Alibaba Cloud DNS:Billing

Billing methods

Private Zone uses pay-as-you-go billing. You are charged for Authoritative Zone, Cache, Forward Zone, Inbound Endpoint, and Traffic Analysis. Bills are generated daily. You can view the previous day's charges the next day.

Billable items

Billing examples

Overdue payments

Billing methods

Global Traffic Manager 3.0 supports both subscription and pay-as-you-go billing.

Subscription

Subscription is ideal for fixed-budget scenarios. The following resources are billable:

Subscription instance: Purchase a Standard or Ultimate Edition of Global Traffic Manager for a specific period, such as a month or a year.

Detection Task Package: The Standard and Ultimate editions include 100 detection tasks per month by default. To add more health check tasks, purchase a Detection Task Package for your instance.

Billing methods

Recursive Gateway uses a pay-as-you-go billing method. You can purchase data transfer plans to reduce costs.

• Bills for Recursive Gateway are generated daily based on your usage.

• On the first day of each month, Recursive Gateway provides a free quota of 10 million regular HTTP requests, which is equivalent to 20 million UDP/TCP parsing requests, for all users with the service enabled. You are charged only for usage that exceeds this free quota.

• The free quota is provided on a monthly basis. Any unused quota from the current month does not carry over to the next month.

Billing rules

Recursive Gateway is billed based on the number of UDP/TCP parsing requests. For billing, the number of parsing requests is converted to the number of HTTP parsing requests. The conversion ratio is as follows:

• UDP/TCP requests are billed at half the rate of HTTP requests. In other words, two UDP/TCP requests are equivalent to one HTTP request.

• After you exceed the free quota, you are charged USD 0.0062 per 10,000 HTTP parsing requests.

Traffic deduction order

Billing methods

HTTPDNS uses pay-as-you-go billing. No charges apply when the service is idle.

• HTTPDNS is billed daily.

• On the first day of each month, HTTPDNS provides a free quota of 10 million HTTP queries (equivalent to 20 million UDP/TCP queries) per active account. Usage beyond the free quota is charged.

• The free quota resets monthly and does not roll over.

Billable items

HTTPDNS bills by HTTP query count. HTTPS queries (including DoH and DoT) are converted to HTTP-equivalent queries at the following ratios:

• Each HTTPS query (DoH or DoT) counts as five HTTP queries.

• Usage exceeding the free quota is charged at USD 0.0062 per 10,000 HTTP queries.

Usage deduction order

Billing method

On-premises DNS uses a pay-as-you-go billing method. You are charged daily based on the number of deployed resolution nodes.

Billing rules

Overdue payments

• If you have an overdue payment for your On-premises DNS service, resolution nodes continue to operate for 30 days. During this period, the console is locked and you cannot change configurations. Existing resolution data is not affected.

• If a payment remains overdue for 30 days, all service nodes and resolution data are permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.

Billing methods

DNS Firewall includes multiple components and supports both pay-as-you-go and subscription billing methods.

Pay-as-you-go

This billing method applies to Private Zone DNS Firewall and Public Recursive DNS Firewall. Fees are calculated and settled daily based on your actual usage.

Cost estimation example

• Feature: Private Zone DNS Firewall

• Usage: 20 custom rules. Each custom rule blocks 10,000 domain name queries per day.

• Monthly cost estimate:

  • Protection rule fee: 20 rules × USD 0.015/rule/day × 30 days/month = USD 9/month

  • Protection detection fee: 20 rules × 10,000 queries/day × USD 0.004/10,000 queries × 30 days/month = USD 2.4/month

  • Total fee: USD 9/month + USD 2.4/month = USD 11.4/month

Overdue payments

Subscription

This billing method applies to Public Zone DNS Firewall. You must purchase the service in advance, and the fee covers the subscription period that you select.

Expiration

• Anti-DDoS Protection: This feature expires when the Public Authoritative Zone instance expires. To avoid service interruptions, renew the instance. For more information, see Instance expiration and renewal.

• Authoritative DNS Resolution Agent: When the service expires, the proxy feature is disabled. To ensure business continuity, renew the service before it expires.

How are wildcard domains counted?

Alibaba Cloud DNS billing is based on the number of zones, not the number of DNS records or subdomains. When you purchase a DNS instance, the "number of domains" you enter is the number of zones you need.

Billing rules:

• Each zone counts as one domain, regardless of the number of DNS records or subdomains it contains.

• A wildcard record, such as *.example.com, is a DNS record within the example.com zone and does not count as a separate domain.

• If you host a subdomain as a separate zone, it counts as one zone. For example, if you host sub.example.com as an independent zone, sub.example.com then counts as a separate zone.

Domain renewal vs. DNS renewal

Domain registration/renewal and the Alibaba Cloud DNS service are two separate products. They are billed and renewed independently.

No renewal is needed for the Free Edition: If you use the Free Edition of Alibaba Cloud DNS, your DNS service continues to work after you renew your domain. No separate Alibaba Cloud DNS renewal is required.

Paid Edition requires separate renewal: If you purchase a Paid Edition of Alibaba Cloud DNS, you must renew your DNS instance separately in the Alibaba Cloud DNS console. If you fail to renew the instance within seven days of its expiration, Alibaba Cloud releases it, and its DNS data becomes unavailable.

Invoices: You can request separate invoices for your domain renewal and Alibaba Cloud DNS service fees in the Alibaba Cloud Billing Management console.