How the hourly rate is worked out
Every plan, and every resource on the rate card, has a monthly list price. Divide it by 730, the average number of hours in a month, and you have the hourly rate. A server that runs the whole month on hourly billing costs exactly its list price; a server that runs for a day costs a day. Every size shows its hourly and monthly price side by side on the pricing page, and a custom vCPU, RAM and NVMe mix is priced the same way on the server builder.
Metering is per started hour, with a minimum of 1 hour per server from the moment it is built. An hourly server is billed per started hour (minimum 1 hour); one hour is reserved from your wallet when you order. A stopped server is still billed for its disk and reserved IP; delete it to stop all charges.
What the prepaid wallet does
Hourly usage is not paid upfront. You top up a wallet by UPI, card or net-banking, and each running server draws it down hour by hour. The panel shows the running balance and the burn rate, so you can see how long the balance will last at the current usage. A UPI payment credits the wallet instantly.
Hourly usage is billed in arrears and invoiced in rupees with 18% GST on a tax invoice that carries your GSTIN, so a GST-registered business can claim input tax credit on hourly spending just as it can on a term plan. See GST billing.
What hourly billing is good for
Hourly billing fits anything that will not run all month, or that you are not yet sure about:
- Trying a provider, an operating system or a stack image before committing money to a term.
- Load tests, build runners and one-off batch jobs that need a big server for a few hours.
- Weekend game servers and event servers, where gaming plans include the Windows licence.
- Testing a broker or an expert advisor on a forex VPS for a few days before moving it to a term.
- Staging and demo environments that are created for a project and deleted when it ships.
- Sizing: start with a small server, resize it in place from the panel once you know the real load, then commit.
What you still pay for when the server is stopped
A stopped server on hourly billing is still charged for its NVMe disk and its reserved IPv4 address, because both stay allocated to you; the vCPU and RAM charge stops. If you have finished with a test server, delete it rather than stopping it, and take the included snapshot first if you may want it back.
On general plans the Windows Server 2022 licence is also metered by the hour, so a workload that can run on Linux costs less per hour on a Linux image. Forex, gaming and algo trading plans include Windows in their price.
When an hourly server should become a monthly one
A monthly plan is 30% below the hourly list price, so once a server runs for about 511 hours (roughly 21 days) in a month the monthly plan costs less. Longer terms go further: a 12-month term is 44% below the hourly list and a 36-month term 65%.
Converting keeps the VM, its IP address and its disk; only the billing changes from the next hour. A term is not a lock-in either: cancel it early and the unused part comes back to the wallet with a GST credit note. The hourly vs monthly guide works through the break-even arithmetic in detail.
Running an hourly cloud server: a short checklist
- Create an account and complete eKYC
Sign up with your email and verify once with Aadhaar/DigiLocker or an ID document, as CERT-In requires.
- Top up the wallet
Pay by UPI, card or net-banking. Put in enough for the hours you plan to run; the burn-rate view in the panel tells you when to top up again.
- Deploy with hourly billing selected
Pick a plan or a custom size on the VPS page or the builder, choose the image, and choose hourly instead of a term. The server is usually live under a minute later.
- Watch the balance, delete what you have finished with
Stopped servers still cost their disk and IP. Delete test servers, keep a snapshot if needed.
- Convert when it stays
If the server is still running after a few weeks, move it to a monthly or longer term from the panel. Nothing is rebuilt.