Public Cloud Billing

Learn about the billing design of OVHcloud Public Cloud solutions.

One of the main principles of cloud computing is based on pay-as-you-go billing, where customers pay for what they use. Cloud computing offers a more flexible billing system — one where you pay at the end of the month for the time during which you have used the resources.

This system is similar to the one used by certain telephone operators, who bill at the end of the month for the number of minutes used. Here, OVHcloud bills the hours for which the server, storage space, or another element of the service is used.

Requirements

a Public Cloud project in your OVHcloud account
a Public Cloud instance
access to the OVHcloud Control Panel

General design

Our goal is to provide a billing system that matches the way our customers use this service as closely as possible. To achieve this, we needed to make the billing granular. This is why the unit system is usually the amount of time, counted in hours in this case.

For each resource to be billed, an hour counter starts when the resource is created, and stops when the resource is removed. This works per the principle of each hour of use being billed.

For each instance, the billing meter starts when an instance reaches the ACTIVE status (displayed as Activated in the OVHcloud Control Panel). In other words, the period during which the instance is in BUILD status is not billed.

At the end of the month, each counter is multiplied by the hourly rate for the resource. To get the overall bill total, simply add up all of the counters charged for.

Each Public Cloud service is a line item on your bill. An invoice totaling all of your services is generated on the first day of the following month.

Example

NOTE: An hourly instance is billed per hour, regardless of when the instance is created. If you would like to have 60 minutes of usage for one hour of billing, you will need to launch your instance at the hour mark, for example at 1:00 or 2:00 pm.

This example might provide a clear explanation of how this works.

A user launches a B2-15 instance on the 4th day of the month, at 09:40.
On the 8th day of the month at 10:00, they add a 250GB additional volume (Classic Volume).
They delete all of it on the 12th day of the same month at 16:30, once they have finished what they needed to do with these resources.

For the instance, from the 4th day of the month at 09:40 until the 12th of the month at 16:30, there are 200 hours of resource usage. They are billed at $0.1539 per hour.

For the storage, from the 8th day of the month at 10:00 until the 12th of the month at 16:30, there are 103 hours of resource usage. The Classic Volume costs $0.000066 per GB per hour.

At the end of the month, the bill will total up to:

200 hours x $0.1539 per hour
103 hours x 250 GB x $0.000066 per hour

i.e. $32.48

The prices listed here are not contractual and are only used to provide an example.

Item
B2-15 Instance	Cost (per hour)	$0.1539
x	Usage (hours)	200 hr
=	Total	$30.78
Additional Volume (Classic)	Size	250 GB
x	Cost (per GB per hour)	$0.000066
x	Usage (hours)	103
=	Total	$1.70
Bill Due:		$32.48

Instructions

View your bills

To view your bills, please follow the steps in our How to Manage OVHcloud Bills guide.

Instances

The prices of cloud instances (or cloud servers) are listed in the OVHcloud Control Panel before you get started with an instance. You can also view prices on the pricing page.

The bandwidth for instances is not billed.

Each instance model has two different billing methods: hourly and monthly.

Instances, except Gen 3 (B3/C3/R3), can be billed hourly or monthly. You can switch from hourly to monthly, but not monthly to hourly. For instructions on how to do this, please see our Switching from Hourly to Monthly Billing guide.

NOTE: The billing for an instance stops when the instance is deleted permanently. If the instance has a status such as “stopped” or “paused”, the billing counter will continue to work because the instance has not been deleted. With both billing methods, the service is billed by the amount of time during which it is used.

Hourly price

This pricing follows the pay-as-you-go model explained earlier.

These instances are paid for on the first day of the following month, for the hours of resource usage over the previous month.

PCI Hourly Timeline.png

Shelve (suspend) an instance

For hourly instances, it is possible to shelve an instance to release the resources dedicated to it while keeping the same IP. In this case, the data on your local disk will be stored in a snapshot that is created when an instance is shelved/suspended. Only the snapshot will be billed.

NOTE: This process is only functional for hourly billed instances, it will not stop the billing of your instance but it will reduce your cost.

For more information on how to proceed, consult this guide.

Monthly price

For B2/C2/R2 instances, monthly pricing offers a price reduction of around 50% compared to hourly billing. This is typical cloud billing.

Each commenced month is billed, even if the instance is deleted before the end of the month.

Billing for Public Cloud Services breaks down as follows:

A customer creates a project, which results in an initial billing period that goes until the end of the month at a prorated rate.
Instances created within the initial billing period will only generate charges through the end of the initial billing period's month.
On the first of the following month (and the first of every month thereafter), the customer is charged the full amount.

Example:

PCI Monthly Timeline.png

Storage

Storage solutions are generally charged based on a GB per month price. To see the price per GB per hour, simply divide the per-month price by 720, the average number of hours in a month. The result of this calculation will be the cost of an element stored per hour.

The calculation is: ( Price per GB per month / 720 ) x number of hours x number of GB

The number of GB per hour corresponds to the maximum number of GB stored for the hour. For example, if a user has 15GB at 16:20, 17GB at 16:40, and 14GB at 16:50, OVHcloud will charge 17GB for the 16:00 - 17:00 period.

The storage prices are available directly on the OVHcloud website.

Additional volumes

The additional volumes are simply billed per GB provisioned, with a different price depending on the range.

Backups of additional volumes

Backups of additional volumes are billed the same way as the volumes themselves.

Snapshots of additional volumes

Snapshots of additional volumes are billed the same way as the volumes themselves.

Instance snapshots and images

Both snapshots and images of instances (excluding the catalog of images supplied by OVHcloud) are billed at a flat rate per GB per month, regardless of the original instance and image type. Go to the pricing page to view prices.

Object storage

Two elements are billed for object storage:

The storage of the objects themselves, i.e. the volume actually used in GB.
Outgoing traffic, i.e. the volume of data sent from the service, contained in HTTP body.

Outgoing traffic between the object storage service and the instances is billed the same way as outgoing traffic sent via the internet.

NOTE: Viewing objects via the OVHcloud Control Panel is also considered to be outgoing traffic.

Vouchers (Public Cloud Credit)

You can apply or check the status of a voucher from the OVHcloud Control Panel. To do this:

Click your name and then your initials.
From the left-side menu select My payment methods.
Click the Vouchers.

PCI_compute_billing_vouchers***.png

To add a voucher to your account, click Add a coupon or voucher. In the pop-up window, enter your Voucher code and click Add.

Go further

For more information and tutorials, please see our other Public Cloud support guides or our other Billing guides. You can also explore the guides for other OVHcloud products and services.

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Requirements