Lots of VPS or dedicated server provides will give you a VM or dedicated server for $x month, if you're just after certainty in billing.
However I'm guessing that you want a flat price, but you want that flat price to be based on only want you want to use, and you don't want to commit to any particular minimum. I'm not really aware of any rental market that works like that. You commit to a minimum, and the provider then dedicates something to you. Or you pay "as you go" and get a cheaper price. Cheers Ken From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Rankin Sent: Thursday, 3 April 2014 9:41 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] Start Menu returns Good point. It does suck....I find myself regularly reinstalling VMs in my home lab because the activation doesn't work any more. It's annoying but the only way I can get a lot of my testing done. If only AWS or Azure weren't so terrible to estimate a price for. If a cloud provider came up with a flat rate monthly fee for x amount of servers, I'd be over the moon. As it is, the billing models for per-minute usage and per-byte bandwidth and per-megabyte of RAM, etc., really make it no good to those of us just doing testing. On 3 April 2014 11:30, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Yet, MSDN remains. However it's $5K+ to buy an anonymous subscription. The fact that they're keeping Action Pack, Bizspark, the Academic options etc. seems to indicate that they're happy to keep providing cheap/free software to people - it's just that you need to jump through some hoops to get it (aka you can't easily get 1000 copies to abuse) Personally, I think it sucks (as it impacts me as much as it does you now that I don't work for a major partner nor am I an MVP anymore), but I can see why they do it. Cheers Ken
