It's $77 for 1 year reserved if I'm reading it correctly. That's $6.44 per month for an instance with double the RAM of the DO $5 instance. The specs look like the size that DO is charging $10 for currently. For a 3 year reserved instance it's $4.48 a month for double the size of the DO $5 instance. There's also a free tier, so the first year is free to try it out.

DO was competitive with EC2 on price but not on features (and certainly not on security), now with the price advantage gone...

EDIT: corrected calculation

The price of an EC2 instance doesn't include data transfer though. For the $5 DO instance you get 1TB of traffic for free.

The price advantage is definitely not gone.

How many customers use more than 1GB of outbound traffic per month for a $5 server? Data transfer in is free on EC2 and the first 1GB outbound is free too according to the pricing page.

Isn't the first GB of your account traffic free with AWS vs DO giving you 1 TB per droplet?

While 1 EC2 instance may not use more then 1 GB (which is a very low quota unless your CDNing everything), if you have a couple of instances your almost certainly going over that.

$51 is only the up front fee. It's $77 for the year, plus you need an EBS volume - say $6 for a magnetic disk 10 GB EBS, or $12 for an SSD.

ok, so about $6.90 per month for 1 year then including storage. Thats still less than a 1GB RAM DO server which goes for $10 per month, and much less if you go for 3 years. Factoring in 1 year of free tier makes it even less.

It doesn't include storage Id doesn't include SSD storage It doesn't include provisioned IOPS for SSD Storage (well, ridiculously low) It doesn't include bandwidth IT doesn't include support.