I think per hour billing makes perfect sense.

I also find it somewhat annoying that any suggestion of a change is immediately attacked on these forums with "Linode is perfect while you are an idiot" messages.

That's because everyone's worried that things will change. Especially with regard to the latest Rackspace announcements.

Not on a suggestion. On the suggestion that since that particular person wants it, everyone in the world must also want the same thing, so it's a no-brainer for linode to make the switch, complete with weak justification based on psychological impacts.

I never said that everyone in the world must want it, nor that it's a no-brainer.

I think I gave better than pure psychological impacts, although I do think psychology makes a big difference. If I have to set 4 servers for 2 hours, on rackspace I'd pay 4x2x24 cents ($1.92), on linode it's going to hit us with $640 bill. Sure, it will stay on credit after we delete the servers, or we can even contact their support as someone suggested and ask for a refund, but it's still money leaving our account straight away. The hassle of asking the credit back alone in this case is not worth it, and means we're constantly going to Rackspace instead of Linode. Like I said, despite Linode's superiority on several fronts. Again, I only speak for myself and don't pretend to know other people's habits or decision-making processes.

I also wonder if you can find someone who says "I chose linode because I didn't like the per-hour billing of Rackspace and preferred to pay a month in advance"...

For my steady-state stuff, it is kinda nice to know I'm paying $19.95/mo, rather than roughly $34.56<x<$43.92 depending on how many days there are in the month and how popular things were. I suppose it's the difference between budget billing and not-budget-billing for gas and electric.

It would be nice to have the postpaid option, perhaps for legit businesses with references and good credit and all that. However, doing it as a standard thing assumes a considerable amount of risk (and requires an Accounts Receivable department that isn't a cron job), which is probably why it is the exception in this market rather than the norm. The two I've used that do it are Amazon and Rackspace, with market caps of $89.32 and $5.51 billion respectively; I suspect size has something to do with it.

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Per hour billing doesn't have to be postpaid option. For example, per hour billing could be setup to only apply as long as you have enough funds at linode. So one can transfer a few dollars to linode once, and that will be enough to create/delete a lot of temporary nodes.

Exactly, and I think I mentioned it earlier somewhere, we'd be happy to pay in a deposit of some sort, activation-fee or whatever, to allow us to use per-hour billing. Pre-paying $640 however for usage of <$2 is a bit steep if I am to use my previous example...

There's a complication, though. Bandwidth is pro-rated too. A $640 linode (the 16GB) over a period of 2 hours would only come with roughly 6GB of bandwidth.

Considering bandwidth is pooled anyway, and since we hardly use our bandwidth allocation anyway, I don't see this as a problem. Whatever the case is, Linode already takes care of this when it pro-rates, so it can just as easily take care of bandwidth cost when doing per-hour billing. I think it does it already http://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?t=4182 when dealing with overage anyway ($0.10 per GB).

btw, my example was of 4 servers, each with 4gb, rather than one server with 16gb. Not that it makes a difference for this discussion...

What ever happened to the Linode staff? Do they not read these forums anymore?

It's not like the traffic is so huge that it would be alot of work for the Linode staff to give some feedback and guidance on these issues.

historically, staff have rarely posted in this type of discussion.

Since several people had been discussing how precisely Linode prorated, I just ran a 512 for 14 minutes. It cost me $0.66. Thus, it was prorated to the day. (As pointed out by DrJ and ericoc; I hadn't thought to do the math myself.)

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Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

Odd, this appears to have changed at some point. I checked my history and I have a credit of 32 cents less than the payment (back in 11/09).