In my post about the astonishing speed of the DigitalOcean network compared to the appalling service I was getting at ThrustVPS, I mentioned that the free bandwidth model didn’t look sustainable in the long run. Indeed, DigitalOcean told me themselves that they would move to a more normal commercial model when they had a better idea of their customer profile. So I was fully prepared to be told eventually that the good times were over and I should now expect to pay a lot more for my traffic. Regardless of that though, I intended to stay in Amsterdam because the network was so refreshingly fast.
Today I was delighted to receive an email from DigitalOcean telling me that as an early customer they had “grandfathered” me in to their new commercial arrangements on the same terms as I orginally signed up to – i.e. free bandwidth forever. Not quite believing my luck I asked for clarification – particularly whether that meant my account as a whole, or just the current VM. My reason for asking was that I am about to create two new VMs with them following their upgrade of the basic $5.00 pcm offering to 512MB RAM and 20 Gig of SSD disk space. I will use the first new VM to move my new tor node and the second to replace my tails mirror (which eats about 900 GiB pcm on the slow, unreliable Thrust network).
They replied:
It’s true, since you have an older account you have unlimited bandwidth for your full account, meaning every droplet you create is set to unlimited bandwidth too!
Now /that/ is what I call service. And a truly fantastic committment from DigitalOcean.
So, if you want a fast VM on a /really/ fast network. Take a look at DigitalOcean. Even without the bandwidth allowance I have, they are still astonishing value for money.