To meet the needs of different business scenarios and help customers reduce costs, Alibaba Cloud provides rich and flexible billing methods. Billing optimization usually does not require change the performance and quantity of resources, but only by changing the billing method to obtain lower discounts and save costs. Alibaba Cloud helps customers achieve cost optimization goals by providing discount benefits, deducting resources, and offering more refined management of preemptible pay-as-you-go instances.
Pay-As-You-Go with a Savings Plans
If an enterprise already has a certain number of pay-as-you-go instances and wants to optimize costs, they can use Alibaba Cloud's Savings Plans to offset the bills of pay-as-you-go instances. Use the Savings Plans purchase recommendation tool to view the estimated savings amount and recommended purchase plan. In order to obtain more favorable discounts and flexible payment methods, enterprises need to commit to consume a certain amount of money per hour within a certain period (1 year or 3 years).
Use Savings Plans together with pay-as-you-go instances, and the specifications of pay-as-you-go instances can be flexibly adjusted.
Bills within the committed amount per hour will be billed at the lowest price, and only the portion that exceeds the committed amount per hour will be billed at the regular pay-as-you-go price.
Enterprises can pay fees using flexible payment methods. 0 prepayment, partial prepayment, and full prepayment modes are supported.
Invoices can be issued for fees billed at the regular pay-as-you-go price, providing convenience for enterprise finance.
Preemptible Instances
If an enterprise already has a certain number of pay-as-you-go instances, they can consider replacing a portion of the compute capacity with preemptible instances. Preemptible instances and pay-as-you-go instances are both on-demand instances. Preemptible instances have a certain discount compared to pay-as-you-go instances, aiming to reduce the cost of using ECS instances in certain scenarios. Preemptible instances have price fluctuations and support billing by the second. By fully utilizing the price fluctuation characteristics of preemptible instances, enterprises can purchase preemptible instances at the right time to reduce computing costs and increase throughput within a certain time period while reducing overall costs. When using preemptible instances, the following points need to be noted:
The market price of preemptible instances fluctuates with the supply and demand of a specific instance specification. When creating preemptible instances, if the real-time market price of the specified instance specification is lower than the bid price and there is sufficient inventory, preemptible instances can be successfully created.
Preemptible instances have a protection period, during which the instance specifications are billed based on the market price at the time of transaction, and after the protection period, they are billed based on the real-time market price.
Based on the characteristics of preemptible instances, it is recommended to use them to support stateless and fault-tolerant businesses that require lower costs. Elastic Supply can also be used to deploy instance clusters across different payment methods, availability zones, and instance specifications, meeting the needs of rapid delivery of stable compute resources and cost reduction using preemptible instances.
Optimize Cloud Traffic Costs
Optimizing traffic costs refers to specialized optimization of fees generated by traffic products that support east-west traffic and north-south traffic in network architecture. Such products include Elastic IP (EIP) and Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN), and so on. Traffic products usually support post-paid and pay-as-you-go billing models. Enterprises can purchase traffic resource packages to enjoy lower prices than pure pay-as-you-go and flexible tiered pricing provided by Alibaba Cloud traffic cost tool. Enterprises can manage the fees generated by traffic products by activating Cloud Data Transfer (CDT). After accessing CDT, the user only needs to manage the fees of the traffic products on one CDT item. Compared to the previous fixed unit price mode, through CDT, enterprises can support tiered pricing, which means that the more they use, the cheaper the price will be, resulting in more cost savings compared to the fixed unit price. Currently, CDT supports traffic products including Elastic IP (EIP), Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN), and VPC Peering. Enterprises can check the cost savings by switching to CDT based on historical consumption data and optimization recommendations in Network Billing Method Optimization. CDT provides financial convenience to users. For example, users can easily view the overall usage and costs on the CDT bill, allowing convenient understanding of overall usage and cost data. Control of cloud traffic costs can be combined with resource packages and tiered pricing. The amount calculated by CDT is the amount to be paid after deducting the traffic package.
Reduce Pay-as-You-Go Costs by Deductible Resources
Deductible resources refer to various resources, such as Reserved Instances, Storage Capacity Unit Packages, PolarDB Compute Packages, and resource packages, that can be used to offset pay-as-you-go usage. The unit selling price of resource instances is lower than the pay-as-you-go unit price. By purchasing deductible resources, the usage costs of pay-as-you-go can be reduced. These deductible resources are collectively referred to as Deduction Plans (DP). DP plans can be managed in "Resource Management - Resource Instance Management" to view relevant data through various reports such as instance summary, usage details, and coverage overview. Based on the actual situation, subscribe to the resource package specifications so that the resource package can achieve maximum coverage and maximize pay-as-you-go cost reduction.
Save Storage Costs with RC
When enterprise customers have a significant need for data storage and management in various business scenarios such as Internet audio and video, cloud galleries, and data backup, they can use OSS's reserved capacity (RC) product. By purchasing one year of reserved capacity, up to 70% of costs can be saved compared to pay-as-you-go. RC provides reserved capacity in designated regions and scenes without regional attributes. RC without regional attributes is suitable for customers who have no requirements for data storage regions and can accept data access only through the public network. Compared to designated regional reserved capacity, the same space level can receive more price discounts. Designated regional reserved capacity only offsets the storage costs of "Standard Storage-Local Redundancy" in that region, and the payment period is one year. Compared to the pay-as-you-go model, costs can be reduced by up to 50%. There are 7 level options available ranging from 500 GB to 1 PB in capacity. The larger the purchasing capacity, the lower the unit storage cost. RC without regional attributes creates a "Bucket without regional attributes" and offsets the storage costs of that bucket. The payment period is one year. "Bucket without regional attributes" only supports data access through the public network and does not support intranet access. Compared to the pay-as-you-go model, costs can be reduced by up to 70%. There are 4 level options available ranging from 10 TB to 1 PB in capacity. The larger the purchasing capacity, the lower the unit storage cost.
Track the Latest Discount Benefits and Billing Methods
Alibaba Cloud continuously tracks the cloud usage requirements of enterprise business applications and provides granular instances, convenience in cost accounting, and billing methods according to different business scenarios. It is suggested to keep up with the latest discount benefits, product specification upgrades, new tools, and tool upgrades provided by Alibaba Cloud. For example, CDT's cost optimization recommendations will gradually support more types of cloud products, helping customers further manage traffic costs.