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 3-node (specifications of each node: 2 vCPUs | 8 GB) GeminiDB Cassandra instance with 500 GB of storage space. At the bottom of the page for buying an instance, price details (excluding the backup storage fee) will be displayed.

Figure 1 Example price

You are billed for:

• 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.

Billing Cycle

Pricing is listed on a per-hour basis (GMT+08:00), and bills are calculated down to the second. The billing starts when an instance is created and ends when it 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 buy a pay-per-use GeminiDB Cassandra instance at 8:45:30 and delete it at 8:55:30, you are billed for the 600 seconds from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30. The billing items include compute resources (vCPUs and nodes), storage, and backup storage.

Billing Examples

Assume that you bought a pay-per-use 3-node instance with 2 vCPUs, 8 GB of memory, 100 GB of storage, and 110 GB of backup storage (100 GB for free) at 09:59:30 on April 18 and deleted the instance at 10:45:46 on April 18, 2023. The billing items include compute resources (vCPUs and nodes) and storage.

• 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 storage is used from 10:00:00 to 10:45:00.
  • 10 GB of backup storage is billed for 46 seconds from 10:45:00 to 10:45:46.

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 Cassandra instances are billed individually.

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.

If the price is not an integer, it is rounded off to the nearest two decimal places. If the rounded price is less than USD0.01, USD0.01 will be displayed.

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

Impact on Billing After Specification Changes

If you change the specifications of a pay-per-use 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 buy a pay-per-use instance with 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory at 9:00:00 and increase the specifications to 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory at 9:30:00, two billing records will be generated between 9:00:00 and 10:00:00:

• 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of memory from 9:00:00 to 9:30:00
• 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory from 9:30:00 to 10:00:00

Impact of Arrears

Figure 3 shows the statuses of a pay-per-use GeminiDB Cassandra instance throughout its lifecycle. After a GeminiDB Cassandra 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 Cassandra instance

Arrears reminder

The system will bill you for pay-per-use resources after each billing cycle ends. If your account goes into arrears, the system will send an email, SMS message, or in-app message to the one who created the Huawei Cloud account.

Impact

If your account is in arrears due to automated deduction for pay-per-use GeminiDB Cassandra instances, the instances are not immediately stopped but given a grace period. After you top up your account, Huawei Cloud will bill you for expenditures generated during the grace period. You can view the charges on the Billing Center > Overview page.

If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, your instance enters the retention period and its status changes to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on the instance in the retention period.

If you do not pay the arrears within the retention period, your instance will be released, and data will be lost.

• 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.