Today we're shipping per-second billing on every VPS plan. If you spin up a box, run a 12-minute job, and destroy it, you pay for 720 seconds. Not an hour. Not a day.
Why it matters
Most cloud hosts bill in hourly buckets. That's fine if you're running a long-lived service, but for batch jobs, CI runners, build hosts, and ephemeral test environments, you're paying for time you didn't use. We've heard from customers running ML training jobs that finish in 18 minutes but cost an hour. That's over.
How it works
- Provision time is free. The clock starts when the OS finishes booting.
- Billing is in 1-second increments, with a 60-second minimum.
- Snapshots are still billed by the GB-month, prorated to the second.
- Reserved instances and committed-use discounts are unaffected.
Per-second billing is on by default for all new VPS provisions starting today. Existing servers will roll over at their next billing cycle.
If you have a use case that doesn't fit cleanly — say, a bursty workload that runs for milliseconds at a time — talk to us. We're already working on a serverless tier that takes this further.