Alibaba Cloud Review
Alibaba Cloud was founded as a VPS provider in 2009.
It is headquartered in China.
It offers VPS, Database, Storage and Networking hosting products.
- Australia
- Australia
- China
- Germany
- India
- Indonesia
- Japan
- Malaysia
- Philippines
- Saudi Arabia
- Singapore
- South Korea
- Thailand
- United Arab Emirates
- United Kingdom
- United States
Quick Links
| Alibaba Cloud plans specs and prices | Plans |
| Alibaba Cloud instance types | Instance Types |
| How fast are Alibaba Cloud servers? Check them out in the Screener | Screener |
| List of Alibaba Cloud trials | Trials |
| Review CPU models found in Alibaba Cloud trials | CPUs |
| Performance variations of Alibaba Cloud VPS over the long term | Consistency |
| List of Alibaba Cloud yabs.sh results | Yabs |
Alibaba Cloud VPS Features
Features not included in VPS prices are marked as missing in the table below.
Pros and Cons
Strengths
- Numerous datacenter locations.
- Large catalog of cloud services.
Weaknesses
- Varying pricing depending on location.
- Complex, hard to use UI.
Alibaba Cloud Extra Services
In addition to features included in VPS plans, Alibaba Cloud also sells the services marked green in the following table:
| Backups | Block storage | Object storage | Load balancer |
| Floating IP addresses | Team Management | Managed databases | Serverless |
| DDoS protection | Kubernetes | GPU instances | Private network |
VPS Instance Provisioning Time
For each Alibaba Cloud VPS trial, we measured how long it took to provision the server from the moment it was ordered to the moment it accepted SSH connections.
See also VPS provisioning times for all providers.
| Average Provisioning Time | Median Provisioning Time | Min Provisioning Time | Max Provisioning Time | Number of VPS Samples |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 40s | 40s | 40s | 40s | 1 |
Control Panel Screenshots
Cloud Storage Prices
For a comparison of storage features and prices from all providers, please check the Cloud Storage Prices page.
| Storage Type | Price / GB / month & Request Pricing | Description |
Restriction
Extra capacity provisioning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Block | $0.152 |
Product name: Enhanced SSD PL1
Alibaba Cloud enterprise SSDs (ESSDs) use 25 Gigabit Ethernet and remote direct memory access (RDMA) to reduce latency and deliver up to 1,000,000 random read/write IOPS per disk. Alibaba Cloud block storage |
Pay as You Go in US East. IOPS and throughput for a 100GiB disk.
IOPS price: $0.000 IOPS allowance: 6800 Throughput price per MBps: $0.000 Throughput allowance MBps: 170 MBps |
| Block | $0.076 |
Product name: Enhanced SSD PL0
Alibaba Cloud enterprise SSDs (ESSDs) use 25 Gigabit Ethernet and remote direct memory access (RDMA) to reduce latency and deliver up to 1,000,000 random read/write IOPS per disk. Alibaba Cloud block storage |
Pay as You Go in US East. IOPS and throughput for a 100GiB disk.
IOPS price: $0.000 IOPS allowance: 3000 Throughput price per MBps: $0.000 Throughput allowance MBps: 125 MBps |
| Snapshots | $0.018 |
US-East price. Charges only for incremental size of the snapshot. Snapshots are stored in object storage (OSS). Alibaba Cloud snapshots storage |
First 5GB are free
|
| Object |
$0.016
100,000 reads: $0.010 100,000 writes: $0.140 |
Product name: Standard Storage LRS
OSS: Standard Storage. Infrequent and Archive storage option are also available for lower prices. Alibaba Cloud object storage |
First 5GB free and first 500 millions read requests free.
|
Network Bandwidth Prices
These are the network bandwidth prices charged by Alibaba Cloud for outbound transfers from VPS to the internet.
