Billing, Pricing, and Discount Information

Is there an easy way to calculate what I will be paying? 

Yes: the most accurate way is to call us or email us and request a quote.  We know how to save you money on your Cloud deployment since it is going to be very different from colocation or even other clouds.  Cloud computing should save you money, and we can figure out the most efficient use of it.  We no longer have a pricing calculator on our website because we found that most people overestimate their computing need, or bring it across from another service such as co-location or Amazon AWS, which already have them purchasing more compute than they need.

Can you help estimate the monthly cost for two-dual-core-cpu/16gb and four-dual-core-cpu/16gb? I'm a bit confused about your statement “our usual rate is $(call us)/mb/month of server RAM with equivalent rates for CPU usage since we measure on percentage server utilization.“

This question addresses the essential difference between ENKI and all other colocation service providers today.  ENKI does not lease servers: we are a cloud computing service provider.  If you're familiar with Amazon EC2, our service is similar.  We charge on resources used per month, similar to your utility bill.  Our costing model for computing and hence our pricing model is based on the percentage of a standard 4GB per core server that you use, whether that's CPU or RAM.  This is how the number ends up being expressed in Gb-mo.  This is generally in your interest and saves you money.  For example, every customer we've signed so far has come to us wanting to lease an equivalent hardware configuration to the one they currently have.  However, each of these customers ended up using significantly less resources than the total in their pre-existing hardware, while getting equal or better performance.  The reason for this is that when you buy or lease hardware, you have to provision the absolute maximum you could possibly need over the life of the equipment or to serve peak loads.  Similarly with cloud services where you provision a fixed-size virtual instance, you often have to overprovision to avoid moving all your code and data to a bigger instance.  When you buy true utility computing services, you pay for what you use, and if you need more, you request it and it's almost instantly available.  In addition, this means that you can provision virtual private data centers of varying sizes any time you want, and destroy them again when you want, and only pay for what you used.  This allows some of our customers to create large demo configurations and then effectively get rid of the hardware they used for the demos when they are done.  If by some chance you end up using all the resources on a full server, our prices are competitive with leasing the servers in a co-located environment with support and installing VMWare or AppLogic on them yourself.

Do you overallocate CPU or Memory, so that I get charged for resources I don't use?

No. At this time, ENKI only provisions virtual machines that are allocated exactly what you ask for, resource-wise. If you order a 1-core, 4GB VM that only uses 1GB of its RAM, the other 3GB will be waiting for your application to use them. Our competition sometimes overallocates RAM or CPU, meaning that if the server your VM is on runs out of resources, your VM will have to make do with less resources than you think you are paying for, causing you to experience slow performance or crashes. To satisfy customer requests, ENKI may offer this arrangement at a future date, discounted by the savings we see from overallocation.

Why do your servers have 4GB of memory per core?

In our experience with our customers, this is the maximum memory necessary to address most application needs.  This keeps customers from having to buy resources they don't need.  Lately, a number of industry analysts have agreed that the recommendation for enterprise customers is to provision their servers with 4GB per core if they plan on using them for a variety of tasks.  If you wish to order a hosted private cloud or a large number of cores' worth of resources from us, we can deploy hardware specifically aimed at your requirements.  In any event you can distribute your CPU and RAM in any way you want across multiple virtual machines, and you will still only be charged on the actual percentage of the server that you use.

What do you mean by saying that you charge for the maximum of memory or CPU used?

Since we charge based on the percentage of our server that your application uses, that percentage is determined by the maximum percentage of CPU or memory that your application uses, since the remaining percentage is what can be sold to other customers.   Since most of our customers have a significant number of virtual instances with varying CPU/memory ratios, we add them all up and charge only on the max of the totals, allowing you to have some of your instances with lots of RAM and others with lots of CPU without paying any extra. On your invoices, you will always be billed for the amount of RAM-equivalent used, which is either your actual RAM footprint, or the RAM equivalent of your CPU usage, multiplied by 4, if it is greater.

Do you have a document explaining how you bill for resources consumed?

Yes, please see our Billing Tutorial

How does your discounting work?

ENKI offers discounts based on usage levels.  Discounts are calculated at the end of each month based on that month's usage.  This means that as your usage level may vary, the resulting discount may vary.   Discounts are only offered to customers who are under a term contract with a minimum usage level specified.  All of our discounts are based on yearly consumption, so shorter contract terms result in proportionately less usage and less discounts. 

Our discounts are marginal and tiered, meaning that for each block of additional resources you use, your pay a progressively lower price.   In general, discounts go up rapidly to 33% off list at 8GB of usage, 66% off at 64GB, and then an additional 5% for every doubling of resources.  This rewards our customers for growth as well as peak usage.   We also offer discounts for resource reservations, see below.

Do you offer discounts on computing resources that are reserved but unused?

Yes, ENKI offers discounts on reserved resources, meaning resources you are not using by want us to hold available for you in the event you need them.   Reservations are offered at 82% off list price - essentially our cost to "keep the lights on," with actual usage charged at normal discounted levels.   Actual usage replaces reservation charges, so you don't pay twice for the resources you use.   For reservations of less than 12 cores, you can pay reservation fees month-by-month, unlike our competitors, where you'd have to sign up for a year.