INE rack rentals now 2.5 hours

rakem

Logged onto INE site today and noticed it says rack rentals are now 2.5 hours per session, compared to the 5.5 hours they used to be.

Anyone got any insight as to why they changed? I liked to 5.5 sessions...

Zartanasaurus

54% less time and only 32% cheaper. Very nice...

xbuzz

Well if you book 2x 2.5 hours segments, you will get 30 mins extra it says, so you'll still have 5.5 hours.

I'd guess theyre're changing them to lower time blocks as alot of people probably don't have time to commit a total 5.5 hours to a single lab.

Mrock4

I don't use the INE rack rentals, but early on in my prep if they had offered 2.5 hour blocks, I would have considered it. I think this will be fantastic too, as I'd like to get onboard with their data center rentals when those are available.

Legacy User

Its pretty awesome but kind of funny they're doing that now. I talked to ine's customer service a while back to see if it was possible if I pay for a sessions 5.5 hr and just use an hr or 2 at a time. They said its not possible but i'm glad that they've decided to use this model.

jahsoul

xbuzz wrote: »

Well if you book 2x 2.5 hours segments, you will get 30 mins extra it says, so you'll still have 5.5 hours.

I'd guess they're changing them to lower time blocks as alot of people probably don't have time to commit a total 5.5 hours to a single lab.

I'm going through the voice track, so I would use 5 more tokens per 5.5hrs. In time, that adds up depending on how much time you want to commit to your track. For the amount of time needed, it might be cheaper for me to build a lab.

Zartanasaurus

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

54% less time and only 32% cheaper. Very nice...

Make that only 15% cheaper. Kind of BS.

Forsaken_GA

Well the cheaper depends on the time of day you wanted to book it at, as the token cost was dependent on the time slot. So it's kind of nice not to have to take a severely off hours slot just to reduce the cost in tokens. Being able to pre-load the configs is also a nice plus.

The part that screws with me is the requirement of 4 rack sessions for a mock lab, making a mock lab session 11.5 hours. That seems a bit excessive, 3 sessions would do just fine.

sea_turtle

This was the major selling point for me vs IPExpert, both looked like they had solid materials but the 3 hours blocks meant i could actually schedule what i needed on days i had less time and not have to waste tokens if i got busy with work or something came up where i had to stop.

NetworkVeteran

rakem wrote: »

Anyone got any insight as to why they changed? I liked to 5.5 sessions...

Customer demand for smaller blocks. They've been discussing and advertising this change for a long time, and it's already been active on the security racks for months, with positive feedback. Most people have an easier time commiting to 2.5hrs than they do commiting to 5.5hrs.

Sett

Yes, the smaller blocks are more convenient, but given that the price of the old and the new blocks is almost the same the change doesn't make too much sense to me. I had paid 18 tokens for almost all my 5.5 hours lab sessions in the past...

Zartanasaurus

NetworkVeteran wrote: »

Customer demand for smaller blocks. They've been discussing and advertising this change for a long time, and it's already been active on the security racks for months, with positive feedback. Most people have an easier time commiting to 2.5hrs than they do commiting to 5.5hrs.

I think it's better for the customer since you may only want to do a 2-hour troubleshooting lab, then do the config portion later. With 2.5 hour blocks, if you want to do both at the same time you can schedule multiple at once. More flexibility then being forced to pay for 5.5 hours at once.

Legacy User

Just an update the 2.5 hrs is good because of the short sessions but bad because each sessions is 10 tokens (voice & sec) compared to 15 tokens for the original 5.5 hrs. So overall its convenient but its going to cost you more for the flexibility.