Charged ¥3500 for 5.4TB traffic with zero warning – Student account used for experiments
I am a student who rented an Alibaba Cloud server for personal learning and experiments. I was charged approximately ¥3500 RMB for 5.4TB of unexpected outbound traffic — an amount that is devastating for a student. Throughout the entire period of this massive traffic surge, Alibaba Cloud sent me absolutely no alert — no email, no SMS, no in-platform notification of any kind. When I raised a billing dispute, the support team acknowledged that no alert was sent, but refused to offer any refund, claiming they “cannot determine the traffic baseline” for my account. This is unacceptable. A single-hour peak of 50GB is an objectively abnormal spike for any individual user — any responsible cloud provider should be able to flag this. AWS, GCP, and Azure all provide free billing alert features. Alibaba Cloud’s failure to provide basic traffic anomaly notifications directly caused my financial loss, yet they refuse to take any responsibility. As a student using this server purely for learning purposes, a ¥3500 unexpected charge is an enormous financial burden. I stopped the service immediately upon discovery and have been a customer with a previously normal billing history. I would not recommend Alibaba Cloud International to any student or individual developer who values cost transparency and basic customer protection.