Help Center/ Elastic IP/ Best Practices/ Lower Network Costs
Updated on 2024-05-10 GMT+08:00

Lower Network Costs

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

Dedicated Bandwidth

If you want to ensure the bandwidth available for a particular EIP, you are advised to purchase dedicated bandwidth. Dedicated bandwidth can only be used for a single, specific EIP. Dedicated bandwidth is not affected by other services.

An EIP can be billed by bandwidth or by traffic:
  • Bandwidth: If your services use a large amount of traffic but are stable, an EIP billed by bandwidth is recommended.
  • Traffic: If your services only use a relatively small amount of traffic, an EIP billed by traffic combined with a shared data package is recommended for a more favorable price.

If your traffic is stable, the yearly/monthly billing based on the bandwidth is more cost effective.

Shared Bandwidth

When you host a large number of applications on the cloud, if each EIP uses dedicated bandwidth, a lot of bandwidths are required, which incurs high costs. If all EIPs share the same bandwidth, your network operation costs will be lowered and your system O&M as well as resource statistics will be simplified. Multiple EIPs whose billing mode is pay-per-use can be added to a shared bandwidth. You can bind EIPs to products such as ECSs, NAT gateways, and load balancers so that these products can use the shared bandwidth.

Shared Data Package

A shared data package is a prepaid package for public network traffic. The price of the package is lower than that for the postpaid billing by traffic. Shared data packages greatly reduce the cost of traffic on a public network. A shared data package takes effect immediately after being purchased and no additional operations are required. If you have subscribed to pay-per-use EIPs billed by traffic in a region and buy a shared data package in the same region, the EIPs will use the shared data package.

  • When to use a shared data package

    After a shared data package takes effect for a bandwidth billed by traffic, the traffic used by the bandwidth is deducted from the shared data package first. After the shared data package is used up, the bandwidth is billed by the amount of traffic used. A shared data package saves more if your amount of traffic used is huge.

  • Additional notes on shared data packages
    • Only the traffic generated in the region selected when the shared data package is purchased can be deducted.
    • Dynamic and static shared data packages are used to deduct the traffic generated by dynamic BGP and static BGP EIPs, respectively.
    • A shared data package has a validity period of one calendar month or one calendar year from the date of purchase. After this period expires, the unused traffic expires as well and cannot be used. You are advised to evaluate the size of a shared data package required based on the historical usage.
    • If you enable the auto-renew function for a shared data package, the system automatically attempts to renew the subscription within seven days before the shared data package expires. After the renewal is successful, the remaining traffic in the shared data package can be used within the new validity period.
    • After a shared data package is used up, your service will not automatically stop. The system automatically bills you based on traffic, ensuring service system availability.