Introducing High CPU Droplets

Today, we’re excited to announce new High CPU Droplet plans for CPU-intensive workloads. As applications grow and evolve we have found that there are certain workloads that need more powerful underlying computing power.

Use Cases
Here are some use cases that can benefit from CPU-optimized compute servers:

• App servers. App servers with significant loads and powered by NodeJS require more CPUs than what’s available with standard Droplets. High CPU Droplets can improve application performance without paying for storage infrastructure you don’t need.
• CI/CD servers. Improve the performance of your Jenkins pipeline to rapidly deliver new functionality to production. With High CPU Droplets, Jenkins can speed up continuous integration and deployment times enabling you to quickly deploy features to production.
• Data analytics applications. More CPUs can improve the performance of data analytics, specifically for applications that require heavy computation. In these cases, choosing one High CPU Droplet with multiple, dedicated vCPUs provides both better performance and more favorable pricing than multiple, standard Droplets.
• Build servers. If you build applications using remote build servers (using the DO API to deploy build servers as needed), it can be more cost effective to use High CPU Droplets on demand to initiate and complete builds more quickly.

We are offering five new Droplet plans. They start from $40/mo for two dedicated vCPUs, up to $640/mo for 32 dedicated vCPUs.


We've partnered with Intel to back these Droplets with Intel's most powerful processors, delivering a maximum, reliable level of performance. Going forward, we’ll regularly evaluate and use the best CPUs available to ensure they always deliver the best performance for your applications.

The current CPUs powering High CPU Droplets are the Intel Broadwell 2697Av4 with a clock speed of 2.6Ghz, and the Intel Skylake 8168 with a clock speed of 2.7Ghz. Customers in our early access period have seen up to four times the performance of Standard Droplet CPUs, and on average see about 2.5 times the performance.

These Droplets are available through the Control Panel and the API starting today as capacity allows in SFO2, NYC1, NYC3, TOR1, BLR1, and AMS3. They will be available in FRA1 and LON1 by the end of August.