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Just WOW.
Low end and hourly don't mix. Hourly requires lots of idling hardware, which is offset by higher costs.
Software? I thought control panels such as SolusVM/Virtfusion support hourly billing, nah?
I feel a little bit worried about Hetzner, for their too cheap price with hourly billing business model.
I have no clue when this happened since I have been away for awhile but for some god forsaken reason it seems everyone has gone to yearly billing. Seems like a bad move to me but hey what do I know right? Only that I will NEVER buy a yearly plan from anyone, and do not get me started one these lifetimes I have been seeing.
Abuse and processing fees if allowing small, incremental payments. I'd be more open to it with a $10 deposit minimum, for example.
Self Service/Resource allocation is still under development in VirtFusion (v2 testing branch).
End user build form:
End user usage/resource overview:
We're still awaiting integrations for credit/post-paid billing.
@lentro has hourly service.
The hardware is never idle: any hardware not rented out is being used for crypto mining, which is profitable on their GPU primary platform.
If the hardware is never idle, then it defeats the purpose of hourly billing as their customers can't scale as intended.
Whenever a customer rents a machine, @lentro deletes their crypto mining software and lets the customer use the machine.
Whenever a customer cancels a machine, @lentro reinstalls their crypto mining software to make profits.
The hardware is always generating profits regardless of whether it's rented by a customer.
Right now, it costs more in electricity when hardware is pushing crypto loads than profit being generated.
I think this is a nice compromise personally. $10 deposit minimum, then hourly from the credits, and you can have a policy like losing the credits if you're terminated for clear abuse/illegal content. Gives a lot of the benefits of hourly services without hurting the provider too much.
Right now, that's definitely true.
If we price too low, then there's no "burstability" for customers because there's not enough stock (and lose customers)
If we price too high, then we're running way too much idle compute (and lose money)
It's a tough balance.
@yoursunny mentioned we do crypto mining. Mining profitability has tanked with Eth moving to PoS, but we luckily have a few customers that have integrations with us where they consume a idle compute when it becomes available for a very heavily discounted rate. These customers queue workloads on their end and process that queue on otherwise-idle machines as they become available. When we need additional servers, we kill their VMs to free up that supply.
Even with those customers, we still can't consistently rent out all of our GPUs, though. So crypto mining still plays a role: a few DCs we're at are still by kW of allocated supply, not kWh of utilized power --- so it still does make sense to idle crypto mine if the power is already paid for.
It's a headache and hassle.
@raindog308 it's mostly margins and spammers. The tech is there, panels are there, it's simply at these small of prices it attracts the spammers. If we offered lower prices billed by the hour, we'd get more spammers and junk usage of our IPs, which is the real problem.
At pennies an hour price, someone would use our system, spam the junk out of someone for pennies, get the account blocked. Turn around, and do it again with another one of our IPs. This would just keep happening, and a single spammer could do it 10 times a day using vpns and proxies to sign up to a single provider.
We've toyed with the idea, I actually have it on the horizon in 2023 to "play" with the idea and see where it gets us, but I haven't decided how to sell yet so we don't get the riff riffs.
Community: Would hourly cheap vms be something you'd jump on if we offered? If so, what would you use it for, what would you be willing to pay??
Like I said, we're toying with the idea, but I have to fine-tune it before we launch it, I don't want the headache of the riff raffs...we'll still get 'em, just gotta figure out a way to make it not so problematic.