Pay-per-Use

Application Scenarios

Pay-per-use billing is good for short-term, bursty, or unpredictable workloads that cannot tolerate any interruptions.

Billed Items

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

If you want to purchase a cluster with 40 GB high I/O nodes and enable Kibana public access, the prices will be displayed on the Confirm Configuration page, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Example prices

The price includes:

• Node flavor (including vCPUs and memory)
• Node storage
• Kibana public network bandwidth

Billed Usage Period

Pay-per-use ECS usage is calculated by the second and billed every hour. 58 minutes of usage will be rounded to the hour and billed. After the bill is generated, a new billing cycle starts. The billing starts when a cluster is created and ends when the cluster is deleted.

It takes a certain time to create a cluster. The billing starts from the time when the cluster is successfully created. You can view the creation time of the cluster on the cluster details page.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use cluster at 08:45:30 and delete it at 08:55:00, you are billed for one hour.

Billing Examples

Suppose you purchased a cluster on April 18, 2023, 9:39:30 and deleted it on April 18, 2023, 10:45:46. Two usage periods will be billed:

• Usage of 1,230 seconds from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00
• Usage of 2,746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46

You need to pay for each billing period, and clusters are billed individually. The billing formula is shown in Table 1. The prices displayed in the pricing details are per hour.

Figure 2 shows the billing calculation.

The prices in the figure are examples only. The actual prices are those displayed on CSS Pricing Details.

Figure 2 Total price for a pay-per-use cluster

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 instance 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 3 shows the statuses a pay-per-use cluster can have throughout its lifecycle. After a cluster is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, the cluster enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 3 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

Your account may fall into arrears due to automatic fee deduction for pay-per-use resources. 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 node specifications (vCPUs and memory), node storage, and public network bandwidth will be released and the data cannot be restored.

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