The basic services of Alibaba Cloud Dynamic Content Delivery Network (DCDN) support two metering methods: pay-by-data-transfer and pay-by-peak-bandwidth. You can select a metering method as needed. This topic describes the metering methods and considerations for the basic services of DCDN.
Pay-by-data-transfer (default)
Scenario | Billing rule |
Websites that experience greatly fluctuating traffic and spikes in bandwidth usage, with daily bandwidth usage below 30% |
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Pay-by-peak-bandwidth
To use the pay-by-peak-bandwidth metering method, make sure that the peak bandwidth value within the previous 30 days exceeds 5 Gbit/s and contact your account manager or contact us by other means.
Scenario | Billing rule |
Websites whose network traffic is relatively flat and daily bandwidth usage exceeds 30% |
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Burst bandwidth
Due to business expansion, data transmission abuse, or attacks, your domain may experience burst bandwidth usage.
In the pay-by-peak-bandwidth metering method, the following cases can be considered as burst bandwidth usage for a single Alibaba Cloud account:
The total increase in bandwidth usage exceeds 500 Gbit/s within a calendar month.
The peak bandwidth recorded in the last calendar month was 0, while the total bandwidth increase in the current calendar month exceeds 200 Gbit/s.
The total peak bandwidth usage in the current calendar month is 1.3 times the billable bandwidth of the previous calendar month.
In the pay-by-data-transfer metering method, if the peak bandwidth of a single domain exceeds 100 Gbit/s within a calendar month, it can be considered as burst bandwidth usage.
If otherwise agreed, the actual rule prevails.
If you expect burst bandwidth on DCDN-accelerated services, you need to apply for burst bandwidth at least 3 business days in advance. For major events including but not limited to the Spring Festival Gala and Double 11 Global Shopping Festival, you need to apply for burst bandwidth at least 1 month in advance. If the application is approved, the availability of your services is guaranteed when the burst bandwidth is within the level agreed upon by both parties. If you do not apply for burst bandwidth or the application is not approved, Alibaba Cloud reserves the right to take measures such as bandwidth throttling to ensure service-level stability for other Alibaba Cloud customers. Alibaba Cloud is not responsible for the reduced availability caused by the measures.
To apply for burst bandwidth, contact your account manager or contact us by other means. After the application is approved, you are billed based on the newly agreed price. If you do not apply for burst bandwidth or the application is rejected, you are billed based on the current price. The final fees are determined by DCDN bills.
Usage notes
The billed traffic volume is higher than the traffic volume recorded in the logs. This is because the latter only reflects data captured at the application layer. However, the billing covers additional overheads, such as the amount of data that is consumed to transmit the additional bytes inserted into TCP or IP packet headers and to retransmit TCP packets. Therefore, the total billed traffic is higher than the traffic logged at the application layer. For more information, see Why is the traffic amount found by using the monitoring and usage analytics feature or the usage statistics feature different from the traffic amount that is logged?
In most cases, a bill is generated about 3 to 4 hours after the end of a billing cycle. The time when bills are generated is determined by the system.