[beekums]

It wasn't clear to me how to autoscale with DO either. That's why I ended up using Google Cloud Engine. It's not exactly cheaper than AWS, but the pricing model for discounts is WAY simpler at least. It also doesn't have the feature set AWS does, but it does have most of what you'll need like a load balancing service.

[vidarh]

The pricing for GCE is the most convoluted I've ever worked with... And it's still 2-3 times more expensive than alternatives like DO or dedicated hosting.

A lot of the time when people want auto-scaling, the thing that strikes me is that most of them wouldn't have needed auto-scaling if they picked a cheaper provider to beging with. Often they could pick a dedicated provider, spin up 3 times as much capacity and still pay less.

[brianwawok]

Ditto. If you need to autoscale you outgrew DO. On top of DO prices not dropping in 4 uears, I see little reason to use them. GCE has $5 instances now with big boy features.