Cloud provider discount & payment / Tencent Cloud
Cloud Virtual Machine (CVM)
Tencent Cloud compute — families, regions and billing
CVM is the most basic thing an overseas business buys from Tencent Cloud International, and usually the first: a virtual machine you log into, install your own OS on, and pay for by the hour or by the month. Choosing one looks like a "how many cores, how much RAM" question, but four things actually decide both the bill and the experience: the instance family, the CPU-to-memory ratio, how you pay for public bandwidth, and the region. This guide works through all four, then explains account opening and payment settlement.
Specs & pricing
| Instance | vCPU | Memory | Public bandwidth | Network billing | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard S5.MEDIUM | 2 | 4GB | 1–5Mbps | Bandwidth or traffic | Websites, APIs, small backends |
| Standard S5.LARGE | 4 | 8GB | 5–10Mbps | Bandwidth | Mid-size production systems |
| Compute C5.LARGE | 8 | 16GB | 5–10Mbps | Bandwidth | High-concurrency services, transcoding |
| Memory M5.2XLARGE | 8 | 32GB | 5Mbps | Bandwidth | Databases, Redis, in-memory queues |
| Standard SA5.LARGE | 4 | 8GB | 5Mbps | Bandwidth | AMD platform, budget-sensitive work |
| Lighthouse | 1–4 | 2–8GB | 3–8Mbps | Bundled plan | Sites, staging, light workloads |
What CVM is, and how it differs from Lighthouse
CVM is a full virtual machine: pick an image, define your own security groups, attach CBS cloud disks, front it with CLB load balancing or AS autoscaling, and place it in a VPC alongside your database and object storage. Against Lighthouse, you get a wider network and instance range and the ability to join cluster architectures — at the cost of more knobs, and first-time buyers routinely over-provision bandwidth and disk.
How CVM is billed across four levers
- Compute: on-demand bills hourly and suits development and load tests. Monthly and annual plans are prepaid, cheaper per hour, and suit steady workloads.
- Spot instances: for interruptible batch work and rendering. Far cheaper, but reclaimable — never for a primary service.
- Public bandwidth: bandwidth-based is a fixed, forecastable monthly cost; traffic-based bills actual egress and wins when usage is spiky.
- Disks and resource packs: disks bill separately, and prepaid storage and bandwidth packs undercut on-demand pricing when usage is predictable.
- Powered off is not free: compute stops billing, but disks and public egress can still cost. Unit prices follow the live official rate.
Choosing a region: start with where users are
| Region | Audience | Why | Watch out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hong Kong | Mainland China, HK, Macau, Taiwan | Shortest path, lowest latency | Higher bandwidth unit price |
| Singapore | Southeast and South Asia | Regional hub, stable networking | Higher latency to Europe and North America |
| Tokyo | Japan and Korea | Low latency for local audiences | Instance availability differs |
| Silicon Valley | North America west coast | Close to North American users | Higher latency to Asia |
Instance families: by workload shape, not price
| Family | Character | Good for | Poor fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard S5 | Intel platform, balanced | Websites, APIs, microservices | Extreme compute or memory pressure |
| Standard SA5 | AMD platform, close to S5 | Budget-sensitive, general work | Software tuned to one instruction set |
| Compute C5 | CPU-heavy ratio | Concurrency, builds, transcoding | Memory-bound work |
| Memory M5 | Memory-heavy ratio | Databases, Redis, queues | Pure compute jobs |
| High I/O I5 | Local high-speed disk | Small-file heavy I/O | Cases needing bulk low-speed storage only |
Tencent Cloud International vs the China site
| Aspect | International site | China site |
|---|---|---|
| Site and registration | intl.cloud.tencent.com, email plus company details | cloud.tencent.com, mainland identity verification |
| Regions | Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Silicon Valley, Frankfurt and others | Mainland regions such as Guangzhou and Shanghai |
| Payment | International methods and corporate settlement | Mainland methods, settled in CNY |
| Docs | English-first, Chinese on some services | Complete Chinese documentation |
| ICP filing | Overseas regions generally avoid it | Mainland nodes serving the public need one |
A selection order you can reuse
- Region first, specs second. No CPU headroom compensates for the wrong region.
- Start at 1:2 to 1:4 CPU-to-memory: memory for databases, CPU for builds and transcoding.
- Start on traffic-based bandwidth. Read one month of billing before switching.
- Start small. Most CVMs resize without a reboot and refund proportionally.
How account opening and payment settlement work
- Tell us the user region, application type and rough concurrency, and we will recommend a family, region and bandwidth.
- We walk you through official registration and provisioning. No personal credit card binding and no personal identity documents on your side — the account is yours once it is live.
- Once the account works you order and pay in the official console; if you prefer we settle payment, we pay at the discounted rate and issue a statement.
- When the instance is up, check security groups, remote login, firewall rules and disk attachment.
- If the region or size turns out wrong, resize and migration are both self-service and the bill follows.
The three mistakes almost every first-timer makes
1. Ticking the public IP and default bandwidth out of habit — a staging box that never stops quietly accruing egress charges. 2. Oversized system disks — 100GB of SSD for a machine that only runs Nginx costs more than the compute. 3. One config and one billing mode for dev and prod — on-demand in production is the most common cause of a surprising invoice. Set auto-shutdown on test instances, or destroy them.
Typical workloads
Open a Tencent Cloud account with us
We handle official provisioning and payment verification — no personal card, no identity documents. Order directly in the vendor console once live.
More Tencent Cloud products
Cloud Object Storage (COS)
Tencent Cloud storage — five storage classes decide most of the bill
Cloud Streaming Services (CSS) and VOD
Tencent Cloud media — low-latency live, recording, overseas ingest
Tencent Cloud discounts & reseller pricing
Term locks the unit price, channel tier decides the rebate — strongest on live and gaming
Related reading
AWS Shield Advanced: what is free, what is billed
Shield Advanced covering your WAF costs is true, with four boundaries: only protected resources, only standard features, and subject to a request ceiling. Bot Control, CAPTCHA and web ACLs above 1,500 WCUs are still billed separately.
Cloud CostAWS private pricing (EDP): threshold, risk, shortcut
Private pricing is the highest-threshold layer of the AWS discount system: a cross-service discount rather than a single-service commitment. Two traps come first - a shortfall payment if you miss the commitment, and mandatory enterprise support. And AWS states plainly that buying through a partner qualifies too.
Cloud CostMulti-cloud cost visibility: unify categories first
Each provider runs its own billing system, so there is no ready-made unified view. Most people reach for a tool first, which reverses the order: unify the cost categories and the tagging scheme first. Four accounting mismatches will make the numbers disagree.