Overview

HSS provides two billing modes, yearly/monthly and pay-per-use billing, to meet requirements in different scenarios. To quickly learn about the price of HSS in different billing modes, visit HSS Pricing Details.

Yearly/Monthly is a prepaid billing. You pay in advance for a subscription term, and in exchange, you get a discounted rate. The longer the subscription term, the bigger the discount.
Pay-per-use is a postpaid billing mode. You pay as you go and just pay for what you use. The HSS usage is calculated by the second but billed every hour. With the pay-per-use billing mode, you can easily adapt to resource requirement changes, reducing the risk of over-provisioning resources or lacking capacity. In this mode, there are no upfront commitments required.

Table 1 describes the differences between the billing modes.

**Table 1** Billing modes
Billing Mode	Yearly/Monthly	Pay-per-Use
Payment	Prepaid Billed by the subscription term you purchase	Postpaid Billed based on the actual usage duration of HSS
Billing Period	Billed for the required duration specified in your order	Billed by the second and settled by the hour
Billed Items	Quota editions: basic, professional, premium, Web Tamper Protection (WTP), and container editions	Quota edition: professional, premium, and container editions
Billing for Stopped Protection	Billed for the required duration specified in your order. Disabling protection for servers and containers does not affect yearly/monthly billing.	You will not be charged after protection is disabled.
Changing the Billing Mode	Can be changed to pay-per-use. For details, see Yearly/Monthly to Pay-per-Use.	The billing mode cannot be changed to yearly/monthly. Disable the pay-per-use billing mode before purchasing HSS in yearly/monthly mode.
Upgrading Quotas	The basic and professional editions can be upgraded to higher editions.	Specifications cannot be upgraded.
Application Scenarios	A cost-effective option for scenarios where the resource usage duration is predictable. Recommended for resources expected to be in long-term use.	Recommended when the demands for server or container protection are likely to fluctuate and you want more flexibility.