@MartinSchröder we have tried. We have tried to clarify the site rules (in fact, they used to be clearer, and fuzzier ones were forced on us). Look back in meta and watch it happen. The owners of this site seem unwilling to allow us professional admins to clarify that we are only interested in professional-quality questions, but we're the ones answering most of the questions, so they can't do without us either. An uneasy peace generally holds, but I freely concede that it doesn't help the newcomer to the site really understand what's going on.

Fair enough. I wouldn't have done that - as I said, net upvotes seems to me unambiguous and reuses an existing, well-understood term of art, which I find much better than defining a new term which is then hardly ever used - but it's not my site.

Ah, OK, that deals nicely with that; I had the wrong end of the stick. Does that particular use of the word score crop up anywhere else on SF? I can't help feeling that net upvotes would be a lot less mysterious a term. Either way, thanks for clearing that up for me!

@istheEnglishway woof.

@Reaces you've clearly put some thought into that, for which I thank you, and I'm sure you're right.

@Reaces I'm not saying you're wrong about the utility of a general question, probably with a view to canonicalisation, but I'd much rather you wrote it. A really good specimen question seems much more likely to me to generate good canonical answers.

No, I am not. I'm trying to be clear that if your original question had simply said How is it possible to set up a cloud server that runs less than 24 hours a day? we wouldn't be having this discussion. Your actual original question barely asks that, and asks a lot more off-topic stuff besides. Focussing on exactly why it's accumulating votes to close is really rather missing the point. I've been pretty clear about what I think you should do in order to get an answer to the question you claim to want to ask. What you do now is of course up to you, but I'm done debating minutiae.

My answer is intended for here, as it addresses why your original question may be considered off-topic and whether or not this is documented. Follow the link above to see where "working with a service provider's management interface" is explicitly off-topic.

Slow down, hoss, I didn't say any such thing. I'm by no means sure your question's on-topic, but I'm still not entirely sure what you're asking. Are you now saying you want to know how one would technically set up a cloud server not to run 7x24?

If that question isn't explain google's billing practices to me, I guess I don't understand what it is at all. What do you want to know? Are you simply asking how it can be part of someone's business model to have a VPS that doesn't run the whole time?

@ExUmbris I'd already upvoted your question. Now I've gone back to upvote your answer as well. Would that every fairly-low-rep user put this much thought into their questions, and the maintenance thereof.