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Providers with per-second/minute billing
I have lots of CI jobs which doesn't require buying a huge entire server and idling it most of the time.
There's the big three clouds which bill you per second, but they have high prices that make it not worth it to run my jobs there.
I'm looking for providers that offer per-second/minute pricing. A couple like Hetzner and Vultr offer hourly billing, but I'm not sure if I run a server for 30 minutes today and 30 minutes tomorrow, it's billed as 1 hour (= 2 * 30 min) or 2 hours (= 2 * (round up each 30 mins to 1 hour)).
Thanks in advance.
Comments
Afaik there is a minimum usage period for each Hetzner VM which is 1 hour. This means you’d get it billed as 2x 1 hour.
But it’s still very cheap though?
Github has actions which is free, Google cloud offers around 3000 minutes I think in cloud build, which is more than enough for your builds.
We do offer hourly billing, even tho it's worth mentioning that we do not charge a higher price if you don't keep the VM for the whole month (which Hetzner and others does).
So in the long run will be way cheaper.
You can verify that yourself doing the hourly price x 730
oh yeah I heard Cloudflare has something similar?
Yes, they have workers I think.
We have lots of LS jobs which doesn't require buying a huge entire second and idling it most of the time.
We're looking for providers that offer per-millisecond pricing. A couple like IBM and Intel offer secondly billing, but we're not sure if we run a server for 500 milliseconds today and 500 milliseconds tomorrow, it's billed as 1 second (= 2 * 500 ms) or 2 seconds (= 2 * (round up each 500 ms to 1 second)).
Thanks in advance.
For Vultr you’re charged the full hour at 0hr 1s, and then charged the next hour at 1h 1 s.
Are you sure GitHub actions wouldn’t work? Not everyone rents a VPS just to compile code.
There's actually AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Run which have per ms and per 100 ms billing respectively, it's just that they're very limited and you can't run Docker inside of them.
Proprietary-ish code that the world doesn't need to see (and would be better off not seeing), but GHA is only free for public repos.
Your script or whatever can go crazy or some employee hack you and bill your ass over budget. Keep that in mind.
I might be wrong but last I try Onidel "hourly" service it is charged by 30 minutes block instead, maybe @onidel can confirm whether it is intentional
Could you explain what you mean here?
If customers delete their cloud servers with us, and the hourly price is less than the monthly price, that is what they pay.
They only pay the monthly price if they use the server for most of the month. Then the monthly price is actually lower than the hourly price would be.
Maybe you mean that we charge customers for cloud server resources, regardless of whether or not the customers use those resources...?
For most of our products, including our cloud servers, customers need to actively cancel or delete them. (With cloud servers, customers delete them.) If a customer has a cloud server, and does not use it, but does not delete it, we will still invoice them for that server because we have allocated resources to them. --Katie
Google cloud run has option of running just a function, or you can run docker container as well.
we charge a full hour at minute 0, and round up to the nearest full hour when the VM is destroyed.
Fair enough.
Just curious, is it a CPU bound workload?
We've had ideas to utilize our higher end idle hardware to offer cheap, by the minute CPU power for one off workloads. It's fairly hard to find at any good price these days.
My jobs aren’t very CPU bound, but in general most CI workloads are as they need to compile and test code.
If you ever offer something like this, you could do something where if the customer averages > 50% CPU for 5 minutes, they’re throttled to 50% CPU, etc. Lots of options there.
Best value at 5399 seconds, where you pay one hour but get just under one and half hours.
But that's not what "round up" means, is it?
In how many hours consist a full month in the Hetzner billing?
From your website pricings seems like 3.80 EUR/ 0.006 EUR = 633.333 hours (which translates to 26.375 days?) I doubt you guys consider a month 26 days. So what I believe happens is that the hourly price is higher and at a certain point you "cap" the monthly price to 3.8.
Which is totally understandable, we were also considering doing so.
Yes, I believe the amount is approximately 26 days, but I am not sure if that changes from product to product. I would have to double check. So yes, in this situation, after 26 days, we would cap the price at €3.80. (That is what I meant by "most of the month".) The fixed monthly price (the "cap" as you say) is always cheaper than it would be to pay for the full month using the hourly rate. We always charge the cheaper of the two options. --Katie