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What billing model do you prefer for VPS?
There are several ways you could be billed in order to provision cloud resources, the most popular here seems to be a prepaid subscription but I'm curious about what you think of others, if you are strongly in favor one way tell me about why.
Classic Prepaid Subscription
- You pay for the upcoming month up front.
- Stripe / Paypal subscription.
- Used on many WHMCS billing portals.
- Can be long term such as 3 years in order to have a lower price for the service.
Account Balance Credit
- You will top up your account balance before you can deploy services.
- Easier to implement crypto for purchasing.
- Some hourly based service providers use this model.
Pay As You Go / 1st of The Month For The Previous 30 Days Usage
- Many hourly based large cloud service providers bill you retroactively on the first of the month for the previous month because many of their services might only be used for a few minutes at a time or for the whole month.
- Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr.
- Need to have a card attached to your account.
- Limits are imposed on how much you can provision for your first few months in order to ensure they are paid.
Billing Model
- What billing model do you prefer for VPS?31 votes
- Classic Prepaid Subscription67.74%
- Account Balance Credit  9.68%
- Pay As You Go / 1st of The Month For The Previous 30 Days Usage22.58%
Comments
I think for people with many online services, prepaid subscriptions the way to go.
Less of a hassle, especially for many servers from various companies.
I use paypal subscription on everything, the paypal auto payments can be easily managed on the paypal website.
I personally feel more secure this way too, since if a host turns out to be a summer host. Go to paypal and turn off auto pay before I get scammed, if payment goes through I just file dispute. Ez pz
Lately though, I started converting to using privacy.com to make virtual cards that auto refills every month of the day payment will be made.
I create a one use virtual card if I feel off about a company/purchase.
I guess this is also a prepaid method.
I preffer this:
Straightforward algo. Helps to keep deadpool events to minimum.
I prefer paying upfront like 1-3 years if I'm confident in the provider. Having account balance credit is a big plus for paying in advance too.
For production applications expected to last a long time, I prefer contracts. However, for idle services, tests or just doing a YABS and never accessing it again: prepaid is the best model.
I prefer the first one, don't ask me why but I got used to it.
I never top up balance on websites, I prefer to pay in advance for the service.
I love second one, cause somehow I need some computing hourly for compiling and I okay to spend on account balance.
Hetzner allows "manually" billing for Pay as you go...
Hourly billing FTW:
I start a lot of VM for maybe an hour or even less.
Option 1 and 2 combined is best.
prefer prepaid with paypal one time payment.
but free is always best.