Most VPS providers have an hourly billing rate and then a monthly billing limit. This may be something like $0.015 per hour or $10/month. So if you only use your VPS for a few hours a month, will you be charged only a few cents?
Maybe.
So the way a VPS works is that when you sign up for VPS hosting, the provider will allocate an IP address, harddrive space, etc. for your use. This means that while you are signed up to use that VPS, no one else can use that IP address, harddrive space, etc. So even if your VPS is not in use the provider is allocating you resources that you must pay for.
So turning off a VPS will not stop you from being charged. Even if you turn off your VPS you will still be charged, because the VPS provider is unable to sell the things that are allocated to you to anyone else.
However, if you sign up for a new VPS, use it for a day and then remove that VPS instance from your account, you will only be charged for that one day’s worth of use. This is because when you delete your VPS, the VPs provider is then able to go and reuse the IP address, harddrive space, etc. for someone else.
I have done this a number of times. If I needed to develop and test a program on a certain VPS, I signed up for the VPS, ran it for a couple of days, tested everything, and finally saved my program somewhere else. At that point I not longer needed a VPS, so I saved everything I needed to save, shutdown the VPS and deleted the VPS from my account.
I was only charged for a few days, not the whole month.
When I needed to test some more, I just created a new VPS and reinstalled everything. It’s a little bit more work, but it saved me some money.
