Pay-per-Use Billing

Application 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 flash sales, temporary testing, and scientific computing.

Billed Items

A pay-per-use EIP can be billed by bandwidth, by traffic, or it can be added to a shared bandwidth. Table 1 lists the billed items in different billing options.

Billed Usage Period

Pay-per-use EIP usage is calculated by the second and billed every hour. The billing starts when the EIP is assigned and ends when the EIP is released.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use EIP at 08:45:30 and released it at 08:55:30, you are billed for the 600 seconds from 08:45:30 to 08:55:30.

Billing Examples

Billing by bandwidth

EIPs use tiered pricing for fixed bandwidth. The price varies by bandwidth size.

The unit price of a fixed bandwidth and whether tiered pricing is used vary by region. For details, see EIP Pricing Details.

Suppose you purchased an EIP billed by bandwidth of 6 Mbit/s on April 18, 2023, 08:45:00, bound the EIP to an instance on April 18, 2023, 09:45:00, unbound the EIP from the instance on April 19, 2023, 06:45:00, and released the EIP on April 19, 2023, 08:55:00.

The EIP reservation price is $0.009 USD per hour. Figure 1 shows how to calculate the hourly bandwidth price in this example. The price for the bandwidth of 6 Mbit/s is $0.084 USD per hour.

Figure 1 Hourly price of an EIP billed by bandwidth

Billing by traffic

Suppose you purchased an EIP billed by traffic on April 18, 2023, 08:45:00 and bound the EIP to an instance on April 18, 2023, 09:45:00. There were 1300 GB traffic generated from 20:00:00 on April 18, 2023 to 06:00:00 on April 19, 2023. Then, you unbound the EIP from the instance on April 19, 2023, 06:45:00 and released the EIP on April 19, 2023, 08:55:00. The EIP reservation price is $0.005 USD per hour, and the traffic price is $0.081 USD per GB.

Price Change After Specification Change

If you change specifications within a given hour, multiple records will be generated. Different records record the billing for different specifications.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use EIP billed by bandwidth of 6 Mbit/s EIP at 09:00:00 and increased the bandwidth to 20 Mbit/s at 09:30:00, the following items will be billed:

• Bandwidth of 6 Mbit/s from 09:00:00 to 09:30:00
• Bandwidth of 20 Mbit/s from 09:30:00 to 10:00:00

Arrears Impact

Figure 2 shows the statuses a pay-per-use EIP can have throughout its lifecycle. After an EIP is purchased, it enters the valid period and runs normally during this period. If your account goes into arrears, the EIP enters a grace period and then a retention period.

Figure 2 Life cycle of a pay-per-use EIP

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 in-app message.

Impact of Arrears

• Grace period

  If your account is insufficient to pay your amount due, your account goes into arrears and your resource enters the grace period. Pay-per-use resources are not stopped immediately. 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.

• Retention period

  If you do not bring your account balance current before the grace period expires, the EIP status turns to Frozen and enters a retention period.

• Permanent release

  If you do not bring your account balance current before the retention period ends, your resources will be released and the data cannot be restored.

• For details about the grace period and retention period, see What Is a Grace Period of Huawei Cloud? How Long Is It? and What Is a Retention Period of Huawei Cloud? How Long Is It?
• For details about top-up, see Topping Up an Account.