What are the differences between the Basic, General Purpose, and Memory Optimized tiers?
The Basic tier is designed for workloads requiring light compute and I/O performance. Examples include servers used for development or testing, or small-scale infrequently used applications. General Purpose is for most business workloads requiring balanced compute and memory with scalable I/O throughput. Examples include servers for hosting Web and Mobile apps, and other enterprise applications. The Memory Optimized tier is for high performance database workloads requiring in-memory performance for faster transaction processing and higher concurrency. Examples include servers for processing real-time data and high performance transactional or analytical apps. Please review the documentation for more details.
How is my bill calculated?
For all tiers, the service is billed on a predictable, hourly rate based on pricing tier, provisioned compute in vCores, and provisioned storage in GB/month for your server and backups. On your bill, vCore hours, storage GB/month for the server and storage GB/month for backups will have separate line items.
What if a single MySQL server is active for less than an hour or uses a higher pricing tier for less than an hour?
You are billed for each hour or portion thereof that a MySQL server exists, regardless of whether the server was active for the full hour. If you have scaled your database, you will be billed using the highest pricing tier, provisioned vCore and provisioned storage during the hour.
For example:
If you create a MySQL server and delete it after five minutes, you are charged for one full hour for the provisioned compute and storage.
If you create a MySQL server in the General Purpose tier with 8 vCores and then immediately upgrade it to 16 vCores in the General Purpose tier, you are charged at the 16 vCore rate for the first hour.
Do I incur any network data transfer charges?
Yes. As of July 1, 2018, standard charges apply for network egress. Refer here for more details.
How is the backup charge calculated?
Backup storage is the storage associated with automated backups of your server. Increasing your backup retention period increases the backup storage that is consumed by your MySQL server. There is no additional charge for backup storage for up to 100% of your total provisioned server storage. Additional consumption of backup storage will be charged in GB/month. For example, if you have the database storage size of 100 GBs, you will get 100 GBs of backup at no additional cost. However, if the backup is 110 GBs, you will pay for the 10 GBs.