Sell me a VPS
- Thread starter HN-Matt
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Yeah, I saw your 'on demand VPSs' thread, don't really care about established hosts who are too big to reply here. Maybe this thread will encourage more smaller hosts to consider hourly billing? It can't really be conceived as innovative, so isn't the question why more hosts don't offer it? I don't really see the HA WHMCS wasteland as an excuse. Like, has no one made an hourly billing plugin for it yet? If not, the point of this thread is to create outmoded criteria that no one can respond to. All virtualization tech on offer should be a minimum of 500 years old. If you get your virtualization distributed from the future or from any kind of aloof, non-communicative meta-world, you're disqualified in advance, etc.
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I mean there's always the general DigitalOcean, Vultr, iwStack, Atlantic.net, etc.
While it's OpenVZ, I would state Wable is pretty rocking.
Yeah there really isn't much regarding hourly billing if I recall correctly. I mean i guess there could be more for those who use that one VPS control panel with the rocket.
While it's OpenVZ, I would state Wable is pretty rocking.
Yeah there really isn't much regarding hourly billing if I recall correctly. I mean i guess there could be more for those who use that one VPS control panel with the rocket.
good post, is an offer and fits criteria, 500th repetition of well known brands I had never heard of, thank
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DomainBop
Dormant VPSB Pathogen
LunaNode made an open source hourly billing panel that is available for any provider to grab on github. It supports OpenStack, CloudStack, and SolusVM . Supported payment gateways are PayPal and Coinbase. https://github.com/LunaNode/lobster
There are also two hourly billing WHMCS plugins: "Hourly Billing" and "Modules Garden Advanced Billing for WHMCS" (this plugin has offered hourly billing since Nov 2012).
The usual reasons: laziness, lack of technical knowledge to implement it, lack of vision, none of their virtual Facebook friends are doing it, etc
drmike
100% Tier-1 Gogent
There is a reason for smaller hosts not doing hourly billing. Their software solutions (bought) tend not to support such billing or usage based accounting.
The model of hourly billing is a lousy one. Highly destructive to business. I'd advise any shop considering it to avoid the hype wagon around such.
You ask how is it destructive? Well, look forward to more resource intensive installs regularly. Wait for workloads that go loco without any notice. Look for customer use demands that suddenly go from quiet to absolutely insane and wanting to scale across many boxes. You need to have lots of idle gear - real servers - sitting there on standby to deal with the unknown. All that and speaking of instances spun up and used for an hour here, two there, only when needed over there. Single customer with potentially many billable items / granularity that is a PIG on accounting and rules that get hard to build right. Like is 0-30 minutes of use unbilled? 31-60 billed? Do we count every minute on all instances and add up all loose parts.
No matter what you do, it cannibalizes your business and adds quite a bit of accounting overhead.
Now I am speaking here of smaller shops... Bigger shops can pull this stuff off with own systems, with tons of idle gear, etc. But it still is a garbage model in my opinion.
That said, I like the hourly billing for development sandboxes. Just on my side need to orchestrate and API automate container creation, destruction, etc. so loose ones aren't on and billed.
Well on top of that, running the usual cloud platform which is commonly used in these applications usually have an expensive starting cost. For some people just installing SolusVM on a single dedicated server and they're done, whereas a proper "minimum" start to Cloudstack is at least a few nodes.
drmike
100% Tier-1 Gogent
Remember, if going Wable, to avoid NYC, something wrong there with multiple fiber outages and single homed. Beware of large packs too, as they were on a warpath about IPs and 'abuse'. IPs are $1 each per month on top of your, regardless if the popular plan says 9 IPs... that's price + $9 if you use the IPs. It's not hourly, but 'cheap' monthly compared to resources.
At last check iwStack was requiring cash deposit. Atlantic.net was problematic on new subscribers and a hoop dance. Vultr, shamefully has a lot of fog around and known for pissing customers off and firing customers.
Not to be that person, but DigitalOcean has the unit billing down and things there tend to work. In that list, that's where I'd be buying.
VyprNetworks
New Member
Digital Ocean is very good I used them before I decided to come into the actual technology business never had any problems.
Kudos to them for making it open source. Great movie too.
I think at worst hourly billing is a convenience for potential clients who want to try before they buy. Make a VM, try it out for a day or two, don't like the service, quit and never look back. Pre-emptively bypasses the hassle of a refund process. Or, client may end up staying for, say, two thirds of the month and then choose to leave. At least the host will receive ~66% of the revenue in such a scenario, rather than $0 in a monthly billing model after client cites the 30 day money back guarantee.
Other than that, it makes sense considering the general volatility of the VPS market. A lot of things can happen in a month. Sometimes paying for that length of time in advance just isn't worth it, especially when lots of VM are involved.
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drmike
100% Tier-1 Gogent
From the customer pre-buy / trial side, I entirely agree with you. Certainly appeals to me and constant network testing and try before buying (I've bought too much over the years that didn't make it to end of paid duration).
Issue though is no one can make a business work with super cheap hourly billing and no deposit. Dealing with micro transactions in nature and they are a pain to handle and hard to make a business viable with those.
Think of the fraud potential, rotating IPs rapidly in containers, etc.
It's a complicated technical puzzle to lock things and regulate bad actors. Putting a price barrier up front slows the worst of them down a bit.
I would say it may act as insurance against would-be fly-by-night hosts to that extent. Can't so easily take the money and run if they don't have it all in advance!
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drmike
100% Tier-1 Gogent
Reason to never jump into any pricier annual or long terms front side. With all the annual services I've bought over the years, maybe one I actually got my use out of and made it to the end with it.
Right, and this logic can be extrapolated to hourly billing. Implementation challenges aside, if one is stuck in a Universe determined by Commodified Time and has been reduced to the VPS world,
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They want €30 up front, but won't accept the money if your billing address is different than your company/business/personal/whatever address, so don't bother if the two don't 'match'. Unnecessarily overzealous fraud checking imo (I don't even think places like Amazon demand that). Didn't demand a passport like that German host, at least.
I gave them a shot the other month. Couldn't reach certain sites no matter the VPS location (I tried from every single one). Didn't care enough to find out why and left immediately.
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Haha, not quite what I was getting at here, but I recall liking that movie.
Now why can't I find that write-up on the musician attempting to play the world's oldest vulture-bone flute (carved from the hollow wing bone) in the presence of a living griffon vulture? Seems to have vanished from the internet. Or maybe I'm just temporarily stuck in the 5000 year old version of Google.
Now why can't I find that write-up on the musician attempting to play the world's oldest vulture-bone flute (carved from the hollow wing bone) in the presence of a living griffon vulture? Seems to have vanished from the internet. Or maybe I'm just temporarily stuck in the 5000 year old version of Google.
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