Frequently Asked Questions

Company

Can I trust Exoscale?

Exoscale has been founded in 2011 and has now several years of successful and reliable service behind it.

We are backed by Telekom Austria Group and service small to huge workloads for startups, enterprises and organizations worldwide. Our clients come from a variety of sectors as B2C SaaS, Financial, Health and Scientific Research. We have been chosen by the CERN among other competitors to serve a workload up to 10,000 cores.

The company is based and operated in Switzerland, is protected by Swiss privacy laws, and offer several zones in Europe. Our platform is no-lock-in, pay for what you use, and we refund your outstanding balance would you be unsatisfied.

We believe to be a simple, scalable, safe alternative to major US companies, with an edge on security, privacy, and support.

Where are your headquarters located?

Our Headquarters are located in Switzerland, from where we also operate our platform. Look up the address below.

Business

Do you offer managed services?

Throughout the partner network, we can suggest both professional services and recurring managed services for workloads and data running on our cloud.

Do you have a reseller program?

Yes we do have reseller agreements. Contact us at sales for application.

Do you have a referral system?

Yes, we provide a referral system called Mentor Program. You can find all the details in our documentation.

Do you offer HIPAA business associate agreements (BAA)?

Yes, this is possible and we already have it in place with several customers. Please contact our support from within our portal or from the contact page for more information.

What is the current status?

You can check our status page anytime to know about incidents, planned maintenance and more.

Billing

How am I billed?

Each resource, unless noted otherwise, is billed by the hour. This means that your billing will be updated on an hourly basis. This does not mean that if a resource runs for 10 minutes it will be billed 1 hour. Most resources are metered on exact consumption usage or up to the minute.

What are your payment options?

Default payment method

The default payment method is via a supported credit card or PayPal account. Supported credit cards are:

  • VISA
  • MasterCard
  • Postfinance

The payment is done on a prepaid basis, crediting funds to your account. VAT is charged upon adding funds. Postpaid is also possible, see the postpaid question on how to apply.

Additional payment methods

Bank Transfer

All customers can request adding funds to accounts using SEPA or SWIFT bank transfers. Please indicate to support the amount you wish to add and the bank transfer method in order to receive the billing information.

For a prepaid account, do I need to fear spending more money than the money on that account?

You add x credit to your account, create and then run an instance. As soon as your credit reaches 0, your instance will be stopped and you won’t be able to start it back without adding credit.

For a stopped instance, it will cost you only for the storage allocated. It means that if you wait a few hours / days, your credit will go negative, according to the storage cost. If you then choose to add credit, you need to add enough to be in positive in order to be able to start back your instance.

If you choose to not add credit, all your instances will be removed after several weeks and reminders.

Does Exoscale support postpaid invoicing?

Yes, postpaid invoicing is available on our platform with the same choice of payment options from PayPal, Credit Cards or bank transfer. Usage is then summed and invoiced each month. Real time tracking of the current usage is available in the portal.

To apply to postpaid invoicing, only 2 conditions are required:

  • Register as an organization
  • Make a first prepaid payment

Emitted invoices are due for payment in 10 days.

Can I have invoices in Euros or US Dollars?

Invoicing is supported in EUR and USD currencies.

Pricing

Is the pricing in the calculator for a 720-hour standard month?

Yes, all monthly prices estimated by the calculators are on a 720 hour base.

Will I be billed for idle (powered down) machines?

Powered down machines will only be charged for resources still in use. Therefore, disk attached to your instance will be charged each additional hour used.

During trial period, machines are charged even when stopped. This behavior is converted to the default behavior on first payment.

How is the output bandwidth billed?

The bandwidth is billed hourly and takes the number of machines running during the last one-hour period.

Effectively, there are 1.42 GB per hour of output bandwidth for free per machine. If a machine doesn’t use its free tier, it is reported on other running machines of the same organization. So, with 5 machines running during the last hour, there are 7.1 GB of free output bandwidth. The exceeding bandwidth is billed.