I am trying to find a VPS provider that allows me to pay one or even two years in advance and invoice me for that.
I know … I am personally not a friend of yearly plans, but if the project that is paying the bills ends at the end of the year and you want to keep the website running beyond that budgetary end of the project, I need to pay for the following year in advance.
It looks like most providers will allow you to deposit money into your account and then have your monthly bills paid out of that deposit, but their official bills will still be monthly bills. At least this is the case with DigitalOcean and Linode (who just recently scrapped their yearly billing).
Can anyone recommend a hoster that can provide me with a proper bill for my advance payment?
Bluehost sells VPS and usually promotes prices that are for 3 years in advance.
In the past, you received what you paid for so if you did not use the full provision then there was no refund. I couldn’t find the T&Cs that would confirm this for the VPS service.
I used John Companies for 6 months shy of a decade. I never had any trouble with them. Actual humans responded in a timely manner when I needed them to. I know one year I paid them a whole year in advance for a savings of a couple months. I now have lots of Digital Ocean referral credits and their pricing, at least for what I was using, isn’t that competitive.
My personal VPS is from Panix, a NYC ISP I have been doing business with for 20+ years. They are very much geared towards longer running systems and offer only monthly and yearly billing plans by default. They are full service and not trying to compete on price (alone).
I just received confirmation from Hetzner that they can provide me with a bill for 12 or even 24 months while maintaining the monthly opt-out possibility. And since they seem to provide a decent product that is even less expensive than digitalocean, I will be exploring this further. Curious if @ljpp, who is also trying Hetzner has any news regarding the Hetzner Experience?
They should be fine, if you can live with German flexibility and support that is work days/office hours only. Have an issue over the weekend? See you on monday.
Ironically, they have been the most flexible so far, at least what billing is concerned. And, hey, shouldn’t webadmins too take the weekend off sometimes? Now we’ve got an excuse: “I couldn’t do anything before the hosting company were back after the weekend!”
I know of MyVirtualServer here in Germany, ran by 4 people currently, right now its KVM based and not failovered but they will have a new billing system and soon later they will move over to OpenStack with high availability system, also dedicated servers are planned and more.
It looks like they are already offering OpenStack but the big downside seems to be that they are not with SSDs (or if you choose SSD instead of HDD, you get like 10 or 15 GB). The other open question is what speed their CPUs are running at…
Those are clocked at 2.93GHz.(That would be very nice nice for Discourse!) But does that mean that is the speed I get? Sorry if this sounds trivial, just want to be sure)
@ljpp, do you want to add them to your list of low cost VPSs and share your test results?
I can recommend you check out the hosting services by BGOcloud. They offer both OVZ and KVM VPS plans and if you choose an annual billing you will get big discounts as well. I’ve been using shared hosting by them and I haven’t had any problems so far. In fact, it’s been really fast, which is great. I hope you’ll find what you need.
Sure, there are several VPS providers that offer yearly or longer billing cycles. This can often be more cost-effective than monthly billing. One such provider is NavicoSoft. NavicoSoft offers VPS hosting with yearly billing options, allowing customers to pay upfront for a year of service.
Now we’ve got an excuse: “I couldn’t do anything before the hosting company were back after the weekend!”