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Utility Pricing
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Support ForumsWhy Use Utility Pricing?
Quite simply because we do not want the finances to be limiting your flexibility. In the age of cloud computing there is no place for fixed configuration pricing. At OpenHosting, there are on "plans".
Would you like a lot of RAM and not a lot of disk space and bandwidth? Or a lot of disk space and bandwidth but not a lot of RAM? Shape your VPS the way that works for you and do not worry about which plan to use.
Do you need to add more RAM tonight because your site has gone ballistic and then scale it back tomorrow when things calm down? Just do it, there are no upgrades or downgrades. Our Utility Pricing system will account for it with a 1 minute accuracy.
How does it Work?
The price is derived from the following resource measurements: Disk, RAM and Network. We take measurements every minute on our servers then hourly aggregate utilization stats into a central database which in turn is used for billing. (And yes, the database is huge, and we love it).
Network
The network utilization is measured in bytes (both sent and received).
Disk
Internally disk space is measured in disk tokens, which are then converted to dollars. One disk token is an average KB (1024 Bytes) over 1 minute interval. This means that we measure disk usage at the beginning and the end of a minute then average the two values; the resulting number of KB is the number of tokens. You can actually see how many tokes a VPS has used in a given month in our control panel.
RAM
RAM is also internally measured in tokens to be later converted to dollars. Similarly to disk tokens, one memory token is an average KB (1024 Bytes) over 1 minute interval. RAM utilization falls into two categories - VM and RSS. VM stands for Virtual Memory and represents the memory allocated, but not necessary actually used. VM may be swapped out or not yet be associated with an area of physical memory. RSS (Resident Set Size) represents actual physical RAM being used. We only charge for RSS and never for VM.
And what are these Commit Levels?
It's a volume discount. Under Utility Pricing, the more resources you use, the cheaper they become. We have different Commit Levels, the higher the level, the higher the discount. It is called a Commit Level because we ask you to commit it upfront towards the upcoming month.
Our system automatically selects your commit level based on your utilization, although if you prefer, you can set your commit level manually.