New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
How important is hourly billing to you?
Many billing panels seem to lack the capability of doing hourly billing out of the box so I'm curious to the people utilizing the hosts here and to the providers here how important is hourly billing and what are your concerns?
Would you use hourly billing?
- Would you use hourly billing?97 votes
- Yes51.55%
- No48.45%
Comments
lowenders generally dont prefer hourly as it adds up too expensive per month.
how do you break down $7/year into hours?
Roughly speaking.
730 hours in 1 month.
7 dollars a month is roughly 0.96 cents ($0.0096) an hour
8760 hours (730*12) is around 1 year.
7 dollars a year is roughly 0.08 cents ($0.0008) an hour.
For us, hourly billing is good for automation and developement, but application is very limited.
I would use hourly billing only for abuse. To spin some ips for sweet and sour spam, scans etc.
Hourly billing = abuse
for SPAM / public proxies and so on.
Lot of new IPs cheaper than ever
If you're not part of a huge company which is able to deal with abuses around the world, skip this plan.
I love hourly billing. I enjoy being able to simply start a Hetzner VM, conduct my testing, and then pay just a few cents for it.
An example would be when I attempted to migrate my infrastructure to ARM CPUs but failed miserably.
I avoid it for personal hobby-could-turn-serious kind of projects
Since it costs hourly, I often end them sooner because of it (not that I need the $3, just because of the fact that it’s constantly ticking)
So I prefer yearly
For company stuff it’s nice though
And for testing
Atleast 1 company I know gives "hourly billing" for a month (you're forced to have the server for a month) and then you're free to use their "cloud hourly billing" infrastructure. I think this is a great way to prevent abusers like those.
Is it? It literally defeats the whole purpose of hourly billing if you are supposed to have the server for one month first.
Well it does in a way, but I mean, that's like Hetzner to me, I've been using them for that many years that sticking around for a month and now I can easily create all the instances I want would've been worth it for me (if this case applied to Hetzner which doesn't). Or you prefer sending 20$ PayPal / ID for verification?
I think you mean you have to have one server for a month, once you have had that, the server and any new servers are hourly from the start
While @sillycat understood it as each server has that 1 month grace period
Sorry I meant only the first one (first month period), once that you're free to use the cloud hourly billing thing without restrictions.
Providers with hourly billing plans are always on my radar. I know that sometimes one has to forget about quality but for quick testing and prototypes, there are really suitable.
Hourly billing is a marketing trap.
After careful comparison, hourly billing is always more economical.
Spinning up a VM only for a few hours when you have some load defeats the purpose of having idling VPS which we are all accustomed to.
Could you elaborate why you think so? Any what you'd like to see from a provider in order to not feel trapped if you had a VM billed hourly?
Useless marketing gimmick.
I think a lot of people don’t like the fact that even when the vm is off they are still charged for their dedicated resources like HDD and IPs etc. Maybe. Maybe not
A marketing gimmick?
xD
To be honest, I really prefer hourly payments. Sometimes I work on testing scripts and it makes the perfect sense to spin up a server, test the scripts, deploy scenarios, make sure different configs work etc etc. This might need an hour or two tops. No need to pay $10 for a full month, when I can pay an hourly rate.
Moreover, I was working on an office365 migration, where default imap sync wasn’t allowed/provided by the client. We had to move many mailboxes through separate vps’s - due to rate limits as well per IP. We created multiple vps’s and each one handled an account separately.
There are many great usecases to be honest.
If the hourly rate equates to the same monthly rate, then why not?
i don't get the logic of how hourly billing = abuse, while is more expensive and expensive is not what abusers can afford.
That's what Raspberry Pi is for.
I think you missed the "due to rate limits as well per IP" part.
Hourly billing is a marketing trap.
I buy a vm not for a hour or day but for a month or longer. I would like to know my monthly budget before payment. A hourly price is frustrate me because I need to recalculate it to a monthly price.
GPU hosting market running on hourly or minute rates. VPS is montly deal. Preffered 1.99€ for 1c/1g/40 gb nvme and GigE.
Hourly billing is great, especially if you can easily set up the service using terraform (and save money on local VPS-to-VPS traffic within the same node). I mostly use it to test a website's performance using Grafana K6.
i like being able to know how much i have to spend every month or year compared to doing the math to find out for 1 month. And since hourly billing doesn't change cost if the server is off/on i don't see the need for hourly. There are some niche scenarios where i can save cost with hourly like to quickly spin up and run some test etc.
Typically hourly billing is charged monthly, yet the subtotals are / 672 in order to find the hourly price and you wont go over the advertised max monthly price. > @ScreenReader said:
This is what I do, spin something up when I need testing in a public environment, but I no longer do so as I just reverse proxy from another public VM or node now.