Cloud VPS billing

This article explains how Cloud VPS hosting accounts are billed.

Understanding Cloud VPS billing

Cloud VPS accounts are billed by usage, which means that charges accrue over the billing period based on the resources you use. Charges for the following resources are based on the virtual machine's running time:

• Memory
• CPU cores
• CPU speed
• Network rate

When the virtual machine is stopped, no further charges accrue for these resources.

Charges for disk space and SSD storage, on the other hand, accrue based on allocation time. This means that as long as the virtual machine is running or stopped (and not destroyed), charges accrue for these options.

There are also charges for bandwidth usage, which includes data sent and received.

Checking current charges

You can use the A2 Hosting Customer Portal to view accrued charges for the current billing period. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Customer Portal.
   If you do not know how to log in to the Customer Portal, please see this article.
2. On the menu bar, click Services and then click MY SERVICES:

   

3. Locate your Cloud VPS service, and then click Manage.

4. On the Manage tab, near the bottom of the page, locate the Accrued Charges section.
   

   The accrued charges total is calculated nightly, and does not include the current day.

5. To view an itemized list of charges, click Show Usage Breakdown:
   

   

Understanding Cloud VPS invoices

As noted above, Cloud VPS charges are based on resource usage, and you can change virtual machine resource configurations whenever you want. As a result, Cloud VPS invoices are a little more complicated than those for typical hosting products. A Cloud VPS invoice includes the following information:

• An itemized list of each resource used at some point during the billing period.
• The usage amount for each resource, which is usually measured in hours of running time.
• The corresponding cost for each resource.

For example, if you resize a virtual machine's memory from 512MB to 1024MB to 2048MB during the billing period, you will see three separate items on the invoice for each RAM configuration, along with the amount of running time accrued for each configuration.

Invoices also include allocation-based resources (disk space and SSD storage) and bandwidth usage.