How Hourly Billing Works
Last updated 31 July 2026
Overview
Hourly billing lets you pay for a server by the hour rather than committing to a month. It is funded from your prepaid wallet balance and metered continuously.
What your plan price covers
Your plan price is a single bundled rate covering vCPU, RAM, the NVMe system disk and one public IPv4 address. There is no separate charge for the system disk or the primary IP.
Billing runs until the server is destroyed
Powering a server off does not stop billing. A stopped server still holds its storage, its IP address and its place on a hypervisor, and none of that becomes available to anyone else while the server exists.
To stop paying for a server, destroy it from the server's page in your dashboard. Destroying a server is permanent and erases its disk, so take a snapshot or backup first if you need the data.
Resources billed separately
These continue to bill until you delete them, whatever state your server is in:
| Resource | Billed | |----------|--------| | Additional IPv4 addresses beyond the first | Per address | | Block volumes | Per GB, attached or not | | Reserved floating IPs | Per address | | Object storage | Per GB stored |
Hourly or monthly: which costs less
The hourly rate is your plan's monthly price divided by 608, while a calendar month is around 730 hours. A server that runs continuously therefore costs more on hourly than on monthly.
Break-even is about 608 hours, roughly 25 days in a month. If a server runs longer than that, a monthly cycle is cheaper for the same server. Hourly suits servers you create and destroy as work comes and goes.
Monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, annual, biennial and triennial cycles are all invoiced, so they do not require a wallet balance.
Minimum balance to create a server
You need at least one hour of the plan's rate available before an hourly server can be created, and that first hour is charged when the server is created. Your wallet balance and any promotional credit both count towards it.
If your balance runs out
Hourly servers are suspended when the wallet balance is exhausted. Top up from Billing → Top Up to restore them.
Related
- How to Top Up Your Wallet