It will certainly offer a strong incentive to existing customers not to convert their accounts, anyway.

+1, seconded, ditto.

D'oh! I missed this post. Seems as though all is well in "Linode land" for now.

Indeed I'm due for a 2 yearly renewal soon, I won't be switching to metered billing. Shame I could use the metered billing facility for testing things.

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So pre-pay on one account for the discount and setup a second account for testing things.

Metered billing is great for testing things.

So, to be clear, based on these two quotes (from different posts):

You'd get billed the hourly rate as long as a linode *exists* (consuming space on disk) regardless of if it's booted or not, correct?

My 2 cents:
I love linode, and have zero intention of leaving. But I've got 8 months of prepaid left and see no reason to switch to metered at all. I do feel it's a price increase with the removal of the pre-paid discounts, but I'd honestly just pay it if the price did increase: I'm that pleased with linode.

Now, I do occasionally need to spin up a machine but don't feel like paying the full price just to have it sit around off, so I use local VMs, which is inconvenient...if I could build that machine and leave it off but built at a discounted price (maybe just a powered off/storage only max per month less than the full "on" price?) I'd be thrilled.

...Xoff
Linode customer since July 11, 2008
(Best hosting decision I ever made!)

Correct.

Thanks for your business

-Chris

Yeah, some sort of separate network storage or backup images would be useful for that.

In the meantime, you might be able to write a StackScript to bootstrap your system, or set it up, resize the image down to a couple GB, and save it on one of your permanent nodes.

Edit: caker, you would be okay with users maintaining two accounts, so one can have old-fashioned-annual-discount billing and one can have metered billing?

Edit (T+18 minutes): I didn't mean to rub the ever-requested feature, storage, in Linode's face in the middle of the announcement of a different oft-requested new feature. I was just trying to help xoff00.

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Of course. That's totally fine with us.

-Chris

It would be good if both types of linodes could co-exist in one account. Perhaps new linodes would be metered by default, while you could convert linodes (once created) into long-term billing. You know, set a flag on that linode that changes how its billed.

Great, now I'm trying to think of a reason to spin up a linode 40960 for an hour or two at $1.20/hr.

They could use the metered billing with a pre charge option with a discount grade.
Something like:

- $200 : 5%
- $500 : 10%
- $1000 : 15%

Actually, it's a 17.6% increase.

Just sayin'.

Let's say you pay $100. You get a 15% decrease. 15% of $100 is $15, so you're paying $100-$15=$85.

But $15 is 17.6% of $85, so going from $85 to $100 is a 17.6% increase.

Only if you convert the account you have your pre-paid stuff on, which you don't have to. You can create a second account with hourly billing. Caker said that was fine.

No doubt something similar to pre-payment discounts will turn up before new customers are put onto hourly plans.

It saves me money because I have less accounting to do and because I only pay for an hours usage if I need an extra Linode for an hour - not a days.

That being said, discounts are always nice

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