For a comparison of bandwidth prices from all providers, go to the Network Bandwitdh Prices page.
| Description | Price / GB |
|---|---|
|
Pricing model: Allowance Then Charged
(the provider gives a free bandwidth allowance with each server. Bandwidth above the free allowance is charged by the provider.)
Free allowance: 0 GB / month
(for a 2 core 4GB instance or closest available)
Product range: Pay-as-you-go price.
Transfer pool: yes
Network transfer billing is tied to the IP address you use at Alibaba. An EIP configuration fee per IP ($0.005/hour) is added to the transfer fee per GB.
Alibaba Cloud networking |
Flat pricing: $0.076 / GB
|
Alibaba Cloud Instance Types and Plans
All Alibaba Cloud instance types
Note: All VPS prices reported at VPSBenchmarks are for one month without any further commitment and before promotions unless noted otherwise. The IPv4 charge is added to the VPS monthly price in case the provider doesn't include it by default.
Cloud Server Plans
| Plan | Number of CPU cores | RAM | Storage | Monthly Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instance Type: General Purpose |
No description
Provider page for instance type:
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ecs/user-guide/overview-of-instance-families
|
|||
| ecs.c8y.small | 1 | 2.0GB | 40GB | $24.45 / month |
| ecs.c7a.large | 2 | 4.0GB | 40GB | $58.32 / month |
| Family: General Purpose Instance Type: g9i |
The Alibaba Cloud g9i instance family is a general-purpose instance type utilizing the innovative Cloud Infrastructure Processing Unit (CIPU) architecture and Intel® Xeon® 6 processors with P-cores. These instances offer consistent computing power, a robust I/O engine, and chip-level security hardening. They are designed for a wide range of demanding applications, including game servers, databases, caches, search clusters, web and application servers, and data analytics, providing a 1:4 CPU-to-memory ratio and high network performance. |
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| VPSBenchmarks has not tested any plan for this instance type yet. | ||||
| Family: General Purpose Instance Type: g8a |
Offers a CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4.
Provider page for instance type:
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ecs/user-guide/general-purpose-instance-families#g8a
|
|||
| ecs.g8a.2xlarge | 8 | 32.0GB | 0GB | $146.11 / month |
| Family: General Purpose Instance Type: g8i |
The Alibaba Cloud ECS g8i instance family is a general-purpose offering utilizing the innovative CIPU architecture. It features 4th and 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (including Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids) with a CPU-to-memory ratio of 1:4, providing consistent computing performance and a robust I/O engine. These instances offer chip-level security hardening and hardware acceleration for cryptographic and AI workloads (like Intel QAT and Intel AMX). They are suitable for a wide range of enterprise-level applications, including game servers, databases, caches, search clusters, websites, application servers, data analytics, computing, AI training and inference, and audio/video transcoding. |
|||
| ecs.g8i.xlarge | 4 | 16.0GB | 0GB | $99.34 / month |
| ecs.g8i.2xlarge | 8 | 32.0GB | 0GB | $198.67 / month |
| Instance Type: Other |
No description
Provider page for instance type:
/hosters/alibaba_cloud
|
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| Starter 1GB 1 core | 1 | 1.0GB | 25GB | $4.50 / month |
| ecs.t5-lc1m1.small | 1 | 1.0GB | 40GB | $6.52 / month |
| ecs.n4.small | 1 | 2.0GB | 20GB | $13.66 / month |
| ecs-t5-c1m1-large | 2 | 2.0GB | 20GB | $14.13 / month |
| ecs.t6-c1m2.large | 2 | 4.0GB | 40GB | $20.91 / month |
| ecs.n4.large | 2 | 4.0GB | 40GB | $35.41 / month |
| ecs.c5.large | 2 | 4.0GB | 40GB | $37.52 / month |
| ecs.c6e.large | 2 | 4.0GB | 40GB | $41.32 / month |
| ecs.g6.large | 2 | 8.0GB | 0GB | $43.19 / month |
| ecs.c7.large | 2 | 4.0GB | 40GB | $49.32 / month |