Cloud Storage Gateway:Billing rules for Cloud Storage Gateway

Online gateways

Billing for online gateways is based on gateway specifications, cache type, and Internet bandwidth. Both pay-as-you-go and subscription billing methods are supported. The fees for the two billing methods are calculated as follows:

• Pay-as-you-go: Hourly gateway fee = Hourly price of the gateway specification + Cache capacity (GB) × Price per GB/hour + Internet bandwidth (Mbps) × Price per Mbps/hour.

• Subscription: Monthly/Yearly price = Monthly/Yearly price of the gateway specification + Cache capacity (GB) × Monthly/Yearly price per GB + Internet bandwidth (Mbps) × Monthly/Yearly price per Mbps.

CSG on CloudBox

You purchase the CloudBox hardware resources outright, and Alibaba Cloud only charges for the gateway software license.

Cross-zone high availability file gateways

Billing for cross-zone high availability file gateways is based on gateway specifications, cache type, and Internet bandwidth. Only the pay-as-you-go billing method is supported. The fees are calculated as follows:

• Pay-as-you-go: Hourly gateway fee = (Hourly price of the gateway specification + Cache capacity (GB) × Price per GB/hour + Internet bandwidth (Mbps) × Price per Mbps/hour) × 2.

  Note

  • If the gateway specifications, cache capacity, and Internet bandwidth are the same, the fee for a cross-zone high availability file gateway is twice that of a Basic Edition file gateway.

  • Cross-zone high availability file gateways do not currently support cross-region use. Therefore, only 5 Mbps of bandwidth is provided for free, and no additional bandwidth fees are charged.

Other fees

Using Cloud Storage Gateway incurs other fees in addition to the billable items for the gateway.

• OSS usage fees

  You own the OSS resources used by Cloud Storage Gateway. OSS charges you for fees that are generated when the gateway accesses OSS. These fees include storage, traffic, requests, and data retrieval.

  • Storage fees: Files written to the gateway are uploaded to OSS and consume OSS storage space.

  • Traffic fees: If you select an internal network OSS Endpoint, no read or write traffic fees are generated. If you select an Internet OSS Endpoint, outbound Internet traffic fees are generated when you read files from the gateway.

  • Request fees: Uploading and downloading files through a file gateway or iSCSI gateway generates request fees. If remote sync is enabled for a file gateway, the gateway retrieves the file list and metadata from the OSS bucket when you browse folders, which generates request fees. An iSCSI gateway uploads data in fixed-size segments. For large files, this generates many segments and corresponding request fees.

  • Data retrieval fees: These are fees for the volume of data read from the OSS server-side. The data volume transferred over the Internet is also billed as outbound Internet traffic. For the Archive storage class, you use the RESTORE operation to restore data. After the data is restored, data retrieval fees are charged based on the actual amount of data restored. If you call RESTORE again after the data is restored, no more data retrieval fees are charged.

    Note

    Data retrieval fees apply only to the Infrequent Access and Archive storage classes of OSS.

• SLS usage fees

  If you enable the Log Monitoring service for Cloud Storage Gateway, system logs are pushed to your specified Simple Log Service (SLS) Logstore. Fees that are generated by gateway access are charged to you by SLS.

• KMS usage fees

  If you enable the server-side encryption feature for OSS, OSS calls the KMS API to perform operations such as querying, generating, encrypting, and decrypting data keys.

  Fees that are generated by gateway access to KMS are charged to you by KMS.

• OSS transfer acceleration usage fees

  If you enable the transfer acceleration feature for a share, the gateway's Internet bandwidth is fully utilized to increase the data transfer speed in cross-region scenarios. Fees that are generated by gateway access to OSS are charged to you by OSS.

• Message Service (formerly MNS) usage fees

  The express synchronization feature depends on Alibaba Cloud Message Service (MNS). Therefore, using express synchronization incurs related fees.

Pay-as-you-go

This method bills you based on the formula: Actual usage × Unit price. Every hour, the actual usage of the previous hour is calculated, and the fee is deducted from your account balance. For example, if the current time is 09:30, the fees generated from 08:00 to 09:00 are settled.

Subscription

The subscription billing method is more cost-effective than pay-as-you-go for a given billing cycle.

Resources that support subscription:

• Purchase a Cloud Storage Gateway

  • When you create a Cloud Storage Gateway, set the Billing Method to Subscription.

    Note

    • On the Cloud Storage Gateway (Subscription) page, you only need to select a billing cycle.

    • You can enable auto-renewal on the Cloud Storage Gateway (Subscription) page.

• Purchase a cache

  Note

  A cache disk is dependent on a specific gateway. The billing cycles of the cache and the Cloud Storage Gateway may be inconsistent. For example, you purchase a subscription gateway at the beginning of the month and an additional subscription cache in the middle of the month. Assume you purchase both for one month. When the subscription gateway expires at the beginning of the next month, if you delete it or it is automatically released upon expiration, the cache disk is also released. The remaining balance is not refunded.

After a Cloud Storage Gateway has an overdue payment, its service status changes as follows:

• For a Cloud Storage Gateway deployed in a data center

  After 24 hours of an overdue payment, Alibaba Cloud pauses the service and freezes operations for the Cloud Storage Gateway. Data stored on the local cache disk of the Cloud Storage Gateway is retained but cannot be read. If you pay the overdue amount within 15 days after the service is stopped, the Cloud Storage Gateway service is automatically restored. You can then continue to access the data retained on the local cache disk through the Cloud Storage Gateway.

• For a Cloud Storage Gateway deployed on Alibaba Cloud

  • After 24 hours of an overdue payment, Alibaba Cloud pauses the service and freezes operations for the Cloud Storage Gateway. However, the data you retain on the Cloud Storage Gateway cache disk continues to be stored and billed.

  • After 15 days of service suspension (from the time the service is paused to the same time on the 15th day), Alibaba Cloud stops providing the service. At the same time, all data that you have saved on the Cloud Storage Gateway cache disk is deleted and cleared, and cannot be recovered.