Hourly VPS for Workshops, Classes and Hackathons: 30 Servers for a Day, Costed

October 7, 2026Mario Marin

Published: 7 October 2026

Giving every student, attendee or hackathon team their own Linux server used to mean a lab full of machines, or a shared box where one person's mistake ended everyone's afternoon. With hourly billing it costs less than the coffee. Thirty KVM servers for an eight hour workshop cost €1.34 in total on our smallest plan. This post covers what typical events cost, the credit rules that matter on the day, and how to build and tear down thirty servers with a script instead of thirty clicks.

What an event actually costs

Prices below are for Bucharest, our lowest priced location, on the hourly VPS line. Every server is a full KVM virtual machine with root access, so participants can install anything, break anything and start again without touching anyone else.

Event	Seats	Plan	Hours	Total
Linux or networking workshop	30	VPS I KVM, 1 vCPU, 2 GB	8	€1.34
Docker and web development class	30	VPS II KVM, 2 vCPU, 4 GB	8	€1.99
Data analysis lab with notebooks	25	VPS III KVM, 2 vCPU, 8 GB	6	€2.09
Weekend hackathon	20 teams	VPS IV KVM, 4 vCPU, 16 GB	48	€21.31

Other countries carry a small location fee. The same thirty VPS II servers in Sofia, for example, would cost €3.00 for the day. Prices exclude VAT where it applies.

One detail behind those totals: the first hour is charged when a server is created, and every later hour on the hour, so the bill counts the clock hours a server touches. Create the seats a few minutes after the hour turns and delete them a few minutes before it turns again, and eight hours of class bills eight hours rather than nine.

Courses that run for weeks: delete between sessions

The biggest saving comes from not leaving servers running between sessions. A class of 30 on VPS I KVM, left on around the clock for four weeks, costs €112.90. The same class meeting twice a week for three hours, with servers created at the start of each session and deleted at the end, costs €4.03 over those four weeks. Hourly billing rewards discipline, and a script, which we come to below, makes the discipline automatic.

If students need to keep their work between sessions, have them push it to a Git repository at the end of each class, so a fresh server can pick it up next time.

Credit rules that matter on the day

Hourly servers are paid from account credit rather than invoices, which is what makes them cheap and instant. It also means the event depends on the balance, so know these four rules:

You need at least €5 of credit before you can order an hourly server.
Charges are taken from that credit as the servers run, and we send a warning when your balance is about a day away from running out.
If credit does run out, servers are suspended after a one hour grace period, and terminated 48 hours after that.
A stopped server still bills. Only deleting it stops the meter.

So top up comfortably more than the event will cost, say €10 for any of the one day sessions above and €30 for the hackathon. Whatever you do not use stays on the account for next time.

Building thirty servers with a script

Clicking through the order form thirty times works, but our Customer API does it in a loop. Create a key in the client area under Profile → API Keys, with the read, orders and services scopes, plus the destructive scope if the same script should clean up afterwards. Then, for each seat:

Place an order with POST /api/v1/orders, with the billing cycle set to hourly, a hostname such as seat01, the location and an operating system.
Pass a first boot script in configOptions.user_data. A script that starts with #! runs once on first boot, so every seat comes up with the same users, packages and course files already in place.
Add the participant's public SSH key in configOptions.ssh_keys, or hand out the root password from the client area instead.
Send an idempotencyKey with each order, so a network hiccup during the loop can never buy the same seat twice.

Two limits to plan around: orders are accepted at up to 30 per 15 minutes per account, and each key gets 1,000 requests an hour. Thirty seats fit in one batch, and a class of sixty needs about half an hour of runway before doors open. The full reference is in our API documentation.

What about a golden image?

You can also set up one server exactly the way you want it, capture it as an image and order every seat from that image. It is the fastest way to start a server with large software already installed. The catch for big classes is that a captured image lives on the node where it was captured, so every server ordered from it is built on that same node, and a node only has so much room. For a handful of seats an image is perfect. For thirty or more, a first boot script is the more reliable way to make every seat identical.

Tearing it all down

The end of the event is where money leaks. Before you leave the room:

Cancel every server with immediate termination, either from the client area or with the API's cancel call for each VPS. This destroys the disk and stops the meter.
List your services and check that nothing from the event is left running or stopped.
Check the balance a day later to confirm the charges match your plan.

Practical tips for running a lab

Pick the plan for the heaviest exercise, not the average one. If one lab step builds containers, size everyone for it. The difference between VPS I and VPS II for a full day is a few cents per seat.
Choose a location near the room. Terminal sessions feel sluggish above roughly 80 ms of round trip time. Bucharest and Sofia had stock at the time of writing, and the order form shows live availability for the rest.
Spin up two spare seats. Someone always breaks a server badly enough that a fresh one is faster than a fix.
Keep a teardown alarm. A phone reminder at the end of the event costs nothing and saves forgotten servers.

The same pattern works beyond teaching: security practice, as in our post on a disposable lab on an hourly VPS, and burst capacity for builds, as in self hosted CI runners on an hourly VPS. If you are new to our VPS line, start with what a €4 KVM VPS includes, then order your first hourly server and run the setup script against one seat before the big day.