and charged users on an opt-out basis.)
While no big thing, everyone knew it was coming - and its not unreasonably priced it is a bit annoying. One of the big selling features of DO over AWS and kin is that its billing is super simple, this is yet another small charge to worry about - and an annoyance to anyone who has to account for spending with an organisation.
Perhaps, at-least for the last point snapshots could be made free for the first X hours or something to allow for temporary usage.
Temporary usage almost certainly costs them more though (read/write bandwidth).
@perennate Temporary storage is usually for the spin up of new services anyway, so it makes them money.
Fair enough, I guess you can't download the snapshot easily (ruling out automatic snapshot + remote backup possibility).
I agree, one of the big challenges in charging for more than just droplets themselves will be keeping billing clear. The calculator page has always been a long standing joke for me since the first time I opened it. How ironic that would be to require one...
It's good feedback
@jarland My other bit of advice, bring block storage to some of the older locations (cough AMS2).
Its irritating to see the newer locations getting the new hardware & features. Some of your best and oldest customers are in the older locations.
They haven't invited you to the secret old timer location yet?
Storage will surely come to more locations, but some base infrastructure upgrades are required to do it. Not a quick task, takes a lot of planning and time to execute.
I'm not saying that as an announcement or anything, merely as an observer making an educated assumption. Seems reasonable to me though. I know the infrastructure requirements and I can't imagine not expanding the feature to other regions.