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.

Billing Items

You are billed for the following items on a pay-per-use basis.

If you want to purchase a pay-per-use 3-node (specifications of each node: 2 vCPUs) GeminiDB Redis instance with 12 GB of storage space. At the bottom of the instance buying page, price details (excluding the backup space fee) will be displayed.

Figure 1 Example price

The price includes:

• Instance specifications (including vCPUs and memory)
• Selected storage space

The backup space fee is not included. For details about the backup price, see Product Pricing Details.

Billed Usage Period

Pay-per-use GeminiDB Redis instance usage is calculated by the second and billed every hour. The billing starts when ECS instance is created and ends when the instance is deleted.

It takes a certain time to create an instance. The billing starts from the time when the instance is successfully created. You can view the two time points on the Basic Information page. You can view the time when the instance is created beside the Created field.

For example, if you purchased a pay-per-use GeminiDB Redis instance at 8:45:30 and deleted it at 8:55:30, you are billed for the 600 seconds from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30.

Billing Examples

Suppose you purchased a pay-per-use instance on April 18, 2023, 9:59:30, and deleted it on April 18, 2023, 10:45:46. Two usage periods will be billed:

• Usage of 30 seconds from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00
• Usage of 2,746 seconds from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46
  • The free backup space is used from 10:00:00 to 10:45:00.
  • Ten GB of billing backup space is used from 10:45:00 to 10:45:46 and the billed duration is 46 seconds.

The price displayed in the pricing details is per hour, so you need to divide it by 3,600 to obtain the price for each second and then multiply the per-second price by the total number of seconds. GeminiDB Redis instances are billed individually as follows.

Figure 2 shows how the total price is calculated.

Prices in the figure are just examples. Actual prices are subject to Product Pricing Details.

For pay-per-use billing, decimal numerals on the price calculator are rounded off and are accurate to two decimal places. If the fee is less than $0.01 USD (after rounding off), $0.01 USD will be displayed.

Figure 2 Total price for a pay-per-use GeminiDB Redis instance

Price Change After Specification Change

If you change the specifications of a pay-per-use GeminiDB Redis instance, 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 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 instance (0.5 vCPUs | 3 GB) at 9:00:00 and changed the instance specifications to 1 vCPU | 6 GB at 9:30:00, the following items will be billed:

• Specifications 0.5 vCPUs | 3 GB usage from 9:00:00 to 9:30:00
• Specifications 1 vCPU | 6 GB usage from 9:30:00 to 10:00:00

Impacts of Arrears

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

Figure 3 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use GeminiDB Redis instance

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

If your configured payment method is unable to pay a bill for pay-per-use resources, the resources enter a grace period. 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 bring your account balance current before the grace period expires, the GeminiDB Redis instance status turns to Frozen and it enters a retention period. You cannot perform any operations on a pay-per-use GeminiDB Redis instance in the Frozen status.

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

• During the retention period, you cannot access or use your instance but the data stored in it can be retained. The retention period for Huawei Cloud International website is 15 days.
• During the grace period, you can access and use only some resources of your instance. The grace period for Huawei Cloud International website is 15 days.

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