Demand for Hourly Billing

PacketVM

Hi,

We are thinking about enabling a feature within Virtualizor which allows for hourly billing. This would likely require quite a bit of work on our part in order to integrate it so we're not going to do it if there is no demand for it.

However, would people like to see an hourly billing option for standard OpenVZ/KVM VPS's?

So in short, you would register an account and top up with a minimum of say $5 (which of course would go towards VPS's) and you could create/delete VPS's in all of our locations as you wish.

Opinions would be appreciated!

Thanks.

yoursunny

Hourly billing is good for these use cases:

• GPU rental for video encoding.
• High RAM (8GB or more) and dedicated cores (1 core per 4GB) for software compiling.
• Windows and Mac VM for software testing.
• Large storage HDD (more than 500GB) for gaining points when a private tracker opens sitewide freeleech.
• Temporary IP for sending spam or launching DDoS attacks.

Francisco

You're going to have to keep a lot of idle hardware around.

If you're renting you're going to really feel it. If you're doing colo and have a whole rack you might be able to just use idle power.

Francisco

raindog308

Random thought: does it have to be hourly? Perhaps renting by the day would be a meeting point where you get enough time commitment to be profitable and the customer has enough flexibility.

mgcAna

Hourly rental is abuse magnet + you need lots headroom which is already pointed out by @Francisco for the customers those spin big VMS for few hours and use resources excessively or else it will hurt your regular or long time customers.

PacketVM

Maybe resource pooling would be better.

Hxxx

or just do hourly billing and when it's out of stock is out of stock... no big deal...

BingoBongo

Hourly billing is always good for clients but pain in the ass for the provider.
So if your target market is LowEnd then my advice is to avoid such things.

If you have resources (hardware/human) and you are not relying on just LowEnd market then Hourly billing is useful (specially if you provide cloud and not just simple vps using some random cheap software like solusvm or virtualizor)

Kassem

Hourly billing option is good.

@Hxxx said: or just do hourly billing and when it's out of stock is out of stock... no big deal...

This could work. Not just "out of stock" but a button to subscribe "Notify me when there is capacity"?