I like the idea, however, this can make bookkeeping more complicated, and it also makes it impossible (or severely impractical) for a $20/month to hit that 15% discount. But if Linode is willing to turn it into a volume discount rather than a prepayment discount, it works out.

That is valid points. They could eventually issue invoices upon payment to the account and then just a statement whenever you paid for something.

Else, in the accounting software we use in our company, we can make it as an extra account, where we can say we've transferred x dollars. When we then get an invoice, we can just take it from there.

The other thing with the monthly could be worked out by adjusting the volume pricing - though again this is up to Linode. It also makes it harder that there is several payment levels, so for example, a $20/mo. would mean you'd get 15 % discount with an up front investment of $480 (or $408), while the 2 GB would be $960 ($816 after discount).

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lakridserne
Serverfruit - shared and managed VPS hosting, SSL certificates and domains
Awesome servers rented from Linode!

The 12 and 24 month discounts are about increasing predictability of resource usage; if you pre-pay a 2GB linode for 24 months, Linode can be reasonably certain that those resources will be consumed.

Discounts based on the size of the payment offer no such benefits to Linode. If you put $1000 in your account, that says nothing about how you'll use it, or how you'll change it around.

I'm a little confused about this. So if my linode is taking storage space, I am paying the rate per hour. So for a normal guy, does this new billing policy even make any difference? When I say normal, I mean I just have a few websites on the box.

Unless you regularly provision new Linodes and decommision them, it probably doesn't make any difference at all, you'll end up paying the monthly rate no matter what.

Where it really makes a difference is if you want to fire up large instances and deactivate them within the month, previously you'd have to fund the whole thing even if you only kept it active a few hours/days, after which time you'd have a large credit on your account. Now, you'll literally only pay (out of pocket) for the hours it's actually running.

But really, if you have a fixed number of Linodes and aren't adding/removing Linodes, it matters not.

The other place it might matter is if you plan on cancelling all services, in which case you're probably better off switching to hourly billing a month in advance. Also a corner case.

Thanks for the reply, helped to clear things up!

Looking at the new front page, are yearly options (with discount) no longer available? Are all new linodes metered?

or am I blind?

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

https://blog.linode.com/2014/04/09/intr ... y-billing/

We're still working out the details for longer-term discounts, but it is something we're planning on doing.

Thanks,
-Chris

An earlier post said a la carte additions like extra IP's and RAM aren't supported on the hourly plans. Is that true?

Extra IPs are supported, miprogrammer. (They're now offered on the Remote Access page, I think.) The Extras tab itself and the other extras such as RAM are all gone.

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Put me down as someone who misses the annual plans. While the discounted rate was nice, the main draw for me was actually the simplicity (1 invoice instead of 12). It gets a bit tedious having to invoice every one of my clients every single month.

Why not invoice your clients once per year? There does not need to be a 1:1 relationship in how you invoice vs how you pay your bills.

Yeah, I'm probably going to split the difference and invoice quarterly. The main downside to breaking the 1:1 is it puts income and outcome into different tax periods. But it can't be helped, I guess.

I'm not sure if it makes a difference from a tax perspective (different countries, plus there are different methods of recognizing revenue), but you could consider doing a large deposit with Linode and letting their invoices run out over the year. There may also be accounting methods open to you where you only realize the revenue as you deliver the service, although setting such things up may cost more in accountant manhours than it could save you.