Overdue payments

Service suspension due to overdue payments

If the available balance in your account, which includes your Alibaba Cloud account balance and vouchers, is less than the amount of an outstanding bill, an overdue payment occurs. This may disrupt your instances. To avoid service disruption, top up your account promptly.

• Overdue payment notifications

  When your account has an overdue payment, the system immediately sends you a notification by SMS or email, reminding you to pay the bill.

• Service suspension

  If your account has an overdue payment, your ENS resources are subject to the following limitations:

  • Pay-as-you-go ENS resources: If your account has an overdue payment, we stop or suspend your pay-as-you-go ENS resources. If you do not top up your account to settle the outstanding bill and restart the instances within the specified period, we delete your resource configurations. This action is irreversible.

    • When your account has an overdue payment, the system automatically suspends the service. If the payment remains overdue for 15 consecutive days, we detach and release all your pay-as-you-go resources.

      The retention status of ENS resources is as follows:

      Resource type	Within 15 days	After 15 days
      Computing resources (vCPUs and memory)	ENS retains the computing resources (vCPUs and memory), but you cannot start the instance.	ENS releases your computing resources (vCPUs and memory). Your service data is permanently deleted and is unrecoverable.
      Block storage	ENS retains the cloud disk and its data. ENS retains the local disk and its data.	ENS releases the cloud disk and its data. Your service data is permanently deleted and is unrecoverable. ENS releases the local disk. Your service data is permanently deleted and is unrecoverable.
      Public IP	ENS retains the static public IP address. Associated EIPs are not affected.	ENS releases the static public IP address. ENS detaches the EIPs.
      Snapshots	We retain all snapshots and custom images. However, you cannot use them to create new cloud disks or custom images. You cannot manually create snapshots. The automatic snapshot feature is disabled. Any attempt to create a custom image from an instance fails because a new snapshot cannot be created. If you top up your account and settle the overdue payment, you can resume using your existing snapshots, and we re-enable your automatic snapshot policies. Important Although you cannot use your snapshots when your account has an overdue payment, we still charge you for their storage. This increases your overdue amount.	We clear and delete all your snapshot resources. The data is unrecoverable after deletion. Important We will continue to charge you for snapshots until the data is deleted. If you no longer need the snapshot service, make sure to delete your snapshot data.

  • Subscription ENS resources :

    • If your account has an overdue payment, you can still use your existing subscription ENS resources, but the following limitations apply:

      • You cannot perform operations that incur fees, such as purchasing new resources, upgrading or renewing instances, or expanding cloud disk capacity.

      • If your subscription ENS instance is associated with a pay-as-you-go cloud disk or uses pay-as-you-go public bandwidth, the corresponding cloud disk and public bandwidth services become unavailable.

• Settle payments and restore services

  Services are restored automatically after you top up your account and settle your overdue payments. For more information about renewal, see Renewal FAQ.