[msbarnett]

6-of-1, half a dozen of the other. Halving their prices on all current instances gives you the same specs at the same pricepoints.

I don't particularly care if they keep around a 512MB/$2.50 instance at that point.

[Crisco]

I would, however, love that price point. It would be nice if I could run a few light-weight services on a VPS for $2.50 a month and then put my websites and other projects on a beefier VM.

I currently use Linode, but if DigitalOcean offered something at that pricepoint they would be getting $2.50 more from me a month than they currently do.

[msbarnett]

Pure guess, but I'd imagine that payment processor fees don't make it particularly profitable to offer price levels much lower than $5.

[kristianp]

It's more about support costs if I were to guess. How many support tickets does it take for their profit on $25 a year to disappear? (if $2.50 a month is discounted to $25 a year).

[bluedino]

I always like prgmr.com's stance on that. "Please note that these plans include $2.50 worth of support"

[raverbashing]

One thing that could help is having the ability to pre pay/load credits, so you could have a small discount that way

[Something1234]

This is the same theory that NearlyFreeSpeech.net uses.

[jldugger]

Linode / AWS already offer prepaid discounts.

[ksec]

Where Could i find that ? For Linode AND AWS Discount.

[triage4]

For Linode: https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/prepaid-billing-and-pay...

[raverbashing]

For AWS look at "reserved instances"

I'm not sure about Linode

[chrisan]

Make it so you have to buy at least 2 months then

[vinceguidry]

Or even pay up front for the year. Perfect for the hobbyist market. I'd probably buy four of them.

[sedachv]

ARIN charges for IPv4 address allocation (https://www.arin.net/fees/fee_schedule.html) and I read that below $5 a month it becomes unprofitable for hosting companies just because of the cost of leasing IP addresses. If your services can run on shared hosting there are a bunch of hosts for less than $1 a month around.

[mkj]

Charge a dollar for ipv4, or ipv6 is free?