Dear All,

I am new to cloud computing. I am looking for 3 machines with 2Gz, 2gB, 30GbHD specs. These will be used for test purpose so they will be running for whole day.

Can anyone please advise a provider that is cheap and will not charge much when these machines are down. I checked rackspace. they suggested that I can take backup and then delete the machine to save cost. But taking backup and restoration will cost bandwidth and the prices increases steeply (for 90Gb for 3 machines.).

Could anyone please suggest a cheap provider who gives hourly billing and charges low for non-running VMs.

Thanks and Regards
DG

from my experience, rackspace is not on the cheap side. i know the planet's cloud is cheaper than rackspace, but they'll charge you even when the machine is off. like rackspace, you'd have to backup the data and delete the machine in order to stop the billing. there are not that many providers that have hourly billing. hosting.com, terremark.com, bluelock.com are among the few that i know have hourly billing. i would normally suggest you check the offers subforum, but i really haven't seen hourly billing providers on WHT.

just looked at the other post. add amazon and gigenet to the list of hourly providers.

I have used stormondemand, it is cheap and amazing, starting at $0.07 per hour.

VPS.net can easily do this.

We use them all the time when we need computing power on the fly. They have per minute billing.

You can scale as you need to as well - but if you change drive space you need to wait for it to rebuild which can take up to an hour.

Thanks to all for your response.....I checked vps.net and they dont offer windows.....i am looking for something under 100 dollars for 3 machines/month. I wont be using these machines for more than 4 hours a day so looking for hourly billing that can save me money.....

Cheers

I believe VPS.net are in the middle of their Beta testing - if you contact them they "maybe" able to sort some thing out for you. They've definitely shown examples of Windows working under their platform.

Usually their initial users of a product they launch get a discount too.

Thanks to all for your response.....I checked vps.net and they dont offer windows.....i am looking for something under 100 dollars for 3 machines/month. I wont be using these machines for more than 4 hours a day so looking for hourly billing that can save me money.....

Cheers

We actually do have Windows on our new clouds. Both Windows 2003 & 2008 are available.