Aliyun International Agents: Pay-as-you-go vs Monthly: How to Choose the Most Cost-effective Billing Mode for Global Deployment of Sea-going Business?
For foreign trade bosses who start their own businesses, webmasters of independent cross-border e-commerce stations, or developers who need to deploy their businesses to the world, choosing Aliyun Overseas Edition (International) or China Station is only the first step.
When you really start to create ECS servers, configure global acceleration networks (GA) or buy cloud databases (RDS) in the background, another big choice immediately comes to your face:
In the end, do you choose "Pay-as-you-go" or "Subscription"?
Many people will intuitively think: "the sea business has just started, choose to pay by volume, how much to spend, certainly the most economical."
Some people also think: "There is a discount for the year and the month, and a one-time buyout is the most practical. There is no need to worry about receiving a sky-high bill at the end of the month."
As an old netizen who has paid tens of thousands of "tuition fees" in the sea cloud service, today I will use the vernacular, without any official public relations rhetoric, to directly help you strip off these two charging modes
Under the global deployment scenario.
The invisible pit and the accounting logic.
1. core card: the essential difference between the two billing models
Alibaba Cloud International Agents
Before we settle the accounts, let's explain their underlying logic in two of the most common words:
Package year and month (prepaid): It's like you have a fitness year card near your home. No matter whether you practice every day or not, you will be deducted so much money every month. As long as you go, the average unit price is very low.
Pay-as-you-go (post-paid): Just like you go to a shared bike or private cinema, you are billed by the hour or minute. When you use crazy billing, once deactivated (or completely released), billing immediately stopped. Its unit price (converted to a month) is usually 2 to 3 times higher than that of a package.
The 2. scene is in the right place: how to choose the sea business?
Sea business has its particularity. Due to the time difference around the world, the network ecology and the consumption habits of overseas users are completely different from those in China, when choosing a billing mode, you must be bound to your specific business scenario.
Scenario 1: Cross-border e-commerce independent stations (such as Shopify and self-built stations) and foreign trade official websites
Business characteristics: This kind of website needs to be online 24 hours without interruption. Because you don't know whether users in the United States will open your web page in their afternoon or in Europe in their morning.
It is strongly recommended that the core node server be stuck with "year-on-year and month-on-month".
Accounting logic: as long as the server needs to be turned on 24 hours a day, the unit price of pay-as-you-go is a bottomless pit. If you buy a server on a Hong Kong or Singapore node in Aliyun International Station, it may only cost US $50/month per year, but if you pay by volume, if you run full 720 hours a month, the bill will probably soar to US $120-150, spending twice as much money for no reason.
Scenario 2:TikTok operations, overseas social media matrix (matrix support/test)
Business characteristics: some cross-border groups.
The team needs to open many IP and servers in different regions overseas to run automated scripts or use them for different number raising employees. These environments may be used today, but they will not be used if the product test fails next week.
Strongly recommended: decisively choose "pay-as-you-go".
Accounting logic: overseas e-commerce products or raise numbers, pay attention to the word "fast. If a product in a region does not run through, you need to abandon the node immediately. If the package is selected, the refund process is very complicated.
Alibaba Cloud International Reseller
(Even some overseas accounts are difficult to refund without damage). Pay-as-you-go allows you to start the machine for 2 hours. If you can't "release" it directly after the test, it only costs a few cents in total, and the sunk cost is extremely low.
Scene 3: Overseas Games and Tool App (with obvious traffic tide)
Business characteristics: for example, a game oriented to Southeast Asia, the peak time of playing games is from 8: 00 p.m. to 11: 00 p.m. local time, and the server traffic increases sharply. However, from 3: 00 a.m. to 7: 00 a.m., almost no one is online.
It is strongly recommended that the combination of "package year and month (guaranteed) pay-as-you-go (flexible expansion)" be used.
