# Alibaba Cloud

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/hosting/alibaba-cloud/

Alibaba Group's public cloud: Elastic Compute Service VMs, fixed-price Simple Application Server plans, block and object storage, networking, containers and managed databases worldwide.

## Who it suits

Fixed-price servers close to China and Asia: Simple Application Server plans from $4 a month (2 vCPU, 0.5 GiB) with no transfer quota and a 99.95% SLA, on a platform with ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI DSS Level 1.

Consider something else if You want list prices outside Hong Kong or more memory at the entry price: the product page prices only China (Hong Kong), the $4 plan has 0.5 GiB, and the $90 new-user credit is for ECS only and excludes accounts that have bought servers.

## iScore

58 / 100 (80% interval 50–65), rank 5 of 16 in hosting — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every hosting peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/hosting/alibaba-cloud/alternatives/

- Price: 37 (20–54), weight 29%, 4 of 5 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: egress_overage_price
- Capacity and limits: 52 (41–63), weight 29%, 3 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: backup_retention, bandwidth_included, file_count_limit
- Capabilities: 79 (73–85), weight 10%, 5 of 11 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: connection_pooling, edge_network, git_deploy, persistent_processes, scale_to_zero, scheduled_jobs
- Trust and compliance: 79 (71–87), weight 14%, 10 of 13 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: customer_managed_keys, support_included, support_response_time
- Evidence: 92 (92–92), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 51 (9–94), weight 10%, 0 of 2 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: No — Compute is offered as a time-limited USD 90 ECS credit, not an ongoing free plan. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/free), read 2026-09-27)
- Kind of free offer: Free credit ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/free), read 2026-09-27)
- What the free plan includes: USD 90 of Elastic Compute Service credit, for new users of computing products only; accounts that have bought ECS instances or Simple Application Servers are not eligible. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/free), read 2026-09-27)
- Credit card to start: Yes — A credit or debit card (or PayTM) must be added; PayPal alone does not qualify. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/free), read 2026-09-27)
- When the free offer ends: The USD 90 ECS credit is valid for 3 months. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/free), read 2026-09-27)
- Entry paid plan: $4/month for SAS 2vCPU 0.5GiB (2 vCPUs, 0.5 GiB memory, 20 GiB system disk, up to 200 Mbit/s), the cheapest Simple Application Server card on the product page; its Buy Now link opens the China (Hong Kong) region. The same page shows a one-time $9.9/year offer on SAS 2vCPU 1GiB in Singapore (resellers excluded, no coupons) and states no renewal price for it. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/swas), read 2026-09-27)
- Pricing model: Simple Application Server is subscription-only: every instance needs a plan, paid upfront when the instance is created; a data disk adds a subscription charge, and transfer beyond a quota (legacy plans only) is billed pay-as-you-go. ECS, the general compute service, is billed separately. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/product-overview/overview), read 2026-09-27)
- Egress over allowance: No per-GB overage price on current Simple Application Server plans, which show Unlimited data transfer. Legacy plans with a monthly quota are billed per GB beyond it: USD 0.07/GB in Frankfurt and London, USD 0.076/GB in Virginia, up to USD 0.153/GB in China (Hong Kong). ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/product-overview/billable-items), read 2026-09-27)
- When you exceed a cap: No overage on current Simple Application Server plans: plans showing Unlimited data transfer incur no excess transfer fees. Legacy plans with a monthly quota are billed pay-as-you-go for outbound transfer beyond it; the quota resets on the first day of each calendar month. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/product-overview/billable-items), read 2026-09-27)

### Limits

- Storage (entry plan): 20 GiB system disk on SAS 2vCPU 0.5GiB ($4/month, China (Hong Kong)), the cheapest Simple Application Server plan on the product page. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/swas), read 2026-09-27)
- Memory (entry plan): 0.5 GiB on SAS 2vCPU 0.5GiB ($4/month, China (Hong Kong)), the cheapest Simple Application Server plan on the product page. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/product/swas), read 2026-09-27)
- Included bandwidth: No monthly transfer quota on the current General-purpose Simple Application Server types: the docs list them with no fixed data transfer plan and no charge for traffic, limited instead by peak Internet bandwidth of up to 200 Mbps. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/product-overview/instance-families/), read 2026-09-27)

### Deployment

- Docker deployment: Supported ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/eci/product-overview/what-is-elastic-container-instance), read 2026-09-27)
- Containers: Supported ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/eci/product-overview/what-is-elastic-container-instance), read 2026-09-27)

