Hourly, monthly or yearly: choosing a VM billing period
How each billing period works, what happens when you delete a VM, and which one suits which kind of workload.
Every VM on ByteNests can be billed hourly, monthly or yearly. The server is the same either way. What changes is the price and what happens when you are done with it.
The four options
Hourly: Pay per hour of use.: Deleted straight away.
Monthly: Billed monthly.: Deleted at the end of the billing cycle. You can cancel until then.
Yearly, paid monthly: 12-month commitment billed monthly.: Deleting early charges the remaining months.
Yearly, paid up front: The full year paid at once. The best value.: Deleted at the end of the billing cycle.
The create form shows the price for each option before you confirm.
Which one to pick
Hourly for anything short-lived: a CI runner, a test environment, a load test, trying out an image.
Monthly for servers you expect to keep, but are not sure for how long.
Yearly for the steady base of your setup, such as a production web server or a database host you know you will run all year.
Many teams mix them: yearly for the servers that are always on, hourly for everything that comes and goes.
Extras follow the VM
Scheduled backups add 10% (weekly) or 20% (daily) to the VM’s price. Extra disks are billed with the VM too. The VM’s Billing tab shows what it has cost so far.
Keep spending in view
Under Billing → Settings, set a monthly budget and turn on the email alert. It warns you as spending nears the limit without stopping anything. Billing → Overview shows usage so far this period and the projected total for the month.
CPU and memory cannot be changed on an existing VM. If you are unsure which size you need, start hourly, measure, and then create the long-term VM at the right size.