A dedicated host provides exclusive physical resources for a single tenant, enabling independent resource planning, security compliance, and lower deployment costs.
Benefits
On shared hosts, the system assigns physical resources shared among multiple tenants. Dedicated hosts give you exclusive physical resources that you can plan based on your business requirements, such as deploying ECS instances on specific hosts or viewing physical attributes including sockets and cores. The following figure shows the differences.
ECS instances on dedicated hosts address the following requirements:
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Security compliance: Physically isolated instances meet regulatory requirements for sensitive workloads.
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Bring your own license (BYOL): Import socket- or core-based license images to ECS to create instances without repurchasing licenses, reducing migration costs.
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Lower deployment costs: CPU overprovisioned dedicated hosts increase available vCPUs from the same physical resources, reducing per-unit deployment costs.
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Self-planned physical resources: Deploy instances on specific dedicated hosts, migrate instances between shared and dedicated hosts, or associate instances with dedicated hosts. For example, when you reactivate a pay-as-you-go instance that was stopped in economical mode and had its compute resources released, the instance remains on the associated dedicated host.
Billing
See Billing overview.
ECS instances on a dedicated host incur no charges for compute resources (vCPUs and memory) or local disks. However, other billable resources such as paid images, cloud disks, and public bandwidth are still charged. See Resource billing for ECS instances on a dedicated host.
Usage notes
Create a dedicated host in the ECS console and then create ECS instances on it:
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Create a dedicated host. See Create a DDH.
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Create ECS instances on the dedicated host. See Create ECS instances on a dedicated host.
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Manage the dedicated host. See Manage Dedicated Host.
To manage dedicated hosts and ECS instances, see What is Dedicated Host?