Accounting logic: You can buy 2 high-end servers on a monthly basis to carry the daily basic traffic (this is your guaranteed cost). Then configure Aliyun's "Auto Scaling". When the peak hour comes at night and the CPU cannot hold up, the system will automatically pay for the temporary opening of 3 servers to join the battle. When there is no one in the middle of the night, the system will automatically destroy (release) these 3 servers by volume. This will not cause the site to crash, and the cost of pressure to the minimum.
3. sea deployment of the two most likely to ruin the "invisible pit"
Many people only looked at the CPU and memory money when settling accounts. As a result, the bill came out at the end of the month and was dumbfounded. In the overseas version of the billing, there are two "electric tigers" that will bite at any time ":
Big pit one: overseas high "network bandwidth/traffic fees"
In the domestic station, we are used to buying "fixed bandwidth" (such as 5M, 10M bandwidth monthly unlimited use). However, when deploying Alibaba Cloud Overseas Edition or international sites, many nodes use Pay-by-Traffic by default ".
Beware of bandwidth by volume: if your server at sea is unfortunately attacked by malicious traffic (DDoS/CC attack), or is targeted by hackers to frantically brush traffic. If it is a fixed bandwidth, the website will at most get stuck or slow down. However, if it is a charge-by-flow mode, hackers will brush off several TB of overseas traffic for you in one night, and thousands of dollars of bills will be deducted directly from your bound PayPal or credit card. This is by no means alarmist!
Solution: For production environment and long-term online business, the network bandwidth can be selected as monthly. If you must charge by traffic, you must set "traffic alert" and "maximum consumption limit" in the Alibaba Cloud background ".
Big pit 2: cognitive misunderstanding that "shutdown" does not deduct money
This is countless novice developers will step on the ray.
You opened a pay-as-you-go server in the background. After opening it, you felt that you didn't want to do it today. You clicked "Stop" in the background to turn it off, thinking that you wouldn't deduct money.
Alibaba Cloud International Reseller
The cruel truth: after the shutdown, it is still continuously withholding your money! Because although you have stopped the calculation of CPU and memory, your website data is still stored in ariyun's cloud disk, and the overseas independent public network IP you occupy is still occupied by you. Aliyun will continue to charge your cloud disk storage fee and fixed IP occupancy fee.
Solution: If the paid resources are not used after confirmation, don't just turn them off, you must click "Delete/Terminate". Only when it is completely destroyed will the stopwatch with fee deduction really stop.
4. ultimate money-saving customs clearance secrets: how to beat down the price?
If you want both the flexibility of pay-as-you-go (you can change nodes at any time) and the low price of a monthly package, the big factory has actually left two "back doors" for smart people:
1. Make good use of Savings Plans or Reserved Instance (RI)"
This is an advanced money-saving method introduced by Aliyun against overseas AWS.
How to play: you can promise ariyun: "I will spend $2 per hour at the international station in the next year." As long as you make this promise, ariyun will give you a 3-50% discount on all pay-as-you-go servers. It not only retains the flexibility to change servers and release them at any time, but also enjoys the discount of annual and monthly package.
2. Embrace "Preemptible Instances (Spot Instance)"
If you are running some offline data analysis, cross-border crawler, or do not need 24-hour online test tasks, check "preemptible instance" when starting up ".
This is Aliyun's "low-price sale" of idle servers in the computer room. The price is often only 1-20% of the normal pay-as-you-go price.
Cost: When the data center resources are tight, Alibaba Cloud has the right to forcibly recover and release the server after notifying you a few minutes in advance.
Summary
For the global deployment of offshore services, the choice of billing model is not absolutely good or bad, only if it is calculated as refined or not:
Official website, e-commerce, core business: honestly package year and month, figure a stable and secure, to prevent the flow of violence leading to bankruptcy.
Testing, temporary running data, multi-region testing: decisively pay by volume, release after using seconds, and never leave a machine in your hand for the night.
Alibaba Cloud International Reseller
Finally, one more nag: it is not easy to go to sea, tied up the international station account number of overseas credit cards,
Be sure to look at the bill details every week.
. Only by keeping the cost under your control can the business run further!