When multiple cloud servers share a single bandwidth, what is the appropriate "total bandwidth"? Is it 100M, 500M, or 1G? Frankly, there's no standard answer, but there is a sound approach—it doesn't depend on some mysterious formula, but entirely on the true pulse of your business and your ability to skillfully utilize the various tools provided by the cloud platform. The so-called "normal" shared bandwidth is the balance point that ensures smooth business operations while maximizing cost-effectiveness.

To find this balance point, the first step isn't to open a purchase page, but to re-examine your business. You need to understand several key details: Which servers are you planning to put into this shared bandwidth pool? Are they public-facing web front-ends, application servers handling internal logic, or storage nodes responsible for file distribution? More importantly, do their peak traffic arrive simultaneously or are they staggered? For example, if you have ten servers, respectively hosting an e-commerce website, an internal OA system, and a reporting system that only synchronizes data in the evening, their busy and idle periods are likely to naturally complement each other. This off-peak characteristic is precisely where shared bandwidth shines in saving money.

If your business traffic is as stable as a heartbeat, such as a corporate website or a stable API service, then the traditional fixed-bandwidth billing model is the simplest and most straightforward. You purchase a fixed bandwidth value, such as 200Mbps, and all servers in that pool share this guaranteed 200Mbps bandwidth. This model has a fixed price, but requires you to have a relatively accurate estimate of your peak traffic.

When your business fluctuates like ocean waves—such as having online education, video-on-demand, or e-commerce promotional activities—then you should consider a more flexible billing model. One is pay-per-use, where you pay for the amount of data used, suitable for scenarios with sudden and unpredictable bursts. However, note that some cloud service providers may not provide strict guarantees for the total peak bandwidth of instances billed by usage. Another more advanced model is Enhanced 95 Billing or Combined Bandwidth Group Billing. It is particularly suitable for enterprises with highly volatile traffic. The principle is that cloud service providers sample your actual bandwidth usage every 5 minutes. At the end of the month, they remove the top 5% of peak traffic, and the highest remaining value (95th percentile) is used as the basis for billing. This means that occasional, short-lived traffic spikes won't result in exorbitant bills, providing predictable costs and strong burst capability.

Besides choosing a billing model, clever architectural design can also greatly reduce the pressure on the total shared bandwidth egress, indirectly answering the question of "how much do you need?" A core principle is: let traffic be acquired locally, not all at the server egress. For static images, videos, software download packages, etc., it is strongly recommended to connect to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN caches these files at the edge nodes closest to the user, so user requests don't have to travel thousands of miles back to your central server, thus saving valuable outbound bandwidth. For the storage and distribution of large files, you can combine it with Object Storage Service (OSS), which can also avoid the bandwidth consumption caused by direct transmission through cloud servers.

For high-concurrency services that must be handled by servers, such as web applications, you can deploy a load balancer (CLB/SLB) in front of the shared bandwidth pool. Load balancers themselves possess high network performance specifications (e.g., ranging from 2Gbps to tens of Gbps). They intelligently distribute massive user requests across multiple backend cloud servers, avoiding single points of congestion, and also serve as efficient traffic aggregation points.

Returning to the initial question, what is considered normal bandwidth sharing across multiple cloud hosts for enterprise users? It might mean optimizing the total bandwidth of 10 servers from 1000Mbps to 500Mbps, or it might mean choosing a 95% billing model to lock in a cost ceiling for a highly volatile business. This number isn't guessed; it's determined through analyzing business traffic, selecting intelligent billing, optimizing application architecture, and ultimately calibrating under the guidance of monitoring data. It's no longer about simply piling on resources, but rather the depth of your understanding of your own business traffic and the maturity of your ability to use cloud-native tools for fine-grained cost control. When you can answer this question confidently, it means your cloud operations have transcended the rudimentary "out-of-the-box" stage and truly entered a highly efficient and agile enterprise-level track.