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Is hourly ever worth it?

Roughly where is the break-even point for hourly billing? If I know I am going to have the VPS off for 50% of the month is it cheaper to pay for it by the hour? 75%? Or does it depend so much on the provider's pricing that there's no universal answer?

Thank you!

Comments

  • emghemgh Member, Megathread Squad

    It depends on the provider. Thank you.

  • It depends on the use case. Thank you.

    Bye.

  • MannDudeMannDude Patron Provider, Veteran

    During daylight savings time.

  • LeviLevi Member

    Do your math and decide. Thx.

    Good luck.

  • Fair enough. I was thinking there was more to it than simple math but I guess there isn't. My bad.

    Thanked by 2emgh wadhah
  • wadhahwadhah Member, Host Rep

    @pgslvwdk said:
    My bad.

    You did nothing wrong. It honestly depends on so many variables that no one can answer but you. For example usecase, technical requirements for the server, pricing, provider etc...

    From my experience, and in my use cases, yearly was both cheaper and made me have less anxiety about if I left those 13 instances running or not.

    So you would have to decide for yourself.

    Thanked by 1emgh
  • You're generally charged for storage regardless, so it seems like you'd have to be using high-spec'd machines sporadically for it to make sense. Maybe some sort of AI or encoding, or other one-off use cases.

  • LeviLevi Member
    edited March 2025

    When it's worth? Let's analyze example:

    • You encounter new provider with hourly rate;
    • Since provider is new, his ASN is fresh and innocent;
    • You begin to SPAM blast. No regrets, no remorse. 250 000 emails and than server destroy;
    • You spin new instance and repeat violent act as long as you can.

    That way hourly rate makes sense. Yes.

  • rskrsk Member, Host Rep

    @Levi said:
    When it's worth? Let's analyze example:

    • You encounter new provider with hourly rate;
    • Since provider is new, his ASN is fresh and innocent;
    • You begin to SPAM blast. No regrets, no remorse. 250 000 emails and than server destroy;
    • You spin new instance and repeat violent act as long as you can.

    That way hourly rate makes sense. Yes.

    Plot twist: provider has port 25 blocked, only lifts after proper KYC, which many here don’t want to provide :)

  • sillycatsillycat Member
    edited March 2025

    @Levi said: When it's worth? Let's analyze example:

    When it's worth? Let's analyze example:

    • You need to transfer an insane amount of data from X to Y and X has better speeds with Z than it does with Y.
    • You need to encode a large amount of video
    • You need to parse a large amount of databases
    • You need to run data analysis
    • You need to do anything else a person with a NERDY DATA job does.
  • emghemgh Member, Megathread Squad

    @sillycat said:

    @Levi said: When it's worth? Let's analyze example:

    When it's worth? Let's analyze example:

    • You need to transfer an insane amount of data from X to Y and X has better speeds with Z than it does with Y.
    • You need to encode a large amount of video
    • You need to parse a large amount of databases
    • You need to run data analysis
    • You need to do anything else a person with a job does.

    Yeah my mom has a job and she does these things very often.

    Thanked by 1farsighter
  • @emgh said: Yeah my mom has a job and she does these things very often.

    Yeah mine too. She uses hourly VPSes to manage her prostitution business.

  • NaXalNaXal Member

    Hi,

    Kindly note, there are other usage than running a simple website

    For example, if I am running a WordPress Blog with very predictable traffic all around the year. I know the resource needed and I can select my VPS with little headroom and go about it.

    No, here your hourly plans have no benefit since your VPS plan stays the same for the entire year.

    However, there are other web applications, from Databases to news websites to ecom platform and others. These services may experience astronomical spikes during some events or even at random.

    Hourly pricing along with API (for deployment) allows the devs to automatically scale things up as the load spikes and then stop those "extra" resources as the load die down.

    Here, in this use case, you dont need to maintain such really high resource for all the time and pay only for those "hours" on those extra resource that you deploy.

    For individual small projects, yearly plans are cost effective solutions and for projects which may experience load spikes, there these hourly options are cost effective.

