Pay-as-you-go is a billing method that lets you pay for resources after you use them. With pay-as-you-go, you activate and release NAS resources on demand, with no upfront purchase. This topic explains how pay-as-you-go NAS resources are settled and what happens if a payment becomes overdue.
Product pricing
For pay-as-you-go pricing of NAS, see Apsara File Storage NAS pricing page.
Billing rules
General-purpose NAS resources are billed based on actual usage. Bills are generated and fees are deducted from your account at the end of each billing cycle. For more information, see Billing for General-purpose NAS.
Extreme NAS resources are billed based on provisioned capacity. Bills are generated and fees are deducted from your account at the end of each billing cycle. For more information, see Billing of Extreme NAS file systems.
Applicable scenarios
Pay-as-you-go billing is mainly applicable to the following scenarios:
Scenarios where workloads frequently fluctuate.
Scenarios where resource usage is temporary or bursty.
Applicable billable items
The following billable items of NAS support pay-as-you-go billing:
General-purpose NAS storage capacity (Capacity/Performance/Advanced)
Infrequent Access (IA) media storage capacity
IA storage read traffic
IA storage write traffic
Archive storage capacity
Archive storage early deletion capacity
Archive storage read traffic
Archive storage write traffic
Extreme NAS provisioned capacity
Billing cycle
Pay-as-you-go NAS resources are billed on an hourly basis (based on UTC+8). After a billing cycle ends, a new billing cycle begins.
If the available credit in your account (including the Alibaba Cloud account balance and vouchers) is less than the pending bill amount, you will receive an insufficient balance notification by text message or email.
Billing after you change configurations
If you change configurations of a pay-as-you-go instance after it is created, a new order is generated and billing starts based on the new configuration price. The old order automatically becomes invalid.
If you change configurations of an instance within one hour, multiple billing entries are generated. The start time and end time of each billing entry correspond to the effective time of a specific configuration within that hour. For example, if you create a pay-as-you-go Extreme NAS file system instance with a provisioned capacity of 1 TiB at 11:00:00 and scale it up to 2 TiB at 11:30:00, two billing entries are generated for the period from 11:00 to 12:00.
The first entry covers 11:00:00 to 11:30:00 and is billed based on a provisioned capacity of 1 TiB.
The second entry covers 11:30:00 to 12:00:00 and is billed based on a provisioned capacity of 2 TiB.
After you create a pay-as-you-go Extreme NAS file system instance, you can change the provisioned capacity of the instance. For more information, see Scale up an Extreme NAS file system.
Overdue payment
If your account has overdue bills, you cannot use pay-as-you-go resources normally. Overdue payment will cause NAS to stop services and may even lead to data deletion. We recommend that you settle overdue bills as soon as possible to avoid service interruptions or data deletion that may affect your business. For information about resource status changes after overdue payment, see Overdue payments.