### Infrastructure

- Persistent storage: Supported ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/product-overview/product-function-node-swas-1), read 2026-09-27)
- Managed databases: Supported ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/rds/product-overview/what-is-apsaradb-rds-what-is-apsaradb-rds), read 2026-09-27)
- Autoscaling: Supported — Auto Scaling adds and removes ECS or ECI instances; it does not resize an instance. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/auto-scaling/product-overview/what-is-auto-scaling), read 2026-09-27)
- Regions: 33 regions in the ECS regions-and-zones tables on 2026-09-27: 16 in China, including Hong Kong, and 17 outside it (Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, the US, Europe, the Middle East, Mexico and Brazil). Two China local regions, Nanjing and Fuzhou, are marked Closing Down, leaving 31. Other products may support fewer. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ecs/user-guide/regions-and-zones), read 2026-09-27)
- Uptime SLA: 99.95% Monthly Uptime Percentage for Simple Application Server (paid use only), with service credits of 10% below 99.95%, 25% below 99% and 100% below 95% of the monthly fee. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/legal/latest/simple-application-server-service-level-agreement), read 2026-09-27)

### Data

- Backup retention: ECS automatic snapshot policies: retention set in days, or snapshots kept permanently, with expired snapshots deleted automatically; several policies can run on one disk, and snapshots can be replicated to another region with their own retention. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ecs/user-guide/automatically-create-snapshots/), read 2026-09-27)

### Support

- Support on entry paid plan: Basic support, by website ticket, is included with all Alibaba Cloud services. Paid tiers: Developer $19.99/month prepaid; Business the greater of $99 or 10% of monthly cloud charges (tiered down to 3%). ([source](https://query.alibabacloud.com/rest/XwrQAJLm8.zYehu4fGo.Lr7cLVTMv), read 2026-09-27)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: SOC 2 Type 2 report on security, availability and confidentiality, issued twice a year over rolling 12-month periods; available to customers in the Alibaba Cloud Compliance Repository. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/trust-center/soc2), read 2026-09-27)
- ISO 27001: ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified by BSI (certificate IS 591687), valid to 2027-11-03; the scope names Elastic Compute Service, Elastic Block Storage, Auto Scaling and Simple Application Server among many services. ([source](https://alicloud-common.oss-ap-southeast-1.aliyuncs.com/2022/Whitepapers/Alibaba%20Cloud%20%28Singapore%29%20Private%20Limited-ISO27001%20Information%20Security%20Management%20System-20241104-20271103-EN.pdf), read 2026-09-27)
- HIPAA: Alibaba Cloud states it supports a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for customers who need HIPAA compliance, and points to a HIPAA whitepaper for which products are covered. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/trust-center/hipaa), read 2026-09-27)
- GDPR / data residency: Customers choose the region where content is stored; Alibaba Cloud says it stores and processes content only in the chosen region(s) and will not move it without consent. A GDPR Addendum with Standard Contractual Clauses covers transfers out of the EEA. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/trust-center/faq), read 2026-09-27)
- PCI DSS: PCI DSS v3.2.1 Level 1, assessed annually onsite by a QSA; the assessment covers cloud products, security services and CDN in 12 global regions (including Hong Kong), and the AOC is downloadable. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/trust-center/pci-dss), read 2026-09-27)
- Encryption at rest: Opt-in for ECS disks: a disk is encrypted with a KMS key (a service key by default) when the Encryption box is selected at creation, or by default in a region where account-level default encryption is enabled. Encryption cannot be reversed. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ecs/user-guide/encryption-overview), read 2026-09-27)
- Customer-managed keys: ECS disk encryption accepts a customer master key (CMK) created in or imported into KMS, with the customer controlling rotation, disabling and deletion. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ecs/user-guide/encryption-overview), read 2026-09-27)
- Role-based access control: Resource Access Management (RAM): multiple identity types (users, groups, roles), each granted fine-grained permissions through policies; free and enabled by default. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/ram/product-overview/what-is-ram), read 2026-09-27)
- Private networking / VPC: Simple Application Server instances in the same account and region share a VPC and talk over the internal network by default; service interconnection extends that to ECS, ApsaraDB and other services in a chosen VPC, at no charge. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/simple-application-server/product-overview/billable-items), read 2026-09-27)
- Dedicated infrastructure: Dedicated Host (DDH): a single-tenant physical server; no other tenant's workloads run on it, and the customer chooses which ECS instance families to deploy. ([source](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/dedicated-host/product-overview/what-is-ddh), read 2026-09-27)