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Paying by the Hour: Do You Use Hourly Instances?

WatchLow-end providers have steadily adapted features that were once the exclusive province of big companies.  For example:

  • Reverse DNS configuration by the user
  • Anycast configuration
  • Block storage

But one feature that hasn’t made it is hourly instances.  If you go to Linode, Amazon AWS, or Azure, you can spin up an instance for 5 minutes, spin it down, and only pay for those 5 minutes.  But if you go to LowEnd providers, you can only pay by the month.

Why?

We discussed this in a LowEndTalk thread and several reasons were mentioned:

  • Low-end provider margins are so razor thin that they need to lock in subscribers for a month.
  • Abuse is higher with ephemeral instances, which means increased support costs.
  • Provider panels don’t support hourly billing.

Do you use hourly instances?  For everything or only occasionally?  Let us know in the poll and comments below!

This poll is no longer accepting votes

Do you use hourly VMs?

 

 

 

raindog308

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