Yearly/Monthly Billing

If you expect to use resources for a longer period, you can save money by selecting yearly/monthly billing. This section describes the billing rules for yearly/monthly DB instances.

Application Scenarios

If you want to ensure resource stability over a certain period of time, yearly/monthly billing is a good choice for the following types of workloads:

Long-term workloads with stable resource requirements, such as official websites, online malls, and blogs.
Long-term projects, such as scientific research projects and large-scale events.
Workloads with predictable traffic bursts, for example, e-commerce promotions or festivals.
Workloads with high data security requirements

Billed Items

The following table lists the billed items of a yearly/monthly DB instance.

The billed items marked with asterisks (*) are mandatory.

**Table 1** Billed items
Billed Item	Description
* Instance class	vCPUs and memory
* Storage space	If the actual storage usage exceeds your purchased storage, you will be billed for additional storage on a pay-per-use basis.
* Backup space	RDS provides free backup space of the same size as your purchased database storage. After the free backup space is used up, charges are applied based on the backup space pricing details. Pricing is listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are calculated based on the actual usage duration.
(Optional) EIP bandwidth	If an EIP is purchased along with a yearly/monthly DB instance and the EIP is billed by bandwidth.
(Optional) Database proxies (for RDS for MySQL only)	RDS allows read and write requests to be automatically routed through a read/write splitting address. Enabling database proxy incurs extra fees.

Billed Usage Period

A yearly/monthly DB instance is billed for the purchased duration. The billing starts from when you activated or renewed the subscription, and ends at 23:59:59 of the expiry date.

For example, if you purchased a one-month RDS DB instance on March 08, 2023, 15:50:04, the billed usage period is from March 08, 2023, 15:50:04 to April 08, 2023, 23:59:59.

Price Change After Instance Class Change

If the instance class of a yearly/monthly DB instance no longer meets your needs, you can change the instance class on the console. The system will recalculate the price and either bill or refund you the difference.

If you upgrade your DB instance class, you need to pay the difference in price.
If you downgrade your DB instance class, Huawei Cloud will refund you the difference.

You are not advised to downgrade your DB instance to a lower instance class because the instance performance may be affected. Suppose you purchased a one-month RDS for MySQL primary/standby DB instance (instance class: general-purpose, 2 vCPUs | 4 GB; storage: cloud SSD, 40 GB) on April 08, 2023 and upgraded the instance class to 4 vCPUs | 8 GB on April 18, 2023. The price of the original instance class was $102.80 USD/month, and that for the new instance class was $309.32 USD/month. The price difference will be calculated as follows:

Price difference for the instance class upgrade = Price for the new instance class × Remaining period - Price for the original instance class × Remaining period

The remaining period is the remaining days of each calendar month divided by the maximum number of days in each calendar month.

In this example, Remaining period = 12 (Remaining days in April)/30 (Maximum number of days in April) + 8 (Remaining days in May)/31 (Maximum number of days in May) = 0.6581. Cost of upgrade = $309.32 USD x 0.6581 – $102.80 USD x 0.6581 = $135.91 USD

For more details, see Pricing of a Changed Specification.

Impact of Expiration

Figure 1 shows the statuses a yearly/monthly DB instance can go through throughout its lifecycle. After a DB instance is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If the DB instance is not renewed after it expires, before being deleted, it first enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 1 Lifecycle of a yearly/monthly DB instance

Expiration Reminder

The system will send you a reminder (by email, SMS, or in-app message) 7 days before a yearly/monthly DB instance expires to remind you to renew the subscription.

Impact of Expiration

If your yearly/monthly DB instance is not renewed after it expires, it changes to the Expired state and enters a grace period. During the grace period, you can access the DB instance but cannot:

Change instance class
Change the billing mode to pay-per-use
Unsubscribe from the DB instance

If the yearly/monthly DB instance is not renewed after the grace period ends, its status turns to Frozen and it enters a retention period. You cannot access or use the DB instance while it is in the retention period, but the data stored in it can be retained.

If the yearly/monthly DB instance is not renewed by the time the retention period ends, the corresponding resources will be released and the data stored in the resources will be deleted.