About finance
This section covers budgeting, costs, bills and how to navigate our price list.
When you spend your hard earned money well, science is happening. Such, we see money as a scientific enabler that you should master and use well.
And for the record, HUNT Cloud is part of a public university that runs these services with zero profit. Such, money is mean towards our goal of enabling more knowledge from sensitive data.
Cost elements
You pay for the resources you use on a daily bases. By default you pay for one machine and the amount of the storage they you have allocated in your lab. In addition, there is a yearly lab subscription cost that covers support and operations.
You can order as many additional machines and terabyte of storage as you like in our administer science service desk. These will be invoiced in according with our price list.
Budgeting
We have developed a price estimator and added price examples to our "pricing" section to guide your cost estimates (see link below).
However, it may still be difficult to translate your experiments into machine sizes and storage volumes. Such, don't hesitate to contact us for dialogues on cost estimates. We are more than happy to share our experience from similar activities in your field, and to help with estimated for grants and other funding sources.
Invoicing
You will receive an PDF with detailed invoice information per quarter. The invoice specifies the number of machines you have use, their sizes, the machine's daily cost and the quarters total machine cost. The invoice will also specify how many terabyte of storage you have had available in your lab for each day of the quarter, it's cost, and the quarters total storage cost.
Billing
For us, this is the process of sending the actual bill. The process differ based on your organizational affiliation:
- Inside NTNU: The transaction is handled as an internal transfer, and and money are transferred directly from your account to our account.
- Outside NTNU: The actual bill is sent from NTNU's billing system directly to your organizations billing system.
Start small
Our advice is to start with a small lab configuration and quickly increase capacity when all your magic ingredients are in place.
It is not uncommon that it takes longer that anticipated to get your scientific project up to full speed, for example if hiring processes or data deliveries takes longer than expected.
Don't overdo storage. Overspending by overestimating storage needs early in your project period is frustrating. Start with a small volume, and increase the size as soon a data is read to be transferred.
Quickly get into the habit of downgrading or turning off comput resources in down-periods. Research activities are difficult to schedule, especially in large groups. However, it is cost effective to adjust your machine sizes based on actual needs, for example reduce sizes during holidays or writing periods.