Bandwidth Cluster

Bandwidth Cluster is a network bandwidth billing model that allows you to uniformly manage all your compute resources and optimize public network bandwidth costs by sharing a bandwidth commitment with the aggregated burstable 95th pricing model. All your compute resources may reside within a large region, which crosses several cities, or simply within only one city.

Once this service is activated, when purchasing computing resources such as bare metal instances or elastic compute instances, if you have selected the Bandwidth Cluster network pricing, these computing resources will be added in to a regional or city-based Bandwidth Cluster and share one bandwidth commitment within the same region or city. Your computing resources covered by the Bandwidth Cluster will be billed by the 95th percentile bandwidth pricing, and the 95th peak value will be added together to calculate the final 95th peak bandwidth of the Bandwidth Cluster.

This kind of network billing provides a cost-effective and easily manageable bandwidth sharing and reuse solution.

Features

• Global Coverage Cover global regions or cities to ensure network service quality and coverage.

• Shared Large Burst A significantly large burst capability to handle peak traffic.

• Cost-effective Scaling Flexibly adjustable bandwidth commitment to suit all your requirements.

• Burstable 95th Billing The 95th percentile bandwidth billing model for efficient cost management.

• Unified Traffic Management Unified management of traffic usage across different cities in the region.

Related Concepts

Bandwidth Cluster

A Bandwidth Cluster is an auto-managed public network service with the regional aggregated burstable 95th bandwidth pricing model. You are allowed to add your computing resources in to a bandwidth cluster and flexibly choose the shared bandwidth commitment, aiming at optimizing network costs.

A Bandwidth Cluster covers a region crossing several cities. See Supported Regions for details.

Burstable 95th Billing

• Usage Sampling It samples the bandwidth usage of your resources over a billing cycle. Samples, typically recorded every 5 minutes, indicate the usage at each point.

• Percentile Calculation Ingress and egress are sampled separately. For each direction, the samples are sorted from highest to lowest and the top 5% are discarded; the highest remaining value is that direction's 95th percentile. The billable bandwidth is the larger of the two directions: billable 95th = max(ingress 95th, egress 95th).

• Predictable Costs Prevent billing surprises due to temporary surges. Ensure you are not overcharged for infrequent usage peaks. Suited for who wishing to scale their digital infrastructure while maintaining budget-friendly networking solutions.

Bandwidth Commitment

The minimum bandwidth usage that you commit to use every month. The higher the usage, the lower the unit price. If you haven't use the committed amount, you will still be charged by the commitment you have purchased. You can upgrade or downgrade the commitment any time as you want, and the scheduled change will be valid at the 1st of next month.

Overages

The actual usage beyond the bandwidth commitment. The overages will be charged additionally per Mbps. You are recommended to purchased a proper amount of bandwidth commitment to reduce extra overages charge.

Burst Capability

Apart from the commitment, you also have the burst capability to temporarily use a certain times the commitment (varied from different regions) to cope with traffic peaks. Please note that the overages beyond commitment will be charged without bandwidth throttling.

Billing Details

Billing	Description
Billing method	Pay-as-you-go, including commitment and overage bandwidth.
Billing cycle	By month, calculated at the end of the month and billed at the 1st of the following month.
Billable items	Bandwidth commitment Overage bandwidth, that is the 95th peak bandwidth of all the computing resources in all cities of the region or in one city (the larger of the ingress and egress 95th).
Billing rules	Commitment charge = Commitment × Commitment price × time factor Overages charge = (Actual used 95th peak bandwidth − commitment) × Overages price × time factor Total charge = Commitment charge + Overages charge where time factor = actual usage duration / total duration in the month (the actual duration is prorated to the second, and the denominator is the number of days in that calendar month).

Billing Example

Scenario Description

• On April 15, the user activated a regional bandwidth cluster (covering cities of A and B) with the commitment of 200 Mbps.

• By the end of the month, the 95th peak bandwidth of A city reached 120 Mbps; the 95th peak bandwidth of B city reached 150 Mbps.

In this situation, 200 Mbps Commitment price = $400/month; Overages price = $1.50/Mbps/month.

Billing Process

The time factor is 16 / 30 (16 used days out of 30 days in April).

1. Commitment charge = $400 × 16/30 = $213.33

2. Overages charge = (120 Mbps + 150 Mbps − 200 Mbps) × $1.50/Mbps × 16/30 = $56.00

3. Total charge = Commitment charge + Overages charge = $213.33 + $56.00 = $269.33

Interval 95th (per-interval settlement)

By default, when the cluster's shared commitment changes mid-month, the aggregated 95th percentile is calculated once across the entire month. Interval 95th is an optional variant: each time the commitment changes, the interval that just ended is settled immediately using an aggregated 95th computed only from that interval's own samples — not the whole month. The next interval then starts a fresh 95th calculation.

When to use it

Interval 95th suits clusters with very large, uneven fluctuation, where a single monthly 95th does not reflect actual usage — for example, a 3-day flash-sale or live-streaming event at the start of the month that spikes traffic, followed by a low, steady baseline for the rest of the month. Under the monthly 95th, the event's peak dominates the whole-month value and inflates the overage charged for the quiet remainder. With interval 95th, each period is billed on its own realized aggregated 95th.

Interval 95th is not a self-service option. If your business has this kind of fluctuation, contact Zenlayer to arrange interval 95th billing.

Example

Prices: 500 Mbps commitment = $600/month, 100 Mbps commitment = $300/month, overage = $1.50/Mbps/month.

• April 1 – April 10 — commitment 500 Mbps, interval aggregated 95th = 600 Mbps

  1. Commitment charge = $600 × 10/30 = $200.00

  2. Overages charge = (600 Mbps − 500 Mbps) × $1.50/Mbps × 10/30 = $50.00

  3. Subtotal = $250.00

• April 11 – April 30 — commitment lowered to 100 Mbps, interval aggregated 95th = 120 Mbps

  1. Commitment charge = $300 × 20/30 = $200.00

  2. Overages charge = (120 Mbps − 100 Mbps) × $1.50/Mbps × 20/30 = $20.00

  3. Subtotal = $220.00

• Monthly total = $250.00 + $220.00 = $470.00

For comparison, the default monthly 95th would apply the event peak (600 Mbps) to the quiet period too, making its overage (600 − 100) × $1.50 × 20/30 = $500.00 and the monthly total $950.00.

Supported Resources

Compute resources, including bare metal, virtual machine and elastic compute services, with pay-as-you-go pricing model.