# DigitalOcean Load Balancers

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/load-balancing/digitalocean-load-balancer/

Managed load balancers billed per node per month, where a node is a fixed block of throughput rather than a usage meter.

## Who it suits

Knowing the bill in advance. $12 a month buys one node and a node is a fixed 10,000 requests per second — capacity that steps rather than meters, which is the only genuinely forecastable pricing in this category.

Consider something else if Your traffic is spiky or small. A node is bought whole, so half a node of traffic costs a whole node, and the ceiling is 100 nodes rather than an elastic limit.

## iScore

47 / 100 (80% interval 40–54), rank 4 of 4 in load-balancing.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every load-balancing peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/load-balancing/digitalocean-load-balancer/alternatives/

- Price: 31 (25–37), weight 36%, 1 of 2 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_card_required
- Capacity and limits: 37 (14–60), weight 29%, 1 of 1 criteria scored
- Trust and compliance: 50 (44–56), weight 21%, 0 of 1 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: uptime_sla
- Evidence: 100 (100–100), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Entry paid plan: $12 a month for a regional load balancer with one node. The only member of this category priced monthly rather than hourly, and the only one where the entry price is a round number rather than a fraction of a cent. ([source](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/load-balancers), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: Per node, added and removed as you go, up to 100 of them. Each node is a fixed quantum of capacity rather than a meter, so the bill steps rather than tracking traffic — which makes it forecastable in a way per-hour and per-GB pricing is not, and wasteful if a node sits half-used. ([source](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/load-balancers), read 2026-09-15)

### Infrastructure

- Regions: 16 datacentres carry Load Balancers: NYC1, NYC2, NYC3, AMS3, SFO2, SFO3, SGP1, LON1, FRA1, TOR1, BLR1, SYD1, ATL1, RIC1, MKC1 and MEM1. Availability is published per product per datacentre rather than assumed from the region list. ([source](https://docs.digitalocean.com/platform/regional-availability/), read 2026-09-15)

### Inference

- Rate limits: 10,000 requests per second per node, alongside 10,000 simultaneous connections and 250 SSL connections per second. Capacity is bought in these blocks, so the way to more throughput is another node rather than a larger bill for the same one. ([source](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/load-balancers), read 2026-09-15)

### Caching

- Multi-region replication: Three types are offered — Regional, Global and Network — with the $12 entry price attached to the Regional one. The page names the three but prices only Regional here. ([source](https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/load-balancers), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [DigitalOcean Load Balancers vs AWS Elastic Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-elb-vs-digitalocean-load-balancer/)
- [DigitalOcean Load Balancers vs Google Cloud Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-cloud-load-balancing-vs-digitalocean-load-balancer/)
- [DigitalOcean Load Balancers vs Cloudflare Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/cloudflare-load-balancing-vs-digitalocean-load-balancer/)