The same way it is counted via any other billing cycle.
Cost per Month, Cost per Year, Cost per Hour, etc. There are 920 hours in September. Let’s say you are paying $92/month – that’s $0.10/hour. When being billed by the hour you’re just told that $0.10/hour rate and then if you use it the whole month you end up at $92.
Nothing terribly exciting.
What is counted depends on the provider and the offering, but generally – yes – those. You would predict what you need the same way you would for any other service be it billed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, annually, etc.
It’s not magic – it’s just simple manth.
Do the math. Hourly cost * hours in a month = monthly price. Then you can compare monthly to hourly. Or multiply it by 12 to get get the annual cost to compare.
Hourly pricing, imho, is generally a bit more expensive as the idea is that you’ll only use it for a short time / while you need it – and will kill it shortly there-after.
You don’t have to do that though – you can keep using it on an hourly basis just as you would use any other service on a monthly basis, etc.
Although, obviously, the actual cost in dollars per usage will vary between providers, are there large differences in the hourly <b>pricing models</b> of the various providers, such as Netlify, Digital Ocean, CloudFlare Pages, Vultr, GitHub Pages, Linode, etc.? Or are the methodologies they use to calculate how much resources the customer utilizes for billing purposes roughly similar?
No idea to be honest. You would think they should be similar but I don’t have any of their algorithms available to me handy to do the math for you.