Hourly or annual hosting: which to choose in Morocco?

In Morocco, most hosts sell their servers by the year, paid in advance. International clouds bill by the hour. Both models have their advantages, and the right choice depends mostly on one question: do you know how long your server will live?

Annual hosting: a fixed price, paid in advance

You pick an offer, you pay for twelve months, and the server is yours for the year. It is simple, and it is often what an accounting department expects: a known expense, one invoice, nothing to monitor afterwards.

The trade-off:

• the year is due even if the project stops after two months;
• changing offer mid-year is rarely provided for, or has to be negotiated;
• setup sometimes goes through a quote or a manual approval;
• the amount for the whole year leaves your cash on day one.

Capped hourly billing: you pay for what you use

On QuantylCloud, each server has an hourly price and a monthly cap. Your wallet, topped up in dirhams, is debited hour by hour, and never beyond the cap in a calendar month. A server kept all month therefore costs the price of the month. A server deleted after three days costs three days.

What to know before choosing this model:

• deleting stops the bill, not stopping: a stopped server keeps its IP address and its disk, and is still billed;
• the service is prepaid: if the balance runs out, the server is suspended. Email alerts go out beforehand, as soon as the balance no longer covers seven days of usage, and the server is kept for seven days after the suspension;
• the unused balance can be refunded, and a creation that fails costs nothing.

Three worked scenarios

On the Standard plan (2 vCPU, 4 GB of memory, 50 GB of disk), at 0,42 Dhs incl. VAT per hour and at most 299,00 Dhs incl. VAT per month:

For short uses, the gap is clear-cut: hourly billing only charges the hours used. For a permanent server, the two models come out roughly equal, and it is the exact annual price of the offer you are comparing with, for an equal configuration, that decides. Compare at identical memory, processor and disk, and check whether the displayed price excludes VAT or includes it: our prices always include VAT.

Which one to choose?

Annual suits you if…

• the server must run all year, without a doubt;
• you prefer a single expense to a balance to top up;
• the annual offer is clearly cheaper, for an equal configuration, than twelve monthly caps;
• you need a server physically in Morocco, which some local hosts offer.

Hourly suits you if…

• you are testing, launching a project, or do not yet know how long it will last;
• you work on client projects, with servers that come and go;
• you do not want to tie up a year of budget on day one;
• you want to be able to stop everything tomorrow without losing anything but the hours used.

In practice

Many projects start with a doubt: hourly billing lets you settle it for a few dirhams, before committing. And if the server ends up running all year, the monthly cap guarantees it will never cost more than planned. To create your first server, follow our guide Create a VPS in Morocco.