This topic explains the billing methods, billable items, and pricing of Alibaba Cloud CDN.
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All Alibaba Cloud CDN services are billed based on your account UID.
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Unless otherwise specified, the pay-by-data-transfer, pay-by-peak-bandwidth, and monthly 95th percentile bandwidth billing methods measure the outbound traffic and bandwidth from Layer 1 (L1) CDN POPs.
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Accelerated domain names that you add in the CDN console with the Business Type set to DCDN are billed based on DCDN pricing. You can view and use these domain names in the DCDN console.
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Alibaba Cloud CDN and DCDN can share resource plans for outbound traffic, static HTTPS requests, and CDN WAF requests.
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Alibaba Cloud CDN bills may be delayed by 3 to 4 hours.
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Alibaba Cloud CDN and DCDN manage accelerated domain names separately. You cannot add the same domain name to both services. Each service is billed independently based on its usage, which prevents duplicate charges.
Choose a billing method
Alibaba Cloud CDN supports two billing methods: pay-as-you-go (default) and resource plans (for common paid services). Choose a billing method based on your traffic patterns.
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Traffic stability |
Billing method |
Benefits |
Description |
Pricing details |
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Highly variable, with significant spikes and dips, or unpredictable |
pay-as-you-go (postpaid) |
Pay only for what you use. This method provides flexibility to accommodate business changes. |
You are charged based on the actual usage of billable items. Use the service first, pay later. |
For the pricing of Alibaba Cloud CDN billable items, see pay-by-data-transfer. |
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Relatively stable, with predictable monthly usage |
resource plans (prepaid) |
More cost-effective than pay-as-you-go. Suitable when you want predictable costs. |
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For the pricing of resource plans, see Resource plan pricing. |
Billable items
CDN billing consists of basic service fees (required) + value-added service fees (optional). The composition of billable items is shown in the figure below.
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Basic service fees (Required): These are the core fees for CDN acceleration. You must select one of the following billing methods for basic services: pay-by-data-transfer, pay-by-peak-bandwidth, and monthly 95th percentile bandwidth. The default method is pay-by-data-transfer.
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Value-added service fees (Optional, billed separately): If you use advanced features such as static HTTPS requests and real-time log delivery, you will incur additional fees.
Key billing concepts
Outbound traffic and back-to-origin traffic
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Outbound traffic (billable): Traffic generated when users download data from CDN POPs through a browser or client. This is the primary component of basic service fees.
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Back-to-origin traffic (not billed): Traffic generated when a CDN POP retrieves content from your origin server, such as an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance or an Object Storage Service (OSS) bucket, because the content is not cached on the POP or has expired. This traffic is not billed by Alibaba Cloud CDN, but your origin server may incur charges for outbound traffic.
Billing region
The system determines the billing region based on a user's IP address and applies the unit price for that region.
Alibaba Cloud CDN has POPs across all billing regions worldwide, enabling precise, region-based billing based on a visitor's IP address. For details about the countries and regions covered by each billing region, see POP distribution.
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Billing region |
Abbreviation |
Countries and regions |
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Chinese mainland |
CN |
Chinese mainland |
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North America |
NA |
United States |
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Europe |
EU |
Ukraine, United Kingdom, France, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Germany, and Spain |
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Asia Pacific 1 |
AP1 |
China (Hong Kong), Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, and Malaysia |
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Asia Pacific 2 |
AP2 |
Indonesia, India, South Korea, and Pakistan |
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Asia Pacific 3 |
AP3 |
Australia |
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Middle East/Africa |
MEAA |
Türkiye, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Nigeria, and South Africa |
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South America |
SA |
Brazil |
Billing cycle
Billing cycles for Alibaba Cloud CDN are as follows:
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Billing cycle |
Bill generation and settlement |
Applicable billable items |
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Hourly |
Fees are settled hourly. Bills are typically generated 3 to 4 hours after a billing cycle ends. Actual bill generation times may vary. |
Basic services |
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Value-added services |
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Daily |
Fees are settled on a daily basis. At approximately 04:00 each day, the bill for the previous day is generated and fees are deducted. Actual bill generation times may vary. |
Basic services |
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Monthly |
At approximately 04:00 on the first day of the following month. |
Basic services |
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Video tutorial
References
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Choose a metering method for acceleration services |
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Resource plans |
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More references |