What is the minimum rental duration?
In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the "minimum rental duration" depends entirely on the type of server you are renting. OCI is generally more granular than other cloud providers, offering per-second billing for most services.
Here is the breakdown of the minimum billing periods:
Minimum Duration: 1 minute.
After the First Minute: You are billed by the second.
When Billing Stops: For standard VMs, billing stops the moment you Stop the instance (though you still pay for the storage attached to it). For specialized VMs like GPU or Dense I/O shapes, you must Terminate the instance to stop the compute charges.
Minimum Duration: 1 hour.
After the First Hour: You are typically billed by the second.
When Billing Stops: Because you are renting the physical hardware, you must Terminate (delete) the instance to stop the billing. Simply "stopping" the OS does not release the hardware, so charges continue until the resource is fully released back to Oracle.
Minimum Duration: Same as standard VMs (1 minute).
Note: If Oracle reclaims the capacity (preempts you) before the first minute is up, you are generally not charged for that partial usage.
| Resource Type | Minimum Billing | Billing Unit Thereafter |
| Standard VMs | 1 Minute | Per Second |
| Bare Metal | 1 Hour | Per Second |
| GPU/HPC Instances | 1 Minute* | Per Second |
| Block Storage | 1 Minute | Per Second |
Important Note on Storage: Even if you delete a VM after 2 minutes, the Boot Volume (the "hard drive" of the server) will continue to incur costs unless you check the box to "Permanently delete the attached boot volume" during the termination process.