Instance voucher FAQ

Concepts and General FAQ

What is an instance voucher?

Instance voucher is essentially a "resource pack" product, similar to the common "object storage resource pack" or "carrier traffic pack", through prepaid one-time payment of a certain You can pay for a certain amount of resources in advance to get a more favorable price compared with the pay-as-you-go model, and you don't need to pay for the use within the amount of resources purchased in the resource pack, and the part that exceeds the resource pack will be billed according to the normal billing rules.

Instance vouchers are used with per-configuration billing compute instances ( virtual machine instances, container instances, POD instances), and can be used to offset the cost of per-configuration billing compute instances after purchasing the vouchers on a monthly/yearly prepaid basis at a price close to the annual/monthly billing. Instance vouchers decouple the payment and resource creation, which determines the characteristics of instances that can be deducted, not limited to a specific instance or certain instances. Therefore, it can meet not only the economic considerations when long-term resource use is scheduled, but also the needs of maintaining flexibility in resource creation and deletion.

Does the instance voucher support resource reservation?

The "resource reservation" instance voucher supports resource reservation and will reserve resources according to the available area, specifications and quantity of the voucher.

Which instance specifications support the purchase of instance vouchers?

You can check Instance of the type of specifications supported by the purchase of the voucher.

Do instance vouchers create instances?

No, the instance voucher is only a resource pack product, purchasing the voucher does not create an instance, please purchase the voucher as needed depending on the instance.

Can the instance voucher be used to purchase other products?

No, instance vouchers are not vouchers and can only be used for per-configuration billing of cloud virtual machine instances, container instances or POD instances.

Manage and use instance vouchers

What attributes can be resized for the instance voucher?

• Set-aside vouchers support resizing to availability zones, specifications and quantities, but not changes to geography and applicable instance types;
• Unreserved vouchers support resizing to specification families and computing power, but not changes to geography and applicable instance types;
• Instance vouchers do not support mutual resizing of reserved and unreserved types.

Can you renew your instance voucher after it expires?

No, the deduction voucher will not be available for renewal and resizing of configuration operation after expiration. Please be sure to monitor the expiration of your resources and complete your renewal before it expires or set up automatic renewal in advance.

Will the expired instance vouchers be automatically deleted?

No, in order for you to view your past purchases, instance vouchers are not automatically deleted when they expire, and you can delete expired instance vouchers at any time from the console. However, the voucher will not take up the quota after it expires.

Can you use the instance voucher across accounts?

No.

Can you specify which instances of vouchers are to be used?

No.

Will vouchers be used to offset instances of downtime not being billed?

Whether or not an instance will use the voucher depends on whether or not there are running hours that need to be paid for when the system is billed hourly. An instance that is down and not billed will not use the voucher if it is always down and not incurring costs during an hour, and will deduction the amount calculated for the running time period if it is down and running part of the time during an hour.

Instance voucher Purchase Decision

What kind of instances are suitable for purchasing instance vouchers?

• If the overall resource is in a long-term running state, but need to ensure the flexibility of the instance itself to create and delete (such as using K8S hosted on the cloud or elastic scaling, or multiple businesses share resources on the cloud, and there are dynamic usage fluctuations among businesses under a certain total amount), then it is recommended to choose per-configuration billing for the instance, and also purchase vouchers for some or all of the instances based on the instance running time.
• If the instance is used for a long time and does not need to be updated by delete-rebuild periodically/unusually, you can directly choose the annual and monthly billing method; if the instance is used for a short time, created when needed and released as soon as it is used, you can directly choose the per-configuration billing method.

How do you calculate how many instance vouchers you should buy?

You can count the total number of cores/cards of the instances under the account that are applicable to purchasing vouchers (excluding the instances subject to yearly/monthly package pay-in-advance billing and with a short running time that are not applicable to purchasing vouchers) by region and specification family (no reserved type), or count the total number (reserved type) by availability zone and specifications, and then go to the instance voucher purchase page to purchase them.

Notification: You can use the "Export Resource List" function in the upper-right corner of the cloud virtual machine console to export the resource information and then do sorting statistics in excel.

Which one do you buy first when you have an instance or instance voucher?

Since instance vouchers are valid at the last full point of the purchase, instance vouchers purchased at 09:01:00 and 09:59:00 have the same amount of deduction calculations available during the 9-10 point billing cycle, and instance billing usually takes place at the full point, so you just need to make sure there are available vouchers at the time of billing. Based on this rule, and considering various uncertainties that may exist in resource creation (sold out specifications, insufficient quota, etc.), it is recommended to purchase a per-configuration billing instance first, and then complete the purchase of the instance voucher within the same natural hour after the instance is successfully purchased.