Do I still get charged if my VM is turned off for a period of time?

Yes. You will still be charged even if you VM is powered off. Zettagrid uses a dedicated model for resources so we charge for what is allocated to your VDC or VPS. The approach many customers have taken when they want to keep legacy , temporary or archive VDCs in Zettagrid but reduce their expenditure is to resize down the CPU and RAM to the lowest possible. This way you can reduce your spend but still keep the data on Zettagrid. If you need to turn on the VPS or VDC you would need to upgrade CPU and RAM to allow the VM to boot.