Alibaba Cloud DCDN basic services offer multiple billing methods: pay-by-data-transfer, pay-by-peak-bandwidth. You can choose the billing method that best suits your business needs. This topic describes the billing methods and important notes for DCDN basic services.
Pay-by-data-transfer (default)
Use cases | Billing rules |
Suitable for workloads with fluctuating traffic, occasional bandwidth spikes, and daily bandwidth utilization below 30%. |
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Pay-by-peak-bandwidth
To use the pay-by-peak-bandwidth billing method, your peak bandwidth in the last 30 days must exceed 5 Gbps. To apply, contact your Alibaba Cloud account manager or contact us.
Use cases | Billing rules |
Recommended for workloads with stable traffic patterns and daily bandwidth utilization consistently above 30%. |
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Burst bandwidth
An accelerated domain may experience a sudden, high-volume increase in traffic, known as burst bandwidth, due to business growth, resource abuse, or cyberattacks. Burst bandwidth is defined by any of the following conditions:
If you use the pay-by-peak-bandwidth method, burst bandwidth occurs for a single account if any of the following conditions are met:
The total DCDN bandwidth increase in a calendar month exceeds 500 Gbps.
The peak bandwidth in the previous calendar month was 0, and the total DCDN bandwidth increase in the current calendar month exceeds 200 Gbps.
The total DCDN peak bandwidth increase in the current calendar month exceeds 30% of the billable bandwidth from the previous month.
If you use the pay-by-data-transfer method, burst bandwidth occurs if the peak bandwidth of a single accelerated domain exceeds 100 Gbps in a calendar month.
If other terms have been agreed upon, those terms take precedence.
If you expect your DCDN services to require burst bandwidth, you must submit an application to Alibaba Cloud at least three business days in advance. For major events, such as the Spring Festival Gala or the Double 11 Global Shopping Festival, you must apply at least one month in advance. If your application is approved and your usage stays within the agreed-upon limits, Alibaba Cloud ensures that your service is not affected. If you do not apply, or if your application is denied, Alibaba Cloud reserves the right to implement measures such as bandwidth throttling to ensure overall network stability. Alibaba Cloud is not liable for any availability issues that result from such measures.
To apply for burst bandwidth, contact your Alibaba Cloud account manager or contact us. If your application is approved, we will bill you at the newly negotiated price. If you do not apply or the application is rejected, we will bill you at your current price. The final charges will be reflected on your DCDN bill.
Important notes
Billed data transfer is higher than the data transfer recorded in logs because logs only record application-layer data. The billed amount also includes network overhead from elements like TCP/IP headers and TCP retransmissions. For more information, see Why is the data transfer in usage analytics different from the data transfer in logs?
DCDN bills are typically generated 3 to 4 hours after a billing cycle ends. The actual time a bill is generated is subject to system processing.