To handle scenarios such as major promotions, critical event protection, or short-term traffic spikes like daily peak transaction hours and unexpected bandwidth surges, Cloud Firewall provides a flexible pay-as-you-go feature that complements its subscription bandwidth. This ensures continuous, elastic security to keep your business running.
How pay-as-you-go for elastic traffic works
Pay-as-you-go billing for elastic traffic is a flexible pay-as-you-go mechanism that complements the Cloud Firewall subscription model to handle sudden bursts in bandwidth usage. Its core logic is as follows:
Elastic scaling: When your actual bandwidth usage exceeds your subscribed bandwidth, the system automatically enables elastic traffic processing to ensure uninterrupted security protection. Traffic exceeding this limit is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Cost optimization: If your bandwidth usage stays within your subscription limit, you will not incur elastic traffic charges. You can combine this model with pay-as-you-go savings plans to further reduce costs for overage traffic.
Use cases
Periodic short-term bandwidth spikes: For example, during peak business transactions from 09:00 to 09:30 daily.
Occasional minor bandwidth spikes: For example, unexpected and brief traffic increases caused by business or API adjustments.
Promotional or critical-event bandwidth surges: For example, during large sales promotions or security drills.
Billing
Starting October 15, 2025, Cloud Firewall will release Billing method 2.0. New customers will use Billing method 2.0 by default. Existing customers will continue to use Billing method 1.0. The billing rules for Elastic Traffic Processing Capacity differ between the two methods.
Billing method 2.0
Status: Enabled by default and cannot be disabled.
Price calculation: The unit price is 0.06 USD per GB. The total cost is calculated as the excess traffic multiplied by the unit price. You are billed daily, and the invoice is available the next day.
Bandwidth limit: The elastic traffic bandwidth limit is 10 Gbps. For a custom limit, contact your business manager or architect.
Configure alerts: Go to the page and configure an Elastic Billing Alert. You will receive a notification when the peak bandwidth reaches a specified percentage of your subscribed bandwidth.
Billing method 1.0
Status: Enabled by default and cannot be disabled.
Price calculation: The unit price is 0.06 USD per GB. The total cost is calculated as (excess outbound Internet Border traffic + excess inbound Internet Border traffic + excess outbound NAT Border traffic + excess outbound VPC Border traffic + excess inbound VPC Border traffic) × unit price per GB. You are billed daily, and the invoice is available the next day.
Bandwidth limit: The elastic traffic bandwidth limit is 10 Gbps. For a custom limit, contact your business manager or architect.
Configure alerts: Go to the page and configure an Elastic Billing Alert. You will receive a notification when the peak bandwidth reaches a specified percentage of your subscribed bandwidth.
To reduce costs, you can combine this feature with pay-as-you-go savings plans. For more information, see pay-as-you-go savings plans.
Billing example
A company has enabled Internet Border protection for Cloud Firewall with 30 Mbps of subscribed bandwidth. Normal business traffic peaks at 10 to 20 Mbps, with occasional short spikes to 100 Mbps that last for about ten minutes. In the last month, the excess bandwidth was 70 Mbps, and the total excess traffic was 200 GB.
Monthly cost for a bandwidth upgrade
70 Mbps × 7 USD/Mbps/month = 490 USD/month
Monthly cost for excess elastic traffic
200 GB × 0.06 USD/GB = 12 USD.