What is the difference between monthly and pay as you go ECS packages and how to choose them?

When purchasing Alibaba Cloud servers, many people will find that there are several payment methods for Alibaba Cloud servers, including pay as you go, monthly package, etc. ECS instances corresponding to different billing methods have different functions. Only by understanding these concepts can you choose the most appropriate payment method.

Monthly package and pay as you go

1. Monthly guarantee

It is a prepaid mode, that is, pay before use, and charge by month. The unit price of resources is yuan/month. It is generally applicable to fixed 7 * 24 services, such as Web services.

2. Pay as you go

It is a post payment mode, that is, first use, then pay, and charge by second. The unit price of resources is displayed in yuan/hour. If the life cycle of the instance from creation to release is less than 0.01 yuan, the supplement will be charged at 0.01 yuan. It is generally applicable to applications or services with explosive business volume, such as temporary expansion, temporary testing, scientific computing, etc. If automatic release is set, the billing end time shall be subject to the actual release time of the system (accurate to seconds).

The following is a comparison table of the difference between monthly subscription and pay as you go billing modes:

Interested can see Official Documents More detailed comparison in.

Difference between subscription and pay as you go scenarios

The usage scenarios are different. From the table above, we can see that pay as you go is usually an ECS created with temporary needs, such as promotions, red packets, and second kill activities. It requires high concurrency in a short period of time, large traffic support, and a few sets can be opened when used, and then released when used up. The use time is relatively short. The biggest advantage of this is that it can save the cost of activities. However, the same length of time must be more expensive than monthly payment. The main feature is flexible, which can be opened (created), stopped (released).

However, monthly subscription is suitable for stable scenarios, such as enterprise stations, personal blogs, large, medium and small websites, applets, apps, and businesses that can't be shut down for a long time and can't be released without expiration. In the same time, the price is lower than pay as you go.

Recommended Alibaba Cloud monthly package activities

Click me directly [AliCloud Cloud Website] Both new and old users can

How to choose between monthly subscription and pay as you go

If the business is stable for a long time, for example, the website has a relatively fixed number of visits every day, and the traffic bandwidth fluctuates slightly in a single value most of the time, Lao Wei recommends that you choose a monthly package. You only need to pay once, and you don't need to pay too much attention to the resource status of the server before the deadline. If the business grows slowly in a certain period and exceeds the current server performance, it can also be elastically upgraded to a higher configuration, and the CPU/memory/bandwidth/cloud disk can be elastically upgraded. In addition, the monthly package is very cost-effective.

In addition, there are some special business requirements, and payment methods can be flexibly selected for this situation:

The business needs are high in the early stage and stable in the later stage. You can choose to pay as you go first, and then transfer to yearly/monthly subscription. Reference Pay as you go subcontracting
During a certain period of time, the traffic increases sharply, and you can choose Monthly subscription to pay as you go

It shows that these two modes are relatively free and can be switched, which is very flexible and convenient for users.

The models and various activities we usually see on Alibaba Cloud's website are all paid by monthly subscription, so that users can sell for more hours at a lower price.