Red Hat License Fee for Rackspace Cloud Servers Changing from Hourly to Monthly

The purpose of this post is to make you aware of a change that will occur in the coming months: Cloud Servers customers will be billed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances on a monthly rather than hourly basis. Due to changes in our subscription arrangements with Red Hat, we can no longer offer Cloud customers hourly billing for RHEL licenses. Rackspace will begin charging our customers a monthly licensing fee, starting in September. This license fee will not be prorated.

What this means for our Rackspace Cloud Servers customers using RHEL:

Instead of being billed for your RHEL license on an hourly basis, customers using Red Hat will be billed on a monthly basis (30 day billing cycle). The Cloud Server will continue to be billed on a utility basis.
The new fee for RHEL will be $20 per month per server, which is an average savings of $1.60 per month for each server for a full month’s usage. This fee replaces the $.03/hour fee per server using Red Hat that is currently in place.
Every Cloud Server that you spin up with RHEL will be subject to a full month’s license fee, no matter how long you use it. If a Cloud Server with RHEL is running for any portion of a month, then you will be billed for that month’s license fee.

Thank you for your understanding as we shift to monthly billing for RHEL users on Rackspace Cloud Servers.

8 Comments

All the more reason to use CentOS!

Travis on September 7, 2010 | Reply

thanks for the nice post

hakan unsal on September 14, 2010 | Reply

How very silly of RedHat to do this. I’d like to hear a bit more of the why behind the decision. It seems like a step backwards.

Kent Langley on September 15, 2010 | Reply

Very smart.. Sign up for 4 hours, get the support you need and drop it. Pay $.12 for 2 hours of support and then drop it… I can totally see why Rackspace would do that.

John on September 15, 2010 | Reply

With that same logic they should drop all pay by the hour options. I don’t buy that. This looks more to be a stupid Red Hat requirement.

Doug Knoodle on September 15, 2010

@John this isn’t about support, it’s just the right to run the OS (and get software patches via YUM), full stop.

Bad call on RHATs part – it forces a lot of people to use CentOS (or a non-redhat clone) for preprod and development, in which case why not use that for prod too?

I know slicehost got a similar terms imposed on their hourly billed RHEL instances.

I suspect it’s got a lot to do with the impending launch of Redhats own cloud services.