We do not rent an hourly dedicated server. Our dedicated servers are billed by the month, from €209, and Xeon servers in stock are typically online within about an hour. For work measured in hours, our KVM VPS bill by the hour from €0.0056, up to 8 vCPU and 32 GB of RAM, capped at the monthly price.
Can you rent an hourly dedicated server?
Not from us, and we would rather say so in the first line than at checkout. None of our eight dedicated servers has an hourly price. The shortest billing period for bare metal is one month, with quarterly and annual billing at three and twelve times the monthly price.
The reason is how a dedicated server is delivered. Each one is a whole physical machine for one customer, and delivery is handled by hand rather than by automated provisioning: the operating system is installed and the network configured before the login details are handed over. Building and wiping a machine like that every few hours would cost more than the hours themselves.
So the useful question is not "where can I get bare metal by the hour" but "what does my short project actually need". For most short jobs the answer is an hourly VPS, and for some it is a monthly dedicated server ordered for the month of the project.
What is the closest thing to an hourly dedicated server?
Our hourly KVM VPS. It is a virtual server, not a physical one, but it is billed for each started hour, it is online in about a minute, and you can destroy it the moment the job is done. Several of them side by side give you more cores and memory than one small dedicated server.
| Plan | vCPU | RAM | SSD | Per hour | Monthly cap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VPS I | 1 | 2 GB | 20 GB | €0.0056 | €4 |
| VPS II | 2 | 4 GB | 40 GB | €0.0083 | €6 |
| VPS III | 2 | 8 GB | 60 GB | €0.0139 | €10 |
| VPS IV | 4 | 16 GB | 80 GB | €0.0222 | €16 |
| VPS V | 6 | 24 GB | 100 GB | €0.0417 | €30 |
| VPS VI | 8 | 32 GB | 120 GB | €0.0806 | €58 |
These are the Bucharest rates, in euros and excluding VAT. Other locations add a small location fee to both the hourly rate and the cap. Traffic is unmetered on every plan, and every VPS sits behind the same 100 Gbps of always on DDoS protection as our dedicated servers.
How does hourly billing work on our VPS?
- Prepaid credit. Hourly servers draw from your account credit once per hour, and a minimum credit balance is required before one is created.
- Each started hour counts. A VPS VI that runs for 90 minutes bills two hours, €0.1612.
- Capped at the monthly price. Once a server's hourly charges in a billing month reach the plan's monthly price, the rest of that month costs nothing. On VPS VI the cap arrives after about 30 days, so an hourly server you forget about never costs more than a monthly one.
- Stopped is not deleted. A stopped server still holds its CPU, memory, disk and address, so it keeps billing. Destroy it to stop the meter.
A short project on hourly VPS, step by step
- Top up your account credit with enough for the hours you plan, plus a margin in case the job runs long.
- Pick a location. On 2 November, Bucharest, Sofia and Ashburn were in stock. Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Vienna were sold out with preorders, and Warsaw was sold out. Ashburn sits in Equinix DC6, as our post on Equinix VPS and dedicated servers explains.
- Deploy the servers from the client area, or through our customer API, which takes cloud init user data and SSH keys and applies them at first boot. That way every server comes up ready for the job.
- Run the job and copy the results off before you finish. A destroyed server takes its disk with it.
- Destroy every server when the work is done. One API call removes a server, and a deleted server stops drawing from your credit.
Scripted this way, a project with ten servers for six hours is a few commands and a few euros. As an example, ten VPS IV servers for six hours at the Bucharest rate cost 10 × 6 × €0.0222 = €1.33.
Our guide to hourly VPS billing goes through the details, and the post on when hourly beats monthly works out the break even point for each plan.
Hourly VPS or monthly dedicated server: what does a short project cost?
Here are three short projects priced both ways. They are examples, not quotes. The VPS side uses four VPS VI servers, 32 vCPU and 128 GB of RAM in total, at the Bucharest rate. The dedicated side uses a dual Xeon E5 2690 v4 with 28 cores, 56 threads and 128 GB on a 1 Gbps port, at €229 for the month.
| Example project | Four VPS VI, billed hourly | One dual Xeon E5 2690 v4 |
|---|---|---|
| 48 hour load test | €15.48 | €229 |
| 10 day render or batch job | €77.38 | €229 |
| A full month of work | €232 (four caps of €58) | €229 |
For anything shorter than a few weeks, hourly VPS win by a wide margin. Over a whole month the price is almost the same, and then the question is what kind of machine the job needs rather than what it costs. Our post on load testing on hourly VPS shows the first case in practice.
When does a short project really need bare metal?
A VPS shares its host with other customers. For most jobs that does not matter, but a few things only a dedicated server gives you:
- A guaranteed port. VPS ports are capped per plan and share the host's uplink. A dedicated server comes with an unmetered port of 1 to 200 Gbps that is not shared with other customers. If the project is a weekend of heavy downloads or a live event at several Gbps, that alone decides it.
- All the cores, all the time. A job that keeps every core busy for days, such as rendering, encoding or a large compile farm, gets steady performance on hardware nobody else uses.
- Predictable disk speed. Databases under heavy load and storage tests behave the same from hour to hour on drives that are yours alone.
- One big machine. Some software cannot be split across servers. Our largest dedicated server has 256 cores and 1 TB of RAM, far beyond any VPS.
If none of those apply, stay on hourly VPS. If one does, order the dedicated server for one month and treat the monthly price as the cost of the project.
How fast can you get a dedicated server for a short project?
Fast enough that you do not have to book it weeks ahead, as long as you pick a Xeon. Xeon servers in stock are typically online within about an hour of the order being confirmed. EPYC builds can take up to 14 days, so order those early, and the estimate is shown at checkout.
| Dedicated server for a one month project | Port | Per month | Typical delivery |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dual Xeon E5 2630 v3, 16 cores, 128 GB | 1 Gbps | €209 | About an hour when in stock |
| Dual Xeon E5 2690 v4, 28 cores, 128 GB | 2 Gbps | €279 | About an hour when in stock |
| Dual Xeon E5 2699 v4, 44 cores, 256 GB | 10 Gbps | €749 | About an hour when in stock |
| Dual AMD EPYC 9554, 128 cores, 512 GB | 1 Gbps | €959 | Up to 14 days |
There is no setup fee, so a one month project costs exactly the monthly price, and the price is the same in all 11 countries we offer. Our guide to what a dedicated server costs lists every combination of server and port.
Questions people ask about hourly dedicated servers
Do you bill any dedicated server by the hour?
No. All of our dedicated servers are billed monthly, quarterly or yearly. Only our KVM VPS have an hourly price.
What is the biggest server I can rent by the hour?
VPS VI, with 8 vCPU, 32 GB of RAM and 120 GB of SSD, at €0.0806 an hour in Bucharest. For more capacity, run several of them side by side.
Is traffic metered on an hourly VPS?
No. Hourly VPS have the same unmetered traffic as monthly plans, with no transfer allowance and no per GB charge.
Can I get bare metal for a single weekend?
You can order a Xeon dedicated server for one month, and when it is in stock it is typically online within about an hour, so a weekend event works if the monthly price fits the budget. If the event does not need a guaranteed port or all the cores of one machine, hourly VPS cost far less.
Start with the right one
For jobs measured in hours or days, deploy an hourly KVM VPS and destroy it when you are done. For a project that needs a whole machine or a guaranteed port, pick a server on the dedicated servers page and plan for one month of billing.