An hourly VPS charges you only for the time you actually use it. Instead of paying a monthly subscription whether you use it or not, you pay per hour and you can delete the server whenever you're done. No long-term contracts. No surprises.
But hourly billing isn't cheaper for everything. This guide breaks down when it makes sense and when it doesn't.
A traditional VPS provider charges you upfront for a month:
An hourly VPS works differently. You pay based on actual usage:
Let's say you need a server for one week of testing.
Monthly VPS ($10/month):
TierHive Hourly VPS (Popular tier at $0.004061/hour):
That's a 93% savings for short-term work.
But here's the flip side. Let's say you need a production server that runs 24/7 for a month.
Monthly VPS ($2.92/month for equivalent specs):
TierHive Hourly VPS (Popular tier at $0.004061/hour):
With a monthly VPS, if you forget to cancel, you lose the entire monthly fee anywhere from $2.92 to $20+.
With TierHive hourly billing, if you forget to cancel, you lose maybe $0.01 - 0.04/day maximum. A whole month of mistakes at TierHive costs what one month costs elsewhere.
That's not just a pricing advantage. It's a risk reduction.
Testing and Development You need a staging environment to test a code change before deploying to production. You run it for 2 hours, confirm the code works, then delete it. Monthly billing makes this expensive. Hourly billing makes it cheap.
CI/CD Pipelines Your build server spins up for 60 minutes, runs tests, then shuts down. With monthly billing, you're paying for hours of idle time. With hourly billing, you pay for 60 minutes of actual work.
Disaster Recovery You keep a standby server ready to failover to if your main server goes down. With monthly billing, you're paying $5.00 + every month just to have it sitting idle. With hourly billing, you activate it only when you need it. If you never use it, you pay nothing.
Short-Term Projects A client project that lasts 3 weeks. You don't want to commit to a monthly VPS. Hourly lets you run exactly 3 weeks, then stop paying.
Experimentation You want to try a new database, rebuild your entire infrastructure, or test a different OS. With monthly billing, mistakes are expensive. With hourly billing, you can experiment freely, worst case you lose a few dollars.
Always-On Services If your server runs idle, you're still paying $0.004061/hour to have it sitting there doing nothing. Over a month, that adds up to the same cost as monthly billing, except you're paying for the idle time hourly providers try to optimize.
The real problem: not all workloads are consistently busy. If your application has periods of zero usage, monthly is cheaper because you're not paying per-hour for that idle time.
Continuous Production If you run a production service 24/7, monthly billing is simpler, and the cost is essentially the same. You're not saving anything by paying hourly yet you retain all the flexibility.
Here's an issue most hourly VPS providers don't mention: IP addresses.
When you destroy a traditional VPS instance and spin up a new one, you get a new IP address. If you're doing this hourly, your IP changes constantly. This breaks DNS, firewall rules, and anything relying on a static address.
Most people solve this by buying a static IP (additional cost) or running their servers for much longer periods (defeating the purpose of hourly billing).
TierHive's approach is fundamentally different. Instead of giving you isolated VPS instances that lose their network every time you rebuild, you get a private NAT subnet that stays constant.
Here's how it works:
You receive a /24 subnet (your own network). Within that network, you can spin up and destroy VPS instances as much as you want. Your external IP address, the one the world connects to, never needs to change, all our end points can reroute your traffic through out HAProxy intergration with SSL termination, which has the advantage of faster ttfp load times as the TLS is done at the end point closest to your end user.
With TierHive's free HAProxy frontend. This handles:
So if you're experimenting with a new configuration:
This makes TierHive ideal for a "cloud homelab" to learn on, or a perfect "developer VPS", or something thats just an easy in, easy out model, you get the network layer first and build flexible infrastructure on top of it.
You run a web application on a TierHive Popular tier server ($0.004061/hr). You want to test a new database configuration without risking production.
What you do:
Your production server kept running the whole time. Your external IP never changed. Your SSL certificate never expired. Your users never noticed.
Try doing that with a monthly VPS. The cost of even one month of a test server exceeds what you'd spend on TierHive experiments in a year.
Choose hourly billing if:
Skip hourly billing if:
TierHive starts at $0.000135/hour for a Micro tier (128 MB RAM, 1 GB SSD). The Popular tier is $0.004061/hour. The Standard is $0.002343/hour. The Maximum is $0.004686/hour.
More importantly, TierHive's NAT model gives you:
Hourly VPS isn't cheaper than monthly billing for continuous workloads. But it's cheaper for everything else and it removes the risk of sunk costs on servers you don't use.
If you're experimenting, testing, or building flexible infrastructure, hourly billing saves money and gives you freedom. If you need 24/7 uptime for months, monthly is simpler.
TierHive's NAT model makes hourly billing practical for use cases where traditional hourly VPS breaks down: you can rebuild your infrastructure constantly without losing your IP, domain, or SSL certificate.
Deploy your first server at https://tierhive.com. Start with the free trial, no credit card required.