
Metered Billing (beta) - martey
https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?t=10817
======
pvnick
This is great news and makes a lot of sense considering their new CLI
([https://github.com/linode/cli](https://github.com/linode/cli)).

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 _two
minutes_ 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 :)

~~~
gr2020
I'm a Linode customer, and I like them.

But everyone fawns over their support ("I got a response in 3 minutes!"), and
while that sometimes happens, it often does not. I've found recently the
typical response time is around 15-20 minutes. I've had other tickets
(including one that was critical) go for over an hour with no response, and
finally I had to call them to see what was up.

Not saying they are bad - I'm a customer, after all. Just saying their
support, in my experience, is not quite as amazing as some make it out to be.

~~~
GaveUp
I'm on that boat too. Most recently had a ticket about their DNS servers not
picking up changes. If I recall correctly the initial response was quick but
every subsequent response was from a different person that would run through a
script, one step of which was "disable your firewall completely," even though
that had been shown to not be the issue not to mention just being a bad
suggestion in the first place.

Ended up after a few back and forth replies it was escalated to the "DNS team"
but they weren't around until the AM. It ended up being the next evening,
after I followed up that I got any response. I ended up making a change on my
side to at least get websites back online, but it was over another week before
any real "answers" were given.

Of the two issues one was due to certain CNAME records not being
supported/allowed by their servers (not documented anywhere) which took over a
day to get a final answer on. The other issue, one of their servers
connecting/disconnecting to mine (seen in my logs) but not actually doing
anything was labeled as something to just be ignored. My logs still fill up
with those errors.

I've been with linode a long time and do like them, but as they've gotten
larger their support has increasingly gone the way of other large
companies...largely useless.

~~~
agwa
> I've been with linode a long time and do like them, but as they've gotten
> larger their support has increasingly gone the way of other large
> companies...largely useless.

Yup, me too. Been with them since 2005 and the quality of their support has
really tanked in the last 2 years. I think once a company becomes a certain
size, it's very hard to provide support that's not just a bunch of drones
reading from a script. It's very unfortunate.

~~~
jebblue
Their support has been awesome the past 3 years when I started with them.
There really is no comparison.

------
asb
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.

~~~
jtokoph
It looks like after beta, all billing will be metered, so I doubt they will
have metered nodes on different hardware.

~~~
yareally
Only if you're a new customer. From the linked forum post:

 _It will become the default for new customers. Existing customers won 't be
forced to change (but they'll be able to on their own)._

------
BrownBuffalo
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 -
[http://www.ecsgrid.com/](http://www.ecsgrid.com/),
[http://www.enernoc.com/](http://www.enernoc.com/)

~~~
reqres
Well the difference here is that a utility is a natural monopoly. It's not
under market scrutiny except for regulators. Linode is under intense pressure
and it's been lagging behind competitors for a while now

I've found Linode rock solid in all the time I've used them. But I've also
found them a bit slow in adopting features that are important to me (this and
SSD storage)

------
rexreed
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 _account_ , 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.

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.

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jareau
Kudos on this!

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]."

[1] [https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-
fees](https://docs.balancedpayments.com/current/#invoicing-fees) [2]
[https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-
to-...](https://grouptalent.com/blog/why-we-switched-from-stripe-to-balanced/)

------
martey
I contacted Linode about this, since one of my Linodes has an annual discount
applied ([https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-
di...](https://blog.linode.com/2008/07/31/referral-system-annual-discounts/))
and I was not sure how switching would affect it. They responded:

" _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._ "

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zedpm
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.

------
BIair
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".

~~~
hueving
The adding a node or dropping a node isn't really a problem. The problem is
that most applications can't handle that type of environment. So until all
applications are written in a way that can handle that, don't hold your
breath.

