Demand for Hourly Billing

PacketVM · February 2023

Hi,

We are thinking about enabling a feature within Virtualizor which allows for hourly billing. This would likely require quite a bit of work on our part in order to integrate it so we're not going to do it if there is no demand for it.

However, would people like to see an hourly billing option for standard OpenVZ/KVM VPS's?

So in short, you would register an account and top up with a minimum of say $5 (which of course would go towards VPS's) and you could create/delete VPS's in all of our locations as you wish.

Opinions would be appreciated!

Thanks.

Micronode · February 2023

We don't do hourly billing but our resource pooling/instance credits is immensely popular. Most our clients have adopted this model compared to traditional VPS'.

Lee · February 2023

The demand for hourly billing absolutely is there. Whether for testing an existing change, trying something new and so on. I see a lot of it going on. Whether your service will have any demand for it is a different matter.

Jab · February 2023

also if you won't be run over with abuse... How many cheap VPSes (and IPs) at the same time I can spin for that 5$? You sure your anti-abuse is ready for mass spam/scan/ddos etc?

VirtFusion · February 2023

For us, it's been requested a fair few times. We decided to take the plunge and add it to VirtFusion.

It comes in the form of hourly billing (post-paid or credit balance) and resource packs.

We're still working on the final few abuse prevention measures, especially bandwidth abuse.

willie · February 2023

Hourly billing is great but for it to be an on-demand product, you have to have stock available all the time, which means you need idle capacity and higher prices. People who spin up an hourly VM may also have heavy cpu requirements while the VM is active. I do that with Hetzner VM's sometimes.

rcy026 · February 2023

I've found hourly billing to be hard to sell to low end customers. They want to know exactly what something costs before signing anything, and hourly billing does not really fit in. I have multiple times had customers go with a fixed monthly price instead of hourly billing even if it costs them a bit more.
Bigger customers on the other hand is a different question, they value the flexibility more and is not afraid of variable costs in the same way.

I think that with the right options it could be a good product. With a good controlpanel, pooling of resources and the option of putting a limit on max price I could see a market for it. Downside is that you need great flexibility when it comes to available resources, you will most likely need to have a lot of hardware idle most of the time.

crunchbits · February 2023

@rcy026 said:
I've found hourly billing to be hard to sell to low end customers. They want to know exactly what something costs before signing anything, and hourly billing does not really fit in. I have multiple times had customers go with a fixed monthly price instead of hourly billing even if it costs them a bit more.
Bigger customers on the other hand is a different question, they value the flexibility more and is not afraid of variable costs in the same way.

I think that with the right options it could be a good product. With a good controlpanel, pooling of resources and the option of putting a limit on max price I could see a market for it. Downside is that you need great flexibility when it comes to available resources, you will most likely need to have a lot of hardware idle most of the time.

My low end experience is much more limited, but early thoughts seem to bring me to the same conclusions you have. It's mostly our renderfarm/HPC customers that want on-demand billing, and they are even okay "paying more" for it because they generally don't need an instance idle for 26 days of the month no matter the price. They need to spin up a bunch of 16core high frequency instances and churn something out asap and then get out and it is almost always cheaper for them to do that for a couple of hours/days than even the best of monthly deals I could offer. Of course the balance is that you have idle gear that has to be there when they need it or else you're worthless to them. Even at 3x your monthly rate hourly it can get hard to justify that kind of capacity idle, always a careful balance.

Demand for Hourly Billing

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