How billing works
You pay in advance by topping up credit. Your servers use that credit by the hour.
By the hour, with a ceiling per month
- A server is billed for every hour it exists, also when it is stopped. While we pause it because your credit ran out, the server itself is not billed; what it keeps taking up, such as its extra IPv4 addresses, still is.
- The hourly rate is the monthly price divided by 720.
- In one calendar month a server never costs more than its monthly price. A month with 31 days costs the same as a month with 30.
- Months are calendar months in UTC, counted in hours: 672 in February (696 in a leap year), 720 in a month of 30 days, 744 in a month of 31 days.
When you change the plan during a month
Each plan a server had in a month counts on its own, up to its own monthly price for its part of the month.
- The hour in which you change the plan still counts at the old plan. The new plan counts from the next full hour.
- The plan the server had at the start of the month (or when you made it) costs at most its monthly price.
- A plan the server moves to costs at most its monthly price times the part of the month that was left: the hours from its first hour to the end of the month, divided by the hours in that month.
- Within those limits every hour costs the hourly rate of its plan, and every hour is billed once.
An example in a month of 30 days: a server runs 10 days on a larger plan and then 20 days on a smaller one. The larger plan costs its 10 days by the hour, which is 10/30 of its monthly price. The smaller plan costs at most 20/30 of its monthly price. The same holds when a server moves to a bigger plan, and for each change when there are more.
- Prices are shown excluding VAT.
Kinds of credit
| Kind | Where it comes from | Expires | Paid out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid credit | Your own top-ups | Never | The unused part can be refunded |
| Bonus credit | Added by us, for example on your first top-up or with a promotion code | Yes, the date is shown in the console | Never |
Bonus credit is used before paid credit. So credit with an end date is used before credit without one.
The balance you see
Usage is booked once a day. The balance on the Billing screen is an estimate that already includes the hours of today, so it is always a little lower than the last booked amount. The list of transactions shows every change to your credit.