6 ms·

Metered Billing (beta)

118 points by martey 13y ago

asb 13y ago
The per-hour prices are actually very competitive with DigitalOcean if you're after compute power. All Linodes have access to 8 CPUs. So for $0.12 an hour you get 4GiB RAM and access to 8 CPUs on Linode, vs 8GiB RAM and 4 CPUs on DigitalOcean. Of course right now you're often on a server with very light utilisation meaning you get much more burst access than you're paying for on Linode. Presumably the hourly instances will be on different servers to the monthly and you're much likely to have neighbours who are actually doing something rather than idling and serving a page through nginx every half hour.
- jtokoph 13y ago
  It looks like after beta, all billing will be metered, so I doubt they will have metered nodes on different hardware.
  - yareally 13y ago
    Only if you're a new customer. From the linked forum post: It will become the default for new customers. Existing customers won't be forced to change (but they'll be able to on their own).
- giulianob 13y ago
  The only big difference is the SSD.
  - kyrra 13y ago
    Linode had SSD hybrid in beta. Unknown release date at this point. https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10406 https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10406
    - Kudos 13y ago
      It's expected in Q1, they tweeted a picture of a large shipment of hardware last week.
- threeseed 13y ago
  Tell me you're joking ? You're actually comparing virtual CPUs between two providers.
pvnick 13y ago
This is great news and makes a lot of sense considering their new CLI (https://github.com/linode/cli https://github.com/linode/cli). I just want to say how happy I've been with Linode so far. Their prices are unbeatable if you're a decent sysadmin, and their support is amazing. I'm probably in one of the lowest tiers of customers as far as how much money I give Linode every month, but their support has never failed to be very responsive and make me feel like I matter to them. I once wanted to migrate from one datacenter to another, so I opened up a support ticket. Within two minutes they had it set up so all I had to do was press a button and my setup teleported a thousand miles with minimal hassle. Kudos to the Linode team, and if you happen to work for them and see this message thanks to you personally for making my life easier :)
- gr2020 13y ago
  I'm a Linode customer, and I like them. But everyone fawns over their support ("I got a response in 3 minutes!"), and while that sometimes happens, it often does not. I've found recently the typical response time is around 15-20 minutes. I've had other tickets (including one that was critical) go for over an hour with no response, and finally I had to call them to see what was up. Not saying they are bad - I'm a customer, after all. Just saying their support, in my experience, is not quite as amazing as some make it out to be.
  - chc 13y ago
    For comparison: Media Temple typically takes a couple of hours to respond to a ticket. So that's still not bad.
    - dougbarrett 13y ago
      As does Rackspace, even with their manage server services. More times than not when I go to Rackspace Chat to speak with someone, there is a bit of troubleshooting but then a ticket needs to be opened and response time is usually 4-6 hours. Not ideal at all.
  - GaveUp 13y ago
BrownBuffalo 13y ago
I just wish utilities worked like this. The constant rise and increase in actual service costs for gas/electric/water is down right criminal. Even with residential / corporate programs for curtailment and decentralized energy reduction during high yield periods is nuts - http://www.ecsgrid.com/ http://www.ecsgrid.com/, http://www.enernoc.com/ http://www.enernoc.com/
- wise_young_man 13y ago
  I don't think those two are comparable. Computing is known to be cheaper over time due to Moore's law, but you can't equate gas/electric/water the same way as there are other factors (population, demand, supply) that weigh in. Hopefully more innovation into alternative electricity (solar) will help with part of it. Another factor is inflation such as employee wages to maintain water supplies could increase the end cost to consumers.
- reqres 13y ago
  Well the difference here is that a utility is a natural monopoly. It's not under market scrutiny except for regulators. Linode is under intense pressure and it's been lagging behind competitors for a while now I've found Linode rock solid in all the time I've used them. But I've also found them a bit slow in adopting features that are important to me (this and SSD storage)
- eli 13y ago
  This billing system probably wouldn't work if all of Linode's customers tended to spin up more servers at exactly the same time, which is what utilities deal with when e.g. it's a heat wave. They need the infrastructure to support the peak load, even though it's quite a bit higher than the typical load.
- rexreed 13y ago
  Unfortunately, I learned the Linode Metered Billing doesn't work this way (see my comment above). Basically, you're billed for the number of hours that a server is on your account, not your actual usage of the server. So, the more or less you use of a specific server doesn't affect billing. It would only affect billing if changes in usage meant changes in the number of servers on your account. Maybe obvious to some, but wasn't to me. The analogy for electricity (with Linode Metered Billing, in comparison) would be adding or removing electric supply lines and/or meters vs. actual usages as measured in Kwh.
BIair 13y ago
I don't think cloud hosting will reach it's panacea until I can just upload a site or application, and be billed for what I use. No calculators, or intervention needed. Are weekends slow? It automatically drops a node. Get front page of Hacker News? Scales up automatically. Hosting that "just works".
- threeseed 13y ago
  Amazon Elastic Beanstalk ?
- hueving 13y ago
  The adding a node or dropping a node isn't really a problem. The problem is that most applications can't handle that type of environment. So until all applications are written in a way that can handle that, don't hold your breath.
- tonyarkles 13y ago
  Have you looked at App Engine? It's been a few years since I've used it, but that's roughly how I remember it working.
zedpm 13y ago
Very cool. People were really whinging about Linode's lack of metered billing the other day when the Linode CLI was posted. I just entered a ticket a few minutes ago and they've already updated my account to join the beta. The support rep did note that the change is irreversible; if you're worried you won't like metered billing for some reason then you might want to hold off.
jareau 13y ago
Kudos on this! We do metered billing at Balanced [1], essentially "grossing out fees" and charging the merchant at the end of the day for one lump sum, rather than "netting out fees" which would require us to take our fee out per transaction. We've gotten a some praise from customers who call it "super clean [2]." [1] https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees [2] https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-balanced/ https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-...
martey 13y ago
I contacted Linode about this, since one of my Linodes has an annual discount applied (https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-discounts/ https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-di...) and I was not sure how switching would affect it. They responded: "Unfortunately, at this time if you have any Linodes that you pay for annually or biennially, enrolling in the metered billing beta will remove your discount, and the process of changing over cannot be reversed."
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rexreed 13y ago
Cool service. At first I didn't understand how this worked, but basically you are charged for the number of hours that a server is on your account, not the number of CPU hours you use. So if you have a server on your account, and it sits idle for a whole month, you'll still be billed for the whole month. This metered billing service is for folks who are regularly putting up and taking down servers for different reasons, like test servers, increasing / decreasing capacity, and that sort of thing, and especially for folks who use the Linode API to automatically do that. It's in place of paying for these in advance and then getting a refund/ credit when you remove the servers. I'm sure that's obvious to the majority of the folks here. I'm probably a dork for not realizing that, but it's worth stating the obvious for folks like me who thought at first this was metered billing based on CPU usage, not based on # of hours a server is sitting in your account, used or not.

