Pay-per-Use

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 activities and temporary testing.

Billing Items

A CSS cluster consists of compute resources (vCPUs and memory), node storage, and EIP bandwidth. You are billed for the following resources on a pay-per-use 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

The usage duration of pay-per-use pods is calculated by the second but billed every hour. The billing starts when a cluster is created and ends when the cluster is deleted.

You can view the creation time of the cluster on the overview tab of the cluster details page.

For example, if you buy a pay-per-use cluster at 8:45:30, including node specifications (vCPUs and memory), node storage, and public network bandwidth, and delete it at 9:55:00, the billing cycle is 8:00:00-9:00:00 and 9:00:00-10:00:00. Fees are generated between 8:45:30 and 9:55:30. The total billing duration in the two billing cycles is 4,200 seconds (870 + 3330).

Price Change After Specification Change

If you change the specifications of a pay-per-use cluster, the original order will become invalid and a new order will be placed. You will be billed based on the new specifications.

If you change cluster node specifications within an hour, multiple records will be generated. The start time and end time of each billing record correspond to when different configurations took effect within the hour.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use cluster ess.spec-4u8g at 9:00:00 and upgraded it to ess.spec-8u16g at 9:30:00, the following items will be billed:

• ess.spec-4u8g cluster usage from 9:00:00 to 9:30:00
• ess.spec-8u16g cluster usage from 9:30:00 to 10:00:00

Impacts of Arrears

Figure 2 shows the statuses a pay-per-use cluster can have throughout its lifecycle. After a CSS instance is purchased, it enters the validity period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, your instance enters a grace period and if no payments are made within the specific time, it enters a retention period.

Figure 2 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use cluster

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 internal message.

Impacts of Arrears

If your account is insufficient to pay your amount due, your account will go into arrears and the resources will enter the grace period. However, relevant cloud services will not be stopped immediately. There will be a grace period for such resources. You are still responsible for expenditures generated during the grace period. You can view the charges on the Billing Center > Overview page and pay any past due balance as needed.

If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, the resources enter a retention period and will be frozen. You cannot perform any operations on the pay-per-use resources during this period.

If you do not bring your account balance current before the retention period ends, the compute resources (vCPUs and memory), EVS disks, and EIPs will be released and the data cannot be restored.

For details about top-up, see Topping Up an Account.