If you use a custom disk image too, you can have it boot, apply security updates, reboot, then ssh in within minutes.
Work for however long, shut down. I do this with linode and their GPU VMs. If you shutdown nightly and on weekends, the costs drop dramatically on a monthly spend.
I only need it a few hours per day, so very cheap for custom compute.
Oh, you're just talking about deleting it when you're not using it in general, rather than during peak times. Makes sense.
[−]newComputerWhoT · 2026-11-15 Sun 19:12 UTC ·
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The usage pattern i've seen on flexible compute is more aligned with 'I need this process to execute, run it when it's cheap' not 'I'm going to kick off this process, stop it if it get's expensive.' for example AWS Spot Instances
Work for however long, shut down. I do this with linode and their GPU VMs. If you shutdown nightly and on weekends, the costs drop dramatically on a monthly spend.
I only need it a few hours per day, so very cheap for custom compute.
The custom volume keeps your persistent install, configs, work in progress, etc.
You can programmatically kick off a linode, attach the volume, then boot, as well as delete, all via curl or python.
So not variable rates, but no rates when the beast is deleted.