Yearly/Monthly

In the yearly/monthly billing mode, you pay before using resources. It is suitable if you need stable resources and want lower costs. You can pre-purchase CSS resources at discounted prices. This section describes the billing rules for yearly/monthly clusters.

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, and online malls.
Long-term projects: scientific research projects, large-scale events, and others. Yearly/Monthly billing facilitates stable supply of resources throughout the project.
Workloads with predictable traffic bursts, for example, e-commerce promotions or festivals.
Workloads with high data security requirements

Billed Items

A CSS cluster consists of compute resources (vCPUs and memory), node storage, and EIP bandwidth. You are billed for the following items on a yearly/monthly basis.

**Table 1** Items billed on a yearly/monthly basis
Billing Item	Description
Node specifications	vCPUs and memory
Node storage	If an EVS disk (a system disk or a data disk) is created along with a yearly/monthly ECS, the EVS is also billed on a yearly/monthly basis.
EIP bandwidth	If an EIP is purchased along with a yearly/monthly ECS and the EIP is billed by bandwidth (for cluster public network, Kibana public network, or OpenSearch Dashboards public network), the bandwidth is billed on a yearly/monthly basis.

Assume that you plan to purchase an Elasticsearch cluster with only data nodes and public network access enabled. At the bottom of the Create Cluster page, you can view price details, as shown Figure 1.

Figure 1 Example prices

The price includes:

Data node specifications: including vCPUs and memory
Data node storage: the cost of EVS disks for storing data.
Cluster public network bandwidth: The fee is calculated based on the selected bandwidth.

Billed Usage Period

A yearly/monthly cluster 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 cluster 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 Specification Change

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

If you upgrade your cluster specifications, you need to pay the difference in price.
If you downgrade your cluster specifications, Huawei Cloud will refund you the difference.

Be careful about downgrading your cluster specifications, as it may impact cluster performance. Suppose you purchased a one-month cluster ess.spec-4u8g (4 vCPU and 8 GiB) on April 8, 2023 and upgraded the specifications to ess.spec-8u16g (8 vCPU and 16 GiB) on April 18, 2023. The price of the old configuration is $136.08 USD/month. The price of the new configuration is $272.3 USD/month. The price difference will be calculated as follows:

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

The remaining period in the formula is the remaining days of each calendar month divided by the maximum days of the corresponding calendar month. In this example, Remaining period = 12 (Remaining days in April)/30 (Maximum days in April) + 8 (Remaining days in May)/31 (Maximum days in May) = 0.6581, the upgrade fee is calculated as follows: 272.3 x 0.6581 - 136.08 x 0.6581 = $89.65 USD.

For more information, see Pricing of a Changed Specification.

Impact of Expiration

Figure 2 shows the statuses a yearly/monthly cluster can go through throughout its lifecycle. After a cluster is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If the cluster is not renewed after it expires, before being deleted, it first enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 2 Lifecycle of a yearly/monthly resource

Expiration Reminder

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

The system will send you a reminder 30 days, 15 days, 7 days, 3 days, and 1 day before a yearly resource expires.
The system will send you a reminder 15 days, 7 days, 3 days, and 1 day before a monthly resource expires.

Impact of Expiration

If your yearly/monthly cluster 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 cluster but cannot:

Change node specifications
Adding More Nodes and Increasing Storage Capacity
Change the bandwidth size

If the yearly/monthly CSS instance is not renewed after the grace period ends, its status turns to Frozen and it enters a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on the resource while it is in the retention period.

If the yearly/monthly CSS is not renewed by the time the retention period ends, the compute resources (vCPUs and memory), EVS disks, and EIPs will be released and data cannot be restored.