Hourly billing VPS

Updated 2026-10-30

On Wolkra, a VPS is billed for each started hour from a prepaid balance, and the total for a month is capped at the plan's monthly price. You pay only while a server exists, there are no contracts or setup fees, and traffic is never on the bill.

The model in three rules

1. Prepaid. You add credit to your account first, by card or crypto. Usage is taken from that balance.
2. Per started hour. A server that exists for 2 hours and 10 minutes is charged for 3 hours.
3. Capped at the monthly price. However the hours add up, a server never costs more in a month than its listed monthly price.

That third rule is what makes hourly billing safe for long-running servers too. You get the flexibility of paying by the hour and the predictability of a monthly price.

Hourly vs monthly, side by side

For a longer discussion of the trade-offs, read hourly vs monthly VPS billing.

When hourly billing pays off

• Testing and evaluation. Try a plan, an OS or a one-click app for an afternoon and delete it.
• Short-lived environments. Create a staging server per pull request or per customer demo and remove it after review. See development environments.
• Burst capacity. Add servers behind a load balancer for a sale, a launch or an event, then delete them when traffic settles.
• Batch jobs. Run a heavy data import or a video encode on a CPU-optimised server for a few hours.
• CI runners. Start runners when the queue is long. See CI runners.
• Learning. Break a server, rebuild it, and pay only for the time you spent.

How to stop the charges

Charges for a server end when you delete it. A few habits keep the bill tidy:

• Delete the server when you are done with it, from the console or through the API.
• Snapshot first if you might need it again. A snapshot is billed per GB and you can create a new server from it later.
• Detach and delete volumes you no longer need. Volumes are billed per GB per month.
• Use labels to mark short-lived servers so they are easy to find and remove.

How your balance is protected

Prepaid billing means you are never surprised by a large invoice, but it also means a server can stop if you forget to top up. We send warnings well before that happens:

1. Low-balance emails go out while you still have credit.
2. When the balance reaches zero, a grace period starts.
3. After the grace period, servers are stopped, not deleted.
4. Deletion only happens after a final notice.

To avoid the whole sequence, turn on automatic top-up by card. The billing and balance docs describe each step.

Prices behind the hours

Every plan has a monthly price, which is also the most it can cost in a month. Prices are in EUR without VAT and include unmetered traffic.

Add-ons are listed on pricing: a primary IPv4 is €0.89 per month and daily backups cost 20% of the server price.

Paying into your balance

• Card: Visa, Mastercard and others through Stripe, with optional automatic top-up.
• Crypto: USDT (TRC-20) and TRX on the TRON network. See crypto VPS.

There is no minimum term, so the balance you add is used only by what you run. Read more on payment methods.

Getting started with hourly servers

1. Sign up and add credit.
2. Create a server in Frankfurt.
3. Use it for as long as you need.
4. Delete it from the console or with a call to the API to stop billing.

Automating creation and deletion through the API is the easiest way to get full value from hourly billing, for example from a script that builds a test server, runs checks and removes it.

Pay for the hours you use

Start with a small top-up and see exactly where every cent goes. Create your Wolkra account.