I am working on a new business model for a spinoff.

I have a few nice clusters going that I am goign to start selling shared space on. I have the tech issues worked out, but I am having issues figuring out the best method or metric to base billing on. When hosting a site on a larger (5 or more server) load ballanced cluster, specificaly a dynamic site. even more specificaly a high load site, where I know that the php/perl load and the DB load is going to be my most costly resource used.
It doesnt seam right to charge by space and transfer. They are minor costs compared to CPU and memory use, and cpu/mem use dont follow space/transfer in use. Because a site uses a lot of space and transfer doesnt mean it will be hard on the server, and vice-versa.

So I want to charge based on CPU time, or database query time.. etc. Something actualy representing the load the user is putting on the servers in the cluster.

I can run everything as cgi and that will seperate the processes out by user. But there isnt a good, low load, way of totaling this up for monthly billing. At least not that I have seen.

How would you bill in this situation?

Don't think there is an easy way to bill for this ,have a look at http://www.nagios.org/ it allows you to easily monitor server load and resources being used.

Yeah I have used Nagios,
But it doesnt tally a users total cpu time.......

Im just drawing a blank here....

Probably 90% of our customers use almost zero cpu and don't have databases. If we charged by your model, we'd go broke within a few months. Are you going to charge a premium price, hoping to gain customers that would otherwise purchase a large data transfer/space hosting package?

--Tina

Tina,
The clients I am shooting for will use a lot of CPU. So much so that billing based on space or bandwidth will not give me anywhere near an accurate discription of their cost to the company.
I understand that in the normal shared hosting plan this would not work, but with this model, I can have a customer useing 1G of space and almost no CPU or 1G of space and using all of the resources of 4 or 5 entire servers. Bandwidth is a little more accurate, But not a lot.

Most of the people I am working with have dynamic sites very much like a bulletin board. but very heavily used.
I have thought about charging based on connecitons per sec. But some of the customers have sites that generate a huge load per each connection.