Yearly/Monthly Billing
If you expect to use resources for a longer period, you can save money by selecting yearly/monthly billing. This section describes billing rules of yearly/monthly GeminiDB Cassandra resources.
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.
Billing Items
You are billed for the following items on a yearly/monthly basis.
Billing Item |
Description |
---|---|
Instance specifications |
Instance specifications, including vCPUs and memory. |
Storage space |
If the actual storage usage exceeds your purchased storage, you will be billed for additional storage on a pay-per-use basis. |
Backup space |
GeminiDB Cassandra provides backup storage up to 100% of your provisioned database storage at no additional charge. After the free backup storage is used up, additional usage will be priced by the hour based on the backup storage pricing details. If it has been used less than one hour, you will be billed based on the actual duration. |
(Optional) EIP bandwidth |
GeminiDB Cassandra instances are accessible from public networks, and you are billed for the generated public network traffic, but not for private network traffic. |
Assume that you want to buy a three-node GeminiDB Cassandra instance with 2 vCPUs, 8 GB of memory, and 100 GB of storage. At the bottom of the instance buying page, price details (excluding the backup space fee) will be displayed.

You are billed for:
- Selected specifications for your instance
- Storage space

The backup space fee is not included. For details about the backup price, see Product Pricing Details.
Billing Cycle
A yearly/monthly GeminiDB Cassandra instance is billed for the purchased duration (UTC+8). The billing starts when you activated or renewed the subscription, and ends at 23:59:59 of the expiry date.
For example, if you bought a GeminiDB Cassandra instance for one month at 15:50:04 on March 8, 2023, the billing cycle is from 15:50:04 on March 8, 2023 to 23:59:59 on April 8, 2023.
Billing Examples
Assume that you bought a three-node GeminiDB Cassandra instance with 2 vCPUs, 8 GB of memory, 100 GB of storage, 110 GB (100 GB for free) of backup storage for one month at 15:50:04 on March 8, 2023 and renewed the subscription for one more month before it expired. The billing items include instance specifications (vCPUs, memory, and nodes), storage, backup storage, and EIP bandwidth.
- The first billing cycle is from 15:50:04 on March 8, 2023 to 23:59:59 on April 8, 2023.
- The second billing cycle is from 23:59:59 on April 8, 2023 to 23:59:59 on May 8, 2023.
- From 23:59:59 on April 8, 2023 to 23:59:59 on May 1, 2023, 50 GB of free backup storage was used.
- From 23:59:59 on May 1, 2023 to 23:59:59 on May 8, 2023, another 10 GB of backup storage was billed for 168 hours.
You need to pay in advance for each billing cycle. Each resource is billed separately.
Resource |
Formula |
Unit Price |
---|---|---|
Instance specifications (including vCPUs and memory) |
Unit price of the instance specifications x Required duration x Number of nodes |
For details about the unit price, see Cluster CPU/Memory on Product Pricing Details |
Storage |
Storage space unit price x Required duration x Storage space (GB) |
See the estimated price of a cluster instance with specified storage in GeminiDB Price Calculator. |
Backup storage |
Backup storage unit price x Required duration x (Backup storage – Storage) (GB)
NOTE:
The billing duration indicates how long the storage exceeding a free quota was used. |
See the estimated price of an instance with specified backup storage in GeminiDB Price Calculator. |
EIP bandwidth |
Billed by fixed bandwidth |
For details, see Product Pricing Details. |
Figure 2 shows how the total price is calculated.

The prices in the following figure are for reference only. For the actual prices, see GeminiDB Price Calculator.
Price Change After Specification Change
If the specifications of a yearly/monthly GeminiDB Cassandra 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 increase instance specifications, you need to pay the difference in price.
- If you decrease instance specifications, Huawei Cloud will refund you the difference.
Decreasing instance specifications will affect instance performance. You are not advised to do so. Assume that you bought a yearly/monthly three-node GeminiDB Cassandra instance with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory for one month on April 8, 2023 and increased its specifications to 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory on April 18, 2023. The old specifications cost USD587.06/month and the new specifications USD981.62/month. The calculation formula is as follows:
Price difference = Price of new specifications x Remaining period – Price of old specifications x Remaining period
The remaining period in the formula is the remaining days of each calendar month divided by the maximum number of days in each calendar month. In this example, the remaining period is 0.6581 (12/30 + 8/31). The fee for increasing specifications is USD259.66 (981.62 x 0.6581 – 587.06 x 0.6581).
For more details, see Pricing of a Changed Specification.
Impact of Expiration
Figure 3 shows the statuses a yearly/monthly GeminiDB Cassandra instance can go through throughout its lifecycle. After an instance is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If the instance is not renewed after it expires, before being deleted, it first enters a grace period and then a retention period.
Expiration Reminder
The system will send you a reminder (by email, SMS, or in-app message) before a yearly/monthly GeminiDB Cassandra instance expires to the Huawei Cloud account creator.
- Expiration notifications will be sent 30 days, 15 days, 7 days, 3 days, and 1 day before yearly resources expire.
- Expiration notifications will be sent 15 days, 7 days, 3 days, and 1 day before monthly resources expire.
Impact of Expiration
If your yearly/monthly GeminiDB Cassandra 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 GeminiDB Cassandra instance but cannot:
- Change instance specifications.
- Change the billing mode from yearly/monthly to pay-per-use.
- Unsubscribe from it.
If the yearly/monthly GeminiDB Cassandra 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 GeminiDB Cassandra instance while it is in the retention period.
If the yearly/monthly GeminiDB Cassandra instance is not renewed by the time the retention period ends, it will be released and data cannot be restored.
Feedback
Was this page helpful?
Provide feedbackThank you very much for your feedback. We will continue working to improve the documentation.See the reply and handling status in My Cloud VOC.
For any further questions, feel free to contact us through the chatbot.
Chatbot