This is great news and makes a lot of sense considering their new CLI (<a href="https://github.com/linode/cli" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/linode/cli</a>).<p>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 <i>two minutes</i> 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 :)
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.
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 - <a href="http://www.ecsgrid.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ecsgrid.com/</a>, <a href="http://www.enernoc.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.enernoc.com/</a>
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 <i>account</i>, 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.<p>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.
Kudos on this!<p>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]."<p>[1] <a href="https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees" rel="nofollow">https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees</a>
[2] <a href="https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-balanced/" rel="nofollow">https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-...</a>
I contacted Linode about this, since one of my Linodes has an annual discount applied (<a href="https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-discounts/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-di...</a>) and I was not sure how switching would affect it. They responded:<p>"<i>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.</i>"
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.
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".