Network Transfer Usage and Costs

Overview

Network transfer is the exchange of data between two computers over the public internet or a private network. Other providers and publications may refer to this as data transfer, ingress/egress, and bandwidth, among many other terms. This traffic is broken down into inbound and outbound network transfer. Inbound network transfer is data sent to your service (such as a file upload). Outbound network transfer is data sent from your service (such as a web page and its images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files).

Transfer Allowance

The following Linode services consume network transfer and, in most cases, include a set amount of outbound network transfer allowance per month. The amount of transfer is displayed along with the pricing and plan details for each service. See Linode’s pricing page for exact amounts.

• Compute Instances: Consume network transfer and include 1-20 TB of transfer allowance per month.

• NodeBalancers: Consume network transfer but do not include a monthly transfer allowance.

• Object Storage: Consumes network transfer and includes 1TB of transfer allowance per month.

• Managed Databases: Does not consume network transfer or include a monthly transfer allowance. Linode services located in a different data center connecting to a Managed Database may consume network transfer.

The allowance included with each service on an account is added to an account-wide monthly network transfer pool. Whenever a service consumes network transfer, it is counted towards this account-wide pool and not the individual transfer allowance.

Note

If the service is not active for the entire month, the amount of network transfer allowance is prorated based on the number of hours the service was active.

Usage Costs

Costs associated with network transfer can often be unexpected or confusing in a cloud hosting environment. Linode keeps these costs simple and transparent so that you can easily anticipate your monthly charges.

Free unmetered network transfer:

• All inbound network transfer

• Outbound network transfer sent between Compute Instances and/or NodeBalancers in the same data center, provided the traffic occurs over an IPv6 address, a private VLAN network, or on the private IPv4 address of those services. Public IPv4 addresses, due to the way traffic is routed, is not included in this.

Metered network transfer:

• Outbound transfer sent from a Compute Instance or NodeBalancer over the public internet (or a public IPv4 address).

• All outbound transfer from Object Storage, even to other Linode services within the same data center.

All metered network transfer consumed by a service is counted toward the account-wide monthly network transfer pool. Any additional transfer usage that exceeds this monthly allotment costs $0.01/GB (which comes to $10/TB) and is charged at the end of the billing period.

Note

The combined monthly network transfer pool is typically enough to cover most common use cases for our services. You are only billed for additional network transfer if your usage exceeds this monthly pool during a billing period. If traffic for an individual service exceeds the network transfer amount specified by its plan, but the total transfer used between all of your services is still less than your monthly network transfer pool, then you are not charged additional fees.

Monitoring Network Transfer Usage

We recommend that you monitor your network transfer usage throughout the month to ensure that your services aren’t consuming more network transfer than expected. You can check your network usage for your current billing cycle via the Cloud Manager or the Linode CLI.

Cloud Manager

1. Log in to the Cloud Manager.

2. Under the list of the Linode Compute Instances, NodeBalancers, or Object Storage Buckets, a short notice is displayed with the percentage of monthly network transfer pool that has been used.

   

3. Click the Monthly Network Transfer Pool link to display a modal pop-up with more details, including the amount of transfer used, the size of the pool, and when the network transfer usage will reset.

   

4. Lastly, you can view more details regarding a Compute Instance’s network transfer usage (including historical charts) directly on the Instance’s page. To do so, click Linodes on the left navigation menu, select the Compute Instance from the list, and navigate to the Network tab.

   The Monthly Network Transfer section includes usage details for the current billing period. The Network Transfer History section shows a chart with usage details over the selected period.

Linode CLI

To view your network utilization (in GB) for the current month, issue the following command:

linode-cli account transfer

Note

You need to generate a Personal Access Token and install the Linode CLI before being able to use the CLI. See the Linode CLI guide for more information.

Email Alerts

Linode automatically sends an email notification to your account’s email address when you have used 80%, 90%, and 100% of your transfer pool size.

More Information

Read the Billing and Payments guide for an overview of Linode billing.