That being said, don't you just like that you can spin up a 40G linode for four hours and only pay $4.80 instead of the full $800 up front?

As long as what yo do doesn't impede my performance I don't give a rat's ass.

Is there a trivial comparison table somewhere to show the different prices against each other?

Well, caker gave the table for three of the cheapest plans in the first post.

Quick copy and paste from the "Add a Linode" page on a metered account:

Plan          Storage  Transfer  Hourly    Monthly
Linode 1024   48GB     2TB       $0.03/hr  $20/mo
Linode 2048   96GB     4TB       $0.06/hr  $40/mo
Linode 4096   192GB    8TB       $0.12/hr  $80/mo
Linode 8192   384GB    16TB      $0.24/hr  $160/mo
Linode 16384  768GB    20TB      $0.48/hr  $320/mo
Linode 24576  1152GB   20TB      $0.72/hr  $480/mo
Linode 32768  1536GB   20TB      $0.96/hr  $640/mo
Linode 40960  1920GB   20TB      $1.20/hr  $800/mo

_________________
Matt Nordhoff (aka Peng on IRC)

So, for someone who 'spins up nodes' here and there (and for ease of comparison, never 'spins up' a node for less than a day at a time), then the (in the long term) pricing hasn't changed at all. As things are now, I fire up a $20 node for a day and close it, I'll end up with an account credit of: $20 - 1 days cost.

For someone who just buys or uses nodes on a 'long term basis', it removes the availability of discounts.

For those that like to 'spin the nodes' on a frequent basis, it saves them a bit of money (up front and long term).

Is that about right?

Correct.

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

If you're spinning up for more than one day, you'd still be saving. 1.5 days gets billed as 2 days under the old system.

Wouldn't hourly billing encourage people to hog the CPU and I/O, though?

For example, I have some batch jobs that I occasionally run on EC2, and the scripts are designed to use 100% of every CPU core so that it takes the minimum number of hours to complete. This saves me a few dollars a month.

It's OK to do this on EC2 because, unless you're on t1.micro, the CPU is dedicated to the instance. But I suppose it's NOT OK to do the same on Linode, since the CPU is shared and others will experience slightly degraded performance. After all, the fact that linodes have highly burstable CPU is precisely what makes them perform so much better than "cloud" servers with a fixed amount of dedicated CPU.

Caker verified that the linode costs the same regardless of if it's powered up or not, so there is no benefit to doing that. With AWS, you pay for storage separately, so firing up a machine for a monthly process makes sense.

What I want is a "storage only" fee so I can have a machine for occasional testing, upgrades (which invariably I get interrupted in the middle of), etc...

For renewing can I still use annual pay upfront still with the 10% discount?
Still have 6 months left though. No intention to switch to hourly bill.

No one will be forced to move to metered billing. So, you're fine.

-Chris

FYI, if you switch to this new style of billing, you cannot add extras (RAM, disk space, transfer, etc) a la carte to your Linode. You have to upgrade your Linode and do a host migration.

I really wish they would have explicitly mentioned this in the announcement!!

While cool, two accounts is more complicated than one in that you can't clone an existing machine into a test environment, test out a new setup and if it works, flip the IPs over and call it a live deployment. However, the existing system works out well enough for this type of use, unless you regularly screw around with 4096s or similar.



That would be nice, although I don't currently use the prepayment discounts, so it doesn't matter to me personally. I'm sure Linode has looked at the number of users who do and can figure out what sort of customer impact will be involved, it might be that there just aren't enough people taking advantage of such things for it to matter at all.

About the possible pre-payment discounts:

Perhaps something similar to AWS's reserved instances - where you can prepay a partial amount for 12/24 months and then receive discounted monthly / per minute prices, reducing the overall cost over the term by x% if that VPS is always on?

I think that would be more complicated than necessary. Maybe a model like this:

Deposit (pay into account credits) | Credit (get extra)
$0-249 | 0 %
$250-999 | 10 %
$1000+ | 15 %

So if you paid $500 in advance, you'd receive an additionally $50 in account credit. Then you if you got something refunded to your card, you'd lose the credits you had gained from this + the $5 fee. That is more simple IMO.

The numbers probably need to be adjusted.

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