Introducing DigitalOcean Premium General Purpose Droplets

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that pursue a digital-first strategy, high-performance websites and applications are crucial to delivering flawless products or service experiences to their customers. General Purpose Droplets with their balanced combination of CPU, memory, and storage have made it easier for businesses—from SaaS applications and high-traffic web servers to digital storefronts, e-commerce marketplaces, consumer tech, and many more workloads—to build and scale incredible digital experiences. Today, we’re introducing the next evolution of these virtual machines: Premium General Purpose Droplets.

Earlier this year, we launched Premium CPU-Optimized Droplets, a powerful offering which our customers immediately loved. We’re excited to now extend the premium advantage to the General Purpose line of Droplets to bring still more versatile and consistent performance to a variety of cloud-native websites and applications.

Discover the performance advantage of Premium General Purpose Droplets

Premium General Purpose Droplets come with a host of advanced features:

• Supercharged processing power: Premium General Purpose Droplets, powered by 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® CPUs, are built to deliver powerful hardware performance. Based on our internal benchmark tests*, Premium General Purpose Droplets deliver up to a 27% increase in single-core performance and a 26% increase in multi-core performance.

• Up to 10 Gbps* of outbound data transfer: With five times higher outbound network speeds compared to Regular General Purpose Droplets, the Premium variant helps you make the most out of the performance boost by swiftly transferring data back to your users. Every Premium General Purpose Droplet comes with a free allowance of outbound data transfer, ranging from 4,000 GiB to 11,000 GiB based on the plan you choose.

• Fast and plentiful NVMe storage: NVMe solid-state drives (SSD) are faster than traditional SSDs due to their use of parallelism in file operations. File reads via Premium General Purpose Droplets are up to 78% faster and file writes are up to 126% faster*, compared to regular General Purpose Droplets. Premium General Purpose Droplets have NVMe storage ranging from 30 GiB to 1,440 GiB included in the plan, which is also 20% larger storage capacity than Regular General Purpose Droplets.

• Dedicated CPU: Premium General Purpose Droplets have access to the full hyperthread at all times, helping deliver consistently superior performance. This is unlike a shared-CPU Droplet, that may get a fraction of CPU cycles when other Droplets sharing the CPU experience a high load.

Elevated experiences for your customers, every time

Premium General Purpose Droplets enable you to reliably deliver stunning product and service experiences.

• Speed up your customer-facing apps and websites: Leverage the higher outbound network speeds in Premium General Purpose Droplets to provide a fast and smooth user experience, whether it’s SaaS, e-commerce, consumer tech, or any other customer-facing scenario.
• Stay flexible as your business evolves: Premium General Purpose Droplets, with their balanced vCPU and memory ratio of 1:4, provide the flexibility to tweak your applications and scale resource usage based on your specific, ever-changing business needs.
• Maximize the performance consistency of your apps. When running multiple Droplets to power your apps, Premium General Purpose Droplets deliver consistently powerful performance across all Droplets, even when you have to adjust your virtual machine fleet continuously to meet dynamic demand.

Simplicity at its core

Premium General Purpose Droplets are available on our simple cloud UI that makes building and scaling cloud infrastructure easy for everyone. With today’s launch, when you go to the control panel to spin up Droplets, you’ll see a new option for Premium Intel within the General Purpose Droplet tab. There are also slugs for use with our CLI, API, or extensions like our Terraform provider. Premium General Purpose Droplets are also available as worker nodes in DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

Spin up a Premium General Purpose Droplet today

Premium General Purpose Droplets are now available in NYC3, NYC1, SFO2, TOR1, FRA1, BLR1, and SYD1 data centers, with more coming soon, so spin up a Premium General Purpose Droplet right now—or switch from regular to Premium. Read more about General Purpose Droplet pricing for your business, or contact our sales team to discuss pricing.

*The benchmark CPU, network and file I/O performance numbers are based on DigitalOcean’s internal testing framework and parameters, using an 8 vCPU Droplet. Actual performance numbers may vary depending on a variety of factors such as system configuration, operating environment, and type of workloads.