Dedicated Host (DDH) is a single-tenant hosting solution from Alibaba Cloud. DDH gives you exclusive access to a physical server's sockets, CPU cores, and memory. No other tenant's workloads run on the same machine.
Benefits
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Security and compliance: Workloads run in physical isolation from other tenants, helping you meet compliance requirements that mandate single-tenant infrastructure.
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Bring Your Own License (BYOL): Use your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses on DDH. Applies to Windows Server, SQL Server, and other enterprise software that requires visibility into the underlying hardware.
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Cost optimization: Migrate workloads to the cloud at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by reusing existing software licenses instead of purchasing new cloud licenses.
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Visibility and control: View the physical attributes of the host, including sockets, CPU cores, and memory. You choose which ECS instance families to deploy on the host.
The following figure compares DDH and shared hosts.
On a shared host, multiple tenants share a physical server. On DDH, you are the sole tenant with exclusive access to all physical resources.
When to use Dedicated Host
| Scenario | Description |
|---|---|
| Regulatory compliance | Your industry or data governance framework requires workloads on physical infrastructure not shared with other organizations. |
| License optimization | You own per-socket or per-core software licenses and want to use them in the cloud (BYOL) instead of purchasing new licenses. |
| Performance-sensitive workloads | You need consistent performance without noisy-neighbor interference from other tenants. |
| Hardware affinity | Your applications require persistent binding to specific physical hosts, for example, for license tracking or audit purposes. |
Features
DDH supports these deployment features:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Automatic deployment | When you create an ECS instance, DDH automatically selects a host with sufficient resources to place the instance. |
| Host association | Bind an ECS instance to a specific DDH. For instances with economical mode enabled, the instance redeploys on the same DDH when restarted, even after being stopped. |
All features are listed in Functions and features.
Dedicated host types
Each DDH type defines the available physical resources: sockets, CPU cores, and memory. These resources determine which ECS instance families you can deploy.
All available types are listed in Dedicated host types.
Billing
Billing details:
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Dedicated Host: Supports subscription and pay-as-you-go billing. Check the Dedicated Host tab in the Pricing section of the Elastic Compute Service product page.
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ECS instances on the host: Billing depends on the resource type. Resource billing for ECS instances on a dedicated host.
Full details are in Billing overview.
Related services
ECS instances on DDH support the same Alibaba Cloud services as those on shared hosts, with some Differences between ECS instances on a dedicated host and those on a shared host.
Limits
DDH has resource Limits.
Get started
Create a dedicated host from the ECS console.