Data transfer is an integral part of cloud computing and all our Simple plans include a generous amount of transfer capacity within the monthly pricing. Nevertheless, the needs of fast-growing businesses can quickly exhaust the monthly transfer quota of their front-end cloud server while other servers on their account never come even close. We recognise the unbalanced use of transfer quotas which is why on the 1st of October 2020 we will be bringing Network Transfer Pool to all public cloud users!
Introducing Network Transfer Pool!
Earlier this year, we lowered the excess data transfer pricing considerably to reduce the cost of outbound transfer to just $0.01 per GB when going beyond the included quotas. However, Network Transfer Pool is going to make even that an unlikely situation by allowing your UpCloud services to share their quotas!
Network Transfer Pool, as the name suggests, combines all transfer quotas included in all UpCloud public cloud products and services you use into a single account-wide transfer pool. This includes all traffic quotas across all data centres covering all current Cloud Servers as well as any future products that contain quotas for outgoing transfer. All metered network transfer is then first subtracted from the pool at a maximum expected hourly rate before any excess billing. Higher bursts of network usage exceeding the hourly transfer quota are billed at the standard transfer rate of $0.01 per GB.
The pooling is based on the goal to enable users to take full advantage of their allotted transfer quota but distributed evenly across the month to ensure fair playing field to all users. In practice, the summed up quota is divided by the hours in a calendar month for an hourly transfer quota for all your UpCloud services. The hourly transfer quota is regularly updated according to the changes in deployed services and is calculated at the beginning of every hour according to the currently allotted quotas.
Example of the new Network Transfer Pool:
- Cloud services have a combined transfer pool of 36 TB
- The pool is divided by 720 hours for an hourly transfer quota of 50 GB
- Applicable outbound traffic first uses the transfer quota of 50 GB per hour
- Any transfer exceeding 50 GB within the same hour is billed at $0.01 per GB
- The hourly transfer quota is then calculated again when the next billing hour starts
All of your cloud services which include transfer quota share the combined Transfer Pool and the calculated hourly quota allowing greater flexibility in service configurations. No longer will the transfer quotas of your database and other backend servers be left unutilised while the frontend or load balancers exceed their individual quotas. And as always, all transfers within SDN Private Networks and the Utility network remain unlimited and free of charge.
Learn more in our network documentation.
The new Network Transfer Pool comes into effect at 00:00 UTC on the 1st of October 2020 when ready!
Anon
Thanks, a lot!
WVH
Sounds good. Have you considered a hard limit that puts users on a slower connection for the rest of the month or some other way to control costs for personal projects where budget surprises are more problematic?
Janne Ruostemaa
Hi there, thanks for the feedback. The goal of the new Network Transfer Pool is to help users be more efficient with their network transfer quotas and avoid overages. If you wish to make sure your server never goes beyond its transfer quota, you can already set a connection speed limit yourself by using e.g. wondershaper.
Taylor
Ok you are trying to do something by utilizing the backend server quotas but at the same time ruining monthly quota concept for users with peaks during the day. Let’s say someone has peak hours thru 09:00 to 15:00 and not much of a traffic at other times. Normally even if this person could be just fine this month with monthly cap only, will be fined for his peak hours next month in October. The very beginning of this concept that you have the limit for the hour is so wrong because if you are below limit you can’t accrue any bandwidth to the next hour but if you are above the limit you will be slapped with excess usage. So wrong! Don’t do that!
Janne Ruostemaa
Hi Taylor, thanks for the comment. You are right that high network transfer during peak hours could cause excess charges in certain use-cases which is opposite to our intentions. We are happy to get the feedback on this and can assure you we are reworking the Network Transfer Pool to make it as favourable to our users as possible.
Anon
I am really disappointed to see that this feature is postponed.
Why can’t you just implement it the same way as competitors there you have just monthly network transfer pool, which adds total amount of bandwidth from each node?
Hopefully this won’t get postponed to the oblivion.
Janne Ruostemaa
Hi there, thanks for the comment. We understand the frustration delays always cause but not to worry, Network Transfer Pool is still very much coming.