    Thanks.

    Thanked by 1emgh
  • LordSpockLordSpock Member, Host Rep

    It heavily depends on the provider and application. I have a client who has a very old school classic ASP application that for most of the week has practically zero traffic but once or twice a week will need to cater for a shit load of traffic.

    Fortunately, these are anticipated events - so we have scripting in place to size up the SQL Server and web servers when needed.

    Keeps the bill nice and low at the end of the month.

  • there are some services where i prefer hourly payment and vps is one of them, i love the flexibility

  • Depend on the server

  • crunchbitscrunchbits Member, Patron Provider, Top Host

    @pgslvwdk said:
    Roughly where is the break-even point for hourly billing? If I know I am going to have the VPS off for 50% of the month is it cheaper to pay for it by the hour? 75%? Or does it depend so much on the provider's pricing that there's no universal answer?

    Thank you!

    It's probably priced somewhere in the 30-50% range at most places before you break even at the low end and up from there for more premium/bigger operations.

    We've been toying with it as well, and I can see some (legitimate) use cases for it. Need to spin up 32 cores to do something for 8 hours? Sucks to pay for the whole month. Have predictable e-commerce load weekly? Makes more sense to be at 2 cores for 144 of 168 hours out of the week, then bump to 16 to handle expected burst.

    Thanked by 1cainyxues
  • Depends on the host. For vultr, you pay hourly until you hit 672 hours, then you don't pay any more for the rest of the month.

  • Okay, I got a lot more useful information out of that than I was expecting after those first few responses :).

    The keys for me were (1) I can't going to dump the storage every time I turn it off and (2) I don't have any huge, data-intensive, CPU-hungry jobs.

    So I won't save much because I can't turn off the storage and I won't save much by turning off the CPU.

    As @emgh and @JabJab said... Thanks!

    Thanked by 1emgh
  • @pgslvwdk said: The keys for me were (1) I can't going to dump the storage every time

    Why not?. Find a provider with API. Script it - create VM, boot VM, install torrent software + script to handle VM deletion after those few days when e-penis ratio enough.

    Pay for 3 days rather than 30.

  • @JabJab Hrm... I was thinking I'd need to leave some torrents in place to boost ratios but maybe I can put them back in place when I bring up the VM. I'll try it the simple way and then do some math. Thank you for pushing on that!

  • I like hourly because I create and destroy things frequently through automation or testing. I use monthlies for things that I have that don't change often or I don't feel like automating deployments for so the resource would exist for a long time

    it's certainly cheaper for me to use an hourly cloud provider for stuff I spin up for a few hours to run tests and then destroy. I'd say that number is based on if I need something more than half of a month or just based on anticipation of permanence...

  • @sillycat said:

    @emgh said: Yeah my mom has a job and she does these things very often.

    Yeah mine too. She uses hourly VPSes to manage her prostitution business.

    Bruh,

  • MivoCloudMivoCloud Member, Host Rep

    Hi

    Of course, the provider's prices affect this, but a lot depends on the conditions under which servers are provided with hourly payment. Why do you need a server at all, if it's for opening a website, then you shouldn't turn it off in principle and it's better to take a VPS.

  • If you plan on having that VPS off half the time, it might just work in your favor, but it comes down to how the pricing shakes out with your provider. It's a case-by-case thing.

  • giraygiray Member

    Roughly, the math is 24 hours*30 days = 720 hours/month. So, 0.01 per hour will be 7.20 per month.

    However, there are a few complications. February is short of 30 days. Some months are more than 30; so there might be a few percent difference. Some providers cap their price per month at 720 hours even if the month has 31 days.

    Also, some providers bill by the second, or 6-second increments instead of per hour, and some have minimums (eg: google cloud per second pricing with 10 minutes minimum)

    Also, if it fits your use case, on demand instances are cheaper than instances that are on all the time.

    In general, my experience has been that if your load does not scale to at least 3 to 4 times, monthly ends up being cheaper.

  • If no monthly minimum and you want to test something real quick by paying instead of oracle free cloud, then yes.

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