How Spaces is billed
DigitalOcean's Spaces pricing documentation, read on 30 October 2026, describes one subscription per account. Billing starts when you create your first bucket and stops when you destroy the last one, prorated hourly. The allowance is pooled: 250 GiB of Standard storage and 1,024 GiB of outbound transfer across every bucket. Inbound uploads are free. Transfer from Spaces to Droplets in listed region pairs is free, and so is private traffic through the VPC-local resolver.
The CDN is included at no extra cost, but DigitalOcean says transfer between the origin and edge servers counts toward your allowance. The documentation does not spell out how bytes delivered from edge to viewer are counted, so the examples below assume every download counts, which is the conservative case.
| Item | Price or allowance |
|---|---|
| Subscription | $5.00 per month |
| Included Standard storage | 250 GiB across all buckets |
| Additional storage | $0.02 per GiB per month |
| Included outbound transfer | 1,024 GiB, shared by all buckets |
| Additional outbound transfer | $0.01 per GiB |
| Inbound transfer | Free |
| CDN | Included; origin-to-edge transfer counts toward the allowance |
| Cold Storage | $0.007 per GiB; 30-day minimum; no CDN; 128 KiB minimum per read |
Monthly cost for three course libraries
Hypothetical libraries, priced with the rates above and assuming all downloads count as outbound transfer once. If protected files are fetched through presigned URLs on the CDN hostname, DigitalOcean warns the bandwidth charge may double, so test with real traffic before relying on these figures.
| Library | Stored | Downloaded per month | Calculation | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Workbook and audio course | 80 GiB | 600 GiB | Inside both allowances | $5.00 |
| Video course, 300 active learners | 400 GiB | 2,000 GiB | $5 + 150 x $0.02 + 976 x $0.01 | $17.76 |
| Large catalogue | 1,000 GiB | 5,000 GiB | $5 + 750 x $0.02 + 3,976 x $0.01 | $59.76 |
Private versus public files
DigitalOcean's file permission documentation says files in a bucket are Private by default. A Public file's URL does not expire and works for anyone who has it; making the file Private later stops that URL working. Private files are shared through presigned links: the control panel's Quick Share offers 1 hour, 6 hours, 1 day, 3 days or 7 days, and the AWS CLI or Boto3 can set a lifetime in seconds.
Here is the trade-off. The Spaces limits page and CDN guide both say requests made with presigned URLs are not cached by the Spaces CDN; you can use the CDN hostname for consistency, but there is no latency or cache benefit, and the limits page adds that presigned-URL transfers may double the bandwidth charge. So you choose between public files that the CDN caches but anyone with the link can share, and private files that stay protected but are always served from the origin bucket.
A sensible split for a course: keep paid workbooks, source files and full-length lesson videos private and generate short-lived links from WordPress only for enrolled learners; put free previews, thumbnails and marketing assets in public files behind the CDN.
Limits that affect video
- A single PUT upload can be up to 5 GB; larger files need multipart upload with parts between 5 MiB and 5 GB, up to 10,000 parts and 5 TB in total.
- Multipart uploads and PUTs sent to the CDN hostname with presigned URLs are limited to 8,100 KiB of payload, so upload large files to the origin endpoint.
- New buckets support 800 total operations per second; DigitalOcean recommends the CDN above 400 read requests per second.
- Incomplete multipart uploads older than 30 days are deleted automatically.
- Objects are billed with a 4 KiB minimum, and early client disconnects may be billed up to the full object size, which matters for video that viewers abandon.
- Accounts can have up to 100 buckets and 200 access keys.
Setting it up
Create the bucket in a region DigitalOcean lists as a free-transfer pair for your Droplet (its example: SFO2 Spaces to Droplets in SFO1, SFO2 and SFO3). Enable the CDN when creating the bucket or later under Settings > CDN; the default edge cache TTL is 1 hour, and longer TTLs speed delivery but delay updates when you replace a file. A custom subdomain needs an SSL certificate: DigitalOcean can issue a free Let's Encrypt certificate only if your DNS is managed at DigitalOcean; otherwise upload your own certificate and chain.
Spaces stores and delivers files. The pricing and how-to pages we read describe storage, transfer and a CDN, not video encoding or adaptive-bitrate playback, so a lesson video is delivered as the file you upload. For long or high-resolution lessons, compare that with a video host before committing.
Questions before you decide
Is the Spaces CDN an extra cost?
No. DigitalOcean's pricing documentation says the CDN is included at no additional cost, but transfer between the origin and the edge servers counts toward your 1,024 GiB allowance.
Can I protect paid course files on Spaces?
Yes. Files are private by default and can be shared with presigned links that expire. DigitalOcean notes that presigned requests are not cached by the CDN.
What happens if I go over the included transfer?
Additional outbound transfer costs $0.01 per GiB and additional storage $0.02 per GiB per month, on top of the $5 subscription.
How large a video file can I upload?
Up to 5 GB in one PUT request; above that, use multipart upload, which supports up to 10,000 parts and 5 TB per object.
Sources & verification
Product details and prices can change. Check the linked provider before buying.
- DigitalOcean: Spaces Object Storage pricing Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean Docs: Spaces pricing details Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean Docs: Spaces limits Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean Docs: Enable the Spaces CDN Accessed 30 Oct 2026
- DigitalOcean Docs: Set file permissions in Spaces Accessed 30 Oct 2026
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