It's a more honest way to do business

Our founders have been in the web hosting industry, offering traditional hosting with web hosting plans for over a decade each. The reality is that you get sick of ripping people off with hosting plans. I'm not saying we're Robin Hood, but the truth is that most of a web hosting company's profit is on people who are severely overpaying.

In reality, hosting companies train sales teams to "upsell" and push customers to upgrade their hosting plans. If you've been a web hosting customer and have ever encountered a performance problem, you already know this is true. Pushing upgrades is so common that if you hire coders, there's a good chance they're telling you to upgrade your hosting, too!

If that isn't wild enough, web hosts employ server admins whose job it is to determine which customers are "abusive" and kick them off their servers (or move those customers to "server islands" with other "abusers"). You'll find rules in every other host's Terms of Service explaining what behavior is abusive and that they'll suspend or terminate your service for doing that. They might not call their customers "abusers"; some will be polite and call them "noisy neighbors."

Okay, you see the problem, but why is "utility billing" a more honest solution? Think of a host selling web hosting plans like an "All you can eat" diner and Slicie's utility billing as a gas station. At the restaurant, they're losing money when you eat more, and they're ripping off the people who eat less to pay for the "overeaters." At the gas pump, you're simply paying for what you want, and the gas station owner is thrilled the more you use. Think of it like this: Has your electric company ever been upset that you used extra electricity?

It comes down to this: we're winning when you are. When your online business gets more traffic, your usage increases, and you pay a little more. We think that's fair.

Pay For What You Use

It's just as simple as it sounds: doing something for a second costs half as much as doing the same thing for two seconds. Using ten times more costs ten times more; there's no fine print here.

Here are some examples to be super clear, but it's as easy as you think.

• Using 1 GiB of RAM for 31 days costs $1.
• Using 1 GiB of RAM for 1 day costs $1 / 31 = $0.032
• Using 1 GiB of RAM for 1 hour costs $1 / 31 / 24 = $0.0013
• Using 1 GiB of RAM for 1 second costs $1 / 31 / 24 / 86400 = $0.000000016
• Using 4 GiB of RAM for 1 day costs $1 * 4 / 31 = $0.129
• When we say "using 1 GiB" we mean your average usage was 1 GiB.
• We always show things based on their "monthly" price, where you used it for 31 days.
• Does the month have 29 days in it? Cool - you pay for 2 days less of usage.
• Doing the same thing always costs the same, regardless of when it happens.

So, it's scam to get me to pay thousands of dollars, right?

We understand the fear behind paying for what you use. You're asleep or on vacation, and your server goes rogue and runs up a fortune before you can react. We get it; that sounds terrifying. The reality is that it's also never actually happened, and our automatic scaling is designed not to allow that sort of situation. With that said, we created AutoPilot, a unique feature of Slicie that enables you to specify a custom budget. AutoPilot guarantees your budget, notifies you when your usage increases, and throttles your server to prevent overuse.

Also, let's be clear: our team of experts monitors our entire cloud constantly. While our autoscaling is automated, we keep an eye on unusual behavior. We do not want your server to run up a bill you won't pay.

How do I know what my usage is?

One of the best parts of Slicie is that you can always hold us accountable. We have detailed statistics available to you within our customer portal. We break down each resource and provide graphs that outline your usage with high precision. If you're skeptical, you might think we'd lie about those stats, but here's the cool thing: we pull those statistics from your cloud server. That means if you look at the stats within your server, those will be the same stats we bill you from. The truth is, we err on your side. If we have some problem and fail to collect stats at that time, your usage is free. If we give your server more memory than it uses, you only pay for the memory your server uses. If we have some overhead to provide you with a resource, we pay extra, not you.

So, what does everything cost?

The most common thing you'll pay for, which typically represents the most significant portion of your bill, are the resources you use on a server. We charge the same rate for all our hosting services, including shared cPanel accounts and custom cloud servers.

• CPU cores are billed at $10 per month.
• Memory is billed for each GiB of RAM at $1 per month.
• Storage is billed for each GiB 10 GiB of NVME at $1 per month.
• Bandwidth, also known as network data transfer, is billed at $1 per 100 GiB.
• Dedicated Public IPv4 addresses are billed at $1 per month, though they are not required.

A "month" is 31 days. You'll save a bit on shorter months.