FYI I'm from Packet. Agreed reliability is important (I'll let others comment on our own record) but I'd say there is significant workload via spot market, batch processing, etc that doesn't need uptime and is interested in cost.
Also, I've seen most users want 99.9+% uptime. 2% downtime is 14 hours in a short month. People would probably get angry about that...
So $0.05/hr is pretty cheap, but agreed free trial is better. We made a little page with $25 on it if you'd like to try it out! https://www.packet.net/promo/hacker-news/
The clients of ours that leverage the by-the-hour model generally use the same devops tools (Terraform, Docker Machine, Ansible, etc) against our API to provision and orchestrate bare metal that they would against AWS or DO to do the same with VM's.
The use case drivers for those who choose bare metal often seem to be price/performance ratios, network, bring your own hypervisor or not use one, etc.
I've met Rishi @ Tiingo a few times and the fact of the matter is he is super passionate about liberating financial data and tools. I think that his pricing model and generosity are truly born from his genuine interest and love of the product. Seems strange, but its true! Hey anything to break up the 2.5k/mo bloomberg stranglehold....
Great read and really does an awesome job showing not only the tech of what NSOne has built, but the 'why' behind the 'how'. DNS is such a deceptively simplistic service, but I think that's only due to the lack of real innovation in the space. NSOne is doing an awesome job changing that. Thanks @chris and @kris ;-)