Friendhosting Lets Users Pay for VDS by the Hour — Monthly Billing No Longer Rules Everything

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Hosting provider Friendhosting has introduced hourly billing for VDS services, allowing customers to launch virtual servers without paying for an entire month upfront. Charges are now calculated based on actual uptime. Somewhere in the hosting industry, a traditional monthly subscription is quietly wondering when exactly things started going wrong.

The new billing model is aimed at short-term workloads: temporary environments, testing, development, one-off projects, and infrastructure that only needs to exist for a few hours or days. Users no longer have to rent a full monthly server just to complete a task that ends before the coffee gets cold.

Hourly Servers Arrive Without Replacing Traditional Plans

According to the company, hourly billing is not replacing standard monthly VDS plans but expanding the available payment models. All virtual servers remain accessible through existing Friendhosting accounts and can be deployed through the regular management interface.

At the same time, the provider introduced automatic limits on the number of hourly VDS instances available simultaneously. These limits are based on the customer’s total account turnover, including both previous spending and the current balance.

Both active and suspended hourly servers count toward the limit calculations. Otherwise, some users would probably attempt to recreate an entire cloud region from a single dashboard tab.

Mail Ports Restricted, Some Features Limited

Friendhosting also confirmed that hourly VDS services have restrictions on mail-related ports 25, 465, and 587 for both incoming and outgoing connections. In the hosting industry, this has become standard practice after years of providers discovering that “temporary server” and “spam campaign” sometimes arrive suspiciously close together.

Some additional options may also be unavailable for hourly instances, including extra IPv4 and IPv6 addresses as well as weekly backup services.

The company added that the limits and restrictions for hourly services may be revised in the future.