118 points by martey 13y ago

asb 13y ago

The per-hour prices are actually very competitive with DigitalOcean if you're after compute power. All Linodes have access to 8 CPUs. So for $0.12 an hour you get 4GiB RAM and access to 8 CPUs on Linode, vs 8GiB RAM and 4 CPUs on DigitalOcean. Of course right now you're often on a server with very light utilisation meaning you get much more burst access than you're paying for on Linode. Presumably the hourly instances will be on different servers to the monthly and you're much likely to have neighbours who are actually doing something rather than idling and serving a page through nginx every half hour.

jtokoph 13y ago
It looks like after beta, all billing will be metered, so I doubt they will have metered nodes on different hardware.
- yareally 13y ago
  Only if you're a new customer. From the linked forum post: It will become the default for new customers. Existing customers won't be forced to change (but they'll be able to on their own).
giulianob 13y ago
The only big difference is the SSD.
- kyrra 13y ago
  Linode had SSD hybrid in beta. Unknown release date at this point. https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10406 https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10406
  - Kudos 13y ago
    It's expected in Q1, they tweeted a picture of a large shipment of hardware last week.
threeseed 13y ago
Tell me you're joking ? You're actually comparing virtual CPUs between two providers.

pvnick 13y ago

This is great news and makes a lot of sense considering their new CLI (https://github.com/linode/cli https://github.com/linode/cli). I just want to say how happy I've been with Linode so far. Their prices are unbeatable if you're a decent sysadmin, and their support is amazing. I'm probably in one of the lowest tiers of customers as far as how much money I give Linode every month, but their support has never failed to be very responsive and make me feel like I matter to them. I once wanted to migrate from one datacenter to another, so I opened up a support ticket. Within two minutes they had it set up so all I had to do was press a button and my setup teleported a thousand miles with minimal hassle. Kudos to the Linode team, and if you happen to work for them and see this message thanks to you personally for making my life easier :)

gr2020 13y ago
I'm a Linode customer, and I like them. But everyone fawns over their support ("I got a response in 3 minutes!"), and while that sometimes happens, it often does not. I've found recently the typical response time is around 15-20 minutes. I've had other tickets (including one that was critical) go for over an hour with no response, and finally I had to call them to see what was up. Not saying they are bad - I'm a customer, after all. Just saying their support, in my experience, is not quite as amazing as some make it out to be.
- chc 13y ago
  For comparison: Media Temple typically takes a couple of hours to respond to a ticket. So that's still not bad.
  - dougbarrett 13y ago
    As does Rackspace, even with their manage server services. More times than not when I go to Rackspace Chat to speak with someone, there is a bit of troubleshooting but then a ticket needs to be opened and response time is usually 4-6 hours. Not ideal at all.
- GaveUp 13y ago

