Virtual Private Cloud:Reduce the costs of data transfer over the Internet

Data transfer plans

Data transfer plans are easy to use and cost-effective. A data transfer plan takes effect immediately after you complete the payment. A data transfer plan automatically offsets the fees of IPv4 data transfer for the following pay-as-you-go resources: Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, EIPs, Classic Load Balancer (CLB) instances, and Internet Shared Bandwidth instances.When a data transfer plan is exhausted or expires, it can no longer be used to offset data transfer fees.

• Cost-effectiveness

  Data transfer plans can reduce the cost of resource usage in your services.

• Wide service scope

  Data transfer plans can be used to offset IPv4 data transfer fees that are generated by ECS instances, EIPs, CLB instances, and Internet Shared Bandwidth instances at the same time. These instances are billed on a pay-by-data-transfer basis.

• Ease of use

  After you purchase a data transfer plan, it automatically offsets the data transfer fees that are generated by the corresponding services in multiple regions. You do not need to configure the data transfer plan. For more information, see Purchase a data transfer plan.

• Centralized management

  You can easily learn the overall Internet data transfer based on the usage of data transfer plans.

The following content describes the benefits, scenarios, and usage notes of data transfer plans.

• How much can data transfer plans save?

  Off-peak data transfer plans are offered at a lower price.

• What scenarios do data transfer plans apply to?

  Data transfer plans are supported by the following pay-as-you-go resources: ECS instances, EIPs, and Internet Shared Bandwidth instances. Data transfer plans allow you to minimize the costs when a large amount of data is transferred.

• Usage notes of data transfer plans

  • Each data transfer plan has a validity period. After a data transfer plan expires, the remaining quota of the plan becomes invalid. We recommend that you purchase a proper number of data transfer plans based on the historical data usage of your workloads. You can first purchase data transfer plans to meet the lowest data transfer requirement. Then, purchase more data transfer plans in the future when your need in data transfer grows.

  • When your data transfer plans are exhausted, the system automatically switches to the pay-as-you-go billing method. This ensures business continuity.

  • If you have purchased multiple data transfer plans, the data transfer plans are applied in order of expiration time. The data transfer plan with the earliest expiration time is applied first.

EIP bandwidth plan

Internet Shared Bandwidth instances are offered as an independent bandwidth service. Internet Shared Bandwidth instances provide high-quality and multi-line Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) bandwidth and support multiple billing methods. You can associate EIPs with an EIP bandwidth plan. This allows the EIPs to share the bandwidth that is supported by the EIP bandwidth plan. You can also associate the EIPs with ECS instances, Internet NAT gateways, or CLB instances in a virtual private cloud (VPC). This way, these services can use the bandwidth of your EIP bandwidth plan.

Internet Shared Bandwidth instances support the pay-as-you-go billing method. You can purchase Internet Shared Bandwidth instances to reduce your expenses on bandwidth resources. In addition, this improves the elasticity of your services. For more information, see What is an EIP bandwidth plan?.

You can use an EIP bandwidth plan to share bandwidth resources and save bandwidth costs. Internet Shared Bandwidth instances are suitable for scenarios in which network traffic fluctuates. For example, you have deployed 10 ECS instances in the China (Hong Kong) region. EIPs are associated with these ECS instances. The EIPs use the pay-by-bandwidth metering method and the maximum bandwidth of each EIP is 100 Mbit/s. In this case, you must pay for the 10 EIPs with the maximum bandwidth of 100 Mbit/s. The price is USD 484.21 per day.

The analytic results of network traffic indicate that the peak and trough values of bandwidth of these EIPs appear at different points in time. The peak value of the outbound bandwidth of the 10 ECS instances is about 500 Mbit/s, as shown in the following figure.

You can purchase an EIP bandwidth plan of 500 Mbit/s for the 10 ECS instances. This way, each ECS instance can use a maximum bandwidth value five times the original one, and the price is lower because you need to pay only data transfer fees per day. For more information about the billing of Internet Shared Bandwidth instances, see Pay-by-data-transfer.

Therefore, if you have purchased multiple EIPs and your workloads fluctuate, you can purchase Internet Shared Bandwidth instances to reduce costs.