Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : Cloud by the hour / Minute billing

[maxihost]

Hello,

I am wondering what are the benefits to offer Cloud by the hour. What I am trying to ask here, if there is any profit offering this kind of Cloud and if there is lots of demand of that type of offering.

Are these kind of customers just trying to save money and keep starting/stop their Clouds all the day ? Does it worth to look for that type of user ? And what are the real market for those kind of clients ?

Most of the customers, or the serious businesses, that want to have a Cloud, are seeking for a good support, good network reliability and a decent control panel with the basic features. All the rest (minute billing and other many features that seems to be useless for most of the users) doesnt worth the spent time.

What are your thoughts about this ?

[VMStormVPS Dave G]

Originally Posted by maxihost

I am wondering what are the benefits to offer Cloud by the hour.

I'd love to see this information as well. I've only ever heard one compelling argument FOR hourly billing. IMHO it seems to be just be another way to confuse the customer w/ regard to how much their VM ACTUALLY costs on a monthly basis...

Dave

[Slepe Host]

I think it isn't a very good idea. I wouldn't ever purchase this and i can't see many others doing so. When you buy hosting it isn't really through the roof prices. So this just complicates things for a customer and as hosting can get very complex for someone with no knowledge of the subject this just adds another complication. Which is not needed.

[tchen]

Hourly/minute billing is useful for load and siege testing. Things like render-farms/encoders also benefit a bit using it as spill-over. Developers tend to like it too since they can start up a lot of instances to test things like network configurations in a closer to real world scenario.

However, for a 24/7 production server, it's pretty much useless even accounting for peaks and troughs.

[dediserve]

Hourly only works if your work load is extremely spikey, and your application has been built/designed to scale up and down quite dynamically.

99% of workloads don't fit this category, and will dave of lot of money running on a cloud with monthly fixed billing, but with still having the flexibility to scale when needed...

[Stratogen]

We tend to deal in private cloud deployments and these are almost always on a fixed monthly cost rather than hourly. Hourly pricing is useful if you just want to spin up a server to test something but in general most organisations prefer to know what the cost of their service will be.