BrownBuffalo 13y ago

I just wish utilities worked like this. The constant rise and increase in actual service costs for gas/electric/water is down right criminal. Even with residential / corporate programs for curtailment and decentralized energy reduction during high yield periods is nuts - http://www.ecsgrid.com/ http://www.ecsgrid.com/, http://www.enernoc.com/ http://www.enernoc.com/

wise_young_man 13y ago
I don't think those two are comparable. Computing is known to be cheaper over time due to Moore's law, but you can't equate gas/electric/water the same way as there are other factors (population, demand, supply) that weigh in. Hopefully more innovation into alternative electricity (solar) will help with part of it. Another factor is inflation such as employee wages to maintain water supplies could increase the end cost to consumers.
reqres 13y ago
Well the difference here is that a utility is a natural monopoly. It's not under market scrutiny except for regulators. Linode is under intense pressure and it's been lagging behind competitors for a while now I've found Linode rock solid in all the time I've used them. But I've also found them a bit slow in adopting features that are important to me (this and SSD storage)
eli 13y ago
This billing system probably wouldn't work if all of Linode's customers tended to spin up more servers at exactly the same time, which is what utilities deal with when e.g. it's a heat wave. They need the infrastructure to support the peak load, even though it's quite a bit higher than the typical load.
rexreed 13y ago
Unfortunately, I learned the Linode Metered Billing doesn't work this way (see my comment above). Basically, you're billed for the number of hours that a server is on your account, not your actual usage of the server. So, the more or less you use of a specific server doesn't affect billing. It would only affect billing if changes in usage meant changes in the number of servers on your account. Maybe obvious to some, but wasn't to me. The analogy for electricity (with Linode Metered Billing, in comparison) would be adding or removing electric supply lines and/or meters vs. actual usages as measured in Kwh.

BIair 13y ago

I don't think cloud hosting will reach it's panacea until I can just upload a site or application, and be billed for what I use. No calculators, or intervention needed. Are weekends slow? It automatically drops a node. Get front page of Hacker News? Scales up automatically. Hosting that "just works".

threeseed 13y ago
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk ?
hueving 13y ago
The adding a node or dropping a node isn't really a problem. The problem is that most applications can't handle that type of environment. So until all applications are written in a way that can handle that, don't hold your breath.
tonyarkles 13y ago
Have you looked at App Engine? It's been a few years since I've used it, but that's roughly how I remember it working.

zedpm 13y ago

Very cool. People were really whinging about Linode's lack of metered billing the other day when the Linode CLI was posted. I just entered a ticket a few minutes ago and they've already updated my account to join the beta. The support rep did note that the change is irreversible; if you're worried you won't like metered billing for some reason then you might want to hold off.

jareau 13y ago

Kudos on this! We do metered billing at Balanced [1], essentially "grossing out fees" and charging the merchant at the end of the day for one lump sum, rather than "netting out fees" which would require us to take our fee out per transaction. We've gotten a some praise from customers who call it "super clean [2]." [1] https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees [2] https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-balanced/ https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-...

martey 13y ago

I contacted Linode about this, since one of my Linodes has an annual discount applied (https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-discounts/ https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-di...) and I was not sure how switching would affect it. They responded: "Unfortunately, at this time if you have any Linodes that you pay for annually or biennially, enrolling in the metered billing beta will remove your discount, and the process of changing over cannot be reversed."

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rexreed 13y ago

Cool service. At first I didn't understand how this worked, but basically you are charged for the number of hours that a server is on your account, not the number of CPU hours you use. So if you have a server on your account, and it sits idle for a whole month, you'll still be billed for the whole month. This metered billing service is for folks who are regularly putting up and taking down servers for different reasons, like test servers, increasing / decreasing capacity, and that sort of thing, and especially for folks who use the Linode API to automatically do that. It's in place of paying for these in advance and then getting a refund/ credit when you remove the servers. I'm sure that's obvious to the majority of the folks here. I'm probably a dork for not realizing that, but it's worth stating the obvious for folks like me who thought at first this was metered billing based on CPU usage, not based on # of hours a server is sitting in your account, used or not.