RDS instance expiration and renewal policy-ApsaraDB RDS(RDS)-阿里云帮助中心

Subscription instances stop running after they expire. To continue using an instance, you must renew it within the specified period. Otherwise, its resources, such as the CPU, memory, and cloud disks, are automatically released, and your data is lost. Pay-as-you-go RDS instances do not expire and do not require renewal.

Warning

Expired instances are at risk of downtime. The system sends you expiration notifications. To avoid service disruptions, renew your instance promptly.

Renewal methods

You can renew instances automatically or manually to prevent data loss. The renewal fee is the same as the purchase price of a new instance.

Note

The purchase price of an instance depends on its configuration, such as the region, specifications, and storage. For more information, see the purchase page.

Automatic renewal

RDS provides an auto-renewal feature. For related operations, see Auto-renewal.

After you enable auto-renewal, the system attempts to charge your account at 08:00 on the ninth day before the instance expires. If the payment fails, the system retries the payment daily for the next two days, for a maximum of three attempts. To prevent auto-renewal failure, ensure that your Alibaba Cloud account has a sufficient balance.

Important

If all three automatic payment attempts fail, manually renew the instance promptly to prevent downtime and data loss.

Manual renewal

You can manually renew an expired instance before it is released. The fee is deducted immediately upon renewal. For related operations, see Manual renewal.

Instance expiration status

Instance status

Procedure

From day 1 to day 7 after expiration, the instance is locked and cannot be accessed.
From day 8 to day 15 after expiration, the computing resources of the instance are released, but the data backups are retained.
On day 16 after expiration, the instance data is no longer retained.

When the instance is locked, manually renew it to immediately restore it to the Normal state.
Starting from the eighth day after a subscription instance expires, it is automatically moved to the recycle bin. You can renew and unlock the instance in the recycle bin within seven days. If the instance is not renewed within the seven-day period, it is released. While the instance is released but its data backups are retained, you can rebuild the instance from the recycle bin. The data is automatically restored to the new instance.
Note
For more information about the recycle bin, see RDS SQL Server instance recycle bin.

Important

After data is released, it cannot be recovered.

After an instance is released, its backups are retained if one of the following conditions is met:

Cross-region backup for RDS SQL Server (within the retention period).