Yearly/Monthly Billing

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

You are billed for the following items on a yearly/monthly basis.

Suppose you want to purchase a one-month distributed DB instance with 8 vCPUs and 64 GB of memory, and the instance contains 1 shard, 3 replicas, 1 CN, and 160 GB of storage. At the bottom of the Buy DB Instance page shown in Figure 1, you can view the total price (excluding the backup space price) of the current instance.

Figure 1 Example price

The backup space price is not included. For details about the backup price, see Price Calculator.

Billed Usage Period

A yearly/monthly DB instance is billed for the purchased duration. The billing starts 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 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.

Billing Examples

Suppose you purchased a one-month distributed GaussDB instance (1 shard, 3 replicas, 1 CN, General-enhanced II, 8 vCPUs, 64 GB of memory, and 160 GB of storage) on March 08, 2023, 15:50:04, and renewed the subscription for one more month before the initial subscription expired. The following usage periods will be billed:

• March 08, 2023, 15:50:04 to April 08, 2023, 23:59:59
• April 08, 2023, 23:59:59 to May 08, 2023, 23:59:59
  • From April 08, 2023, 23:59:59 to May 01, 2023, 23:59:59, 60 GB of free backup space was used.
  • From May 01, 2023, 23:59:59 to May 08, 2023, 23:59:59, another 10 GB of backup space was used, which was billed for 168 hours.

Figure 2 shows how the total price is calculated.

The prices in the figure are just examples. The actual prices are those displayed on GaussDB Pricing Details.

Figure 2 Total price for a yearly/monthly GaussDB instance

Price Change After Specification Change

If the specifications of a yearly/monthly GaussDB instance 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 instance specifications, you need to pay the difference in price.
• If you downgrade your instance specifications, Huawei Cloud will refund you the difference.

You are not advised to downgrade your DB instance to lower specifications because instance performance may be affected. Suppose you purchased a one-month primary/standby GaussDB instance (8 vCPUs | 64 GB) on April 08, 2023 and upgraded the instance specifications to 16 vCPUs | 128 GB on April 18, 2023. The price of the original specifications was $1,640 USD/month, and that for the new specifications was $3,280 USD/month. The price difference will be calculated as follows:

Specification upgrade fee = New specification price × Remaining period - Old specification price × 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 = $3,280 USD x 0.6581 – $1,640 USD x 0.6581 = $1,079.28 USD

For more details, see Pricing of a Changed Specification.

Impact of Expiration

Figure 3 shows the statuses a yearly/monthly GaussDB 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 3 Lifecycle of a yearly/monthly GaussDB 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 specifications
• Change the billing mode from yearly/monthly 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 perform any operations on the DB instance while it is in the retention period.

If the yearly/monthly DB instance is not renewed by the time the retention period ends, it will be released and data cannot be restored.

• The grace period and retention period are both 15 days.
• For details about renewals, see Overview.