Help Center/ Elastic IP/ Best Practices/ Lower Public Network Costs
Updated on 2025-09-04 GMT+08:00
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Lower Public Network Costs

You can select a proper bandwidth and billing mode based on your service requirements.

Shared Bandwidth

A shared bandwidth is an independent bandwidth product. You can add pay-per-use EIPs to a shared bandwidth to allow the EIPs to share the bandwidth. You can bind EIPs to resources such as ECSs, NAT gateways, and load balancers so that these resources can use the shared bandwidth. For more information, see Shared Bandwidth Overview.

Table 1 describes the scenarios and cost savings of different billing modes of shared bandwidth.

Table 1 Examples of cost savings when you use a shared bandwidth

Billing Mode

Scenario

Example

Pay-per-use (billed by bandwidth)

You host a large number of applications on the cloud. If each ECS uses a dedicated bandwidth, a lot of bandwidths are required, which incurs high costs.

You can add your instances to a pay-per-use shared bandwidth (billed by bandwidth). This can reduce network operations costs especially for workloads with different traffic peaks and troughs.

Using pay-per-use EIPs (billed by bandwidth), each with a dedicated bandwidth:

Assume that you have 10 ECSs in the same region and each ECS has an EIP bound. Each EIP is billed by bandwidth with a maximum value of 100 Mbit/s. In this case, you need to pay the price of 10 EIPs each with a maximum bandwidth of 100 Mbit/s, that is, $427.2 USD per day.

Using a pay-per-use shared bandwidth (billed by bandwidth):

Traffic analysis of 10 EIPs shows services reach peaks and troughs at different times. The peak outbound bandwidth of the 10 ECSs to the Internet is about 500 Mbit/s.

You only need to purchase one shared bandwidth of 500 Mbit/s for the 10 ECSs to share. Each ECS can enjoy a peak bandwidth 5 times higher than the original one, and you only need to pay $213.6 USD per day for the 500 Mbit/s of shared bandwidth, saving $213.6 USD per day, or about 50% of the bandwidth cost.

Yearly/Monthly (billed by bandwidth)

For long-term workloads with stable traffic, you can select a yearly/monthly shared bandwidth (billed by bandwidth).

Using a pay-per-use shared bandwidth (billed by bandwidth):

Assume that you buy a pay-per-use shared bandwidth of 500 Mbit/s and use it for one month (30 days). You need to pay $6,408 USD.

Using a yearly/monthly shared bandwidth (billed by bandwidth):

You can buy a yearly/monthly shared bandwidth of 500 Mbit/s for one month at $4,275 USD. This is about 33% lower than that of a pay-per-use shared bandwidth billed by bandwidth.

The prices are just for your reference. See the actual prices by visiting EIP Pricing Details.

Example of Public Network Cost Saving

The table below recommends bandwidths for various scenarios. You can choose one based on your service needs and adjust as necessary to optimize resource use and costs.

Table 2 Recommended bandwidth in different scenarios

Scenarios

Traffic Feature

Recommended Solution

Enterprise or SaaS applications

The traffic peak is stable and the usage period is long.
  • Use a yearly/monthly dedicated bandwidth or shared bandwidth.

E-commerce platforms and gaming services

Traffic shows strong, periodic fluctuations, while services require long-term deployment.

Use a shared bandwidth billed by bandwidth to reduce costs.

E-commerce and gaming promotions

The traffic fluctuates greatly and the service period is short.

Use a pay-per-use dedicated bandwidth (billed by traffic).