Hosting pricing
How do I compare hourly and monthly hosting prices?
Short answer
Check how the provider actually bills. Some cloud providers charge per second or per hour up to a monthly cap, so the monthly figure is a ceiling, not a promised bill. Compare the same resources, how stopped servers are billed, and separate line items.
What changes the answer
- Billing granularity and monthly cap
- Whether a powered-off server is still billed
- Separate charges such as IP addresses and backups
An hourly rate and a monthly price are different things
Some providers publish both. DigitalOcean's documentation, for example, says that bundled-plan CPU Droplets are billed per second at an hourly rate, with usage capped at 672 hours (28 days) in a month. Other providers use different rules, so read each provider's own page instead of assuming that one provider's approach applies to another.
Stopped servers can still cost money
The same DigitalOcean page states that a powered-off bundled-plan Droplet is still billed, because its compute resources stay reserved, and billing ends when the Droplet is destroyed. Check whether any provider you consider treats stopped machines the same way before you rely on switching a server off to save money.
Compare like with like
Line up CPU, memory, storage and data transfer first. Then add the items billed separately. The DigitalOcean pricing page says public IPv4 addresses for Droplets with v5 configurations appear as their own invoice line item. Backups, snapshots, load balancers and extra storage are often separate as well. Add everything you will really use.
Fit the price to your usage
A server used for a few hours of testing is better compared by hourly usage. One that runs all month is closer to the monthly figure, and the cap is relevant there. Use your own expected hours rather than the headline number.
Verify and date your figures
Prices and terms change. Confirm the figure on the provider's page and note the date. HostCritiq shows prices with their source and verification date, and the cost calculator lets you enter your own assumptions. Where a provider's billing rules are not documented in a source we have reviewed, we leave them unknown.
Write down the comparison
Put each candidate in a small table with the monthly ceiling, your expected hourly usage, the separate line items and the date you checked the page. When a provider changes its terms you can see which figures to update, instead of rebuilding the whole comparison from memory.