Arrears

Arrears Reason

If your DB instance is not billed at a yearly/monthly basis, your account falls into arrears any time your configured payment method is unable to pay for the used resources on the pay-per-use basis.

Arrears Impact

• Yearly/Monthly

  This is a pre-paid billing mode, so you can continue using yearly/monthly DB instances even if your account is in arrears. However, you cannot perform operations such as buying new DB instances, upgrading the instance specifications, or renewing DB instances, because they will generate new expenditures.

• Pay-per-use

  If your configured payment method is unable to pay a bill for pay-per-use DB instances, the instances enter a grace period. You are still responsible for expenditures generated during the grace period. You can view the expenditures on the Overview page of the Billing Center and pay any past due balance as needed.

  If you do not bring your account balance current before the grace period expires, the DB instance turns to Frozen and enters a retention period.

  After the retention period ends, the compute resources (vCPUs and memory) and EIPs will be released and cannot be restored.

  Figure 1 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use DB instance
  

The grace period and retention period are both 15 days.

Avoiding and Handling Arrears

Make sure you have a valid payment method configured as soon as possible after your account is in arrears. For details, see Topping Up an Account.

If a DB instance is no longer used, you can delete it to avoid generating further expenditures.

To help make sure your account never falls into arrears, you can configure the Balance Alert on the Overview page of the Billing Center. Then, any time an expenditure quota drops to below the threshold you specify, Huawei Cloud automatically notifies you by SMS or email.