Pay-per-Use Billing

Application Scenarios

Pay-per-use billing is good for short-term, bursty, or unpredictable workloads that cannot tolerate any interruptions, such as applications for e-commerce flash sales, temporary testing, and scientific computing.

Billed Items

You are billed for the following resources on a pay-per-use basis.

Billed Usage Period

Pay-per-use HSS is billed in seconds, and settled on the hour (GMT+08:00). Once settlement is complete, it enters a new billing cycle.

The billing starts when HSS is enabled.

The billing ends when HSS is disabled.

For example, if you enabled the pay-per-use HSS enterprise edition for a server at 8:45:30 and disabled it at 8:55:00, you are billed for the 600 seconds from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30.

Billing Examples

Suppose you enabled the pay-per-use HSS enterprise edition for a server at 9:59:30 on April 18, 2023 and disabled it at 10:45:46 on April 18, 2023. Two usage periods will be billed:

• Usage of 30 seconds from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00
• Usage of 2,746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46

You will be billed for both usage periods. For details, see Table 2. The price displayed in the pricing details is per hour, so you need to divide it by 3,600 to obtain the price for each second and then multiple the per-second price by the total number of seconds.

Figure 1 shows how the total price is calculated.

The prices in the figure are just examples. The actual prices are those displayed on HSS Pricing Details.

Figure 1 Total price for pay-per-use HSS

Impact of Arrears

Figure 2 shows the statuses a pay-per-use HSS subscription can have throughout its lifecycle. After HSS is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, HSS enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 2 Lifecycle of pay-per-use HSS

Arrears Reminder

The system will bill you for pay-per-use resources after each billing cycle ends. If your account goes into arrears, we will notify you by email, SMS, or in-app message.

Impact of Arrears

If your account is insufficient to pay your amount due, your account goes into arrears, and the pay-per-use HSS enters the grace period. You are still responsible for expenditures generated during the grace period. You can view the charges on the Billing & Costs > Overview page and pay any past due balance as needed.

If you do not bring your account balance current before the grace period expires, HSS turns to Frozen and enters a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on pay-per-use HSS in the Frozen status.

If you do not pay off the arrears within the retention period, your HSS resources will be released, and data will be lost.

• For details about the grace period, see What Is a Grace Period?
• For details about the retention period, see What Is a Retention Period?
• For details about top-up, see Topping Up an Account.

Billing for Stopped HSS

Generally, HSS charged in pay-per-use mode stops billing after it is disabled.