Help Center> Elastic Cloud Server> Billing> Arrears
Updated on 2023-10-19 GMT+08:00
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Arrears

If your configured payment method is unable to pay for your bill, your account will be in arrears. You will need to update you payment method or to top up your account in a timely manner if you want to continue using your cloud services.

Arrears Reason

  • For a pay-per-use or spot ECS, the account balance is insufficient due to continuous expenditure deduction.
  • After a pay-per-use or spot ECS is deleted, its associated resources (such as EVS disks and EIPs) that are not deleted together with the ECS continuously generate costs.

Arrears Impact

  • Yearly/Monthly

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

  • Pay-per-use/Spot

    If your configured payment method is unable to pay a bill for pay-per-use or spot resources, the resources enter a grace period. After you top up your account, Huawei Cloud will bill you for expenditures generated by the resources during the grace period. You can view the expenditures on the Overview page of the Billing Center.

    If your account is still in arrears after the grace period ends, the resources enter the retention period and their status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on these resources.

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

    Figure 1 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use or spot ECS

For details about the grace period and retention period, see What Is a Grace Period of Huawei Cloud? How Long Is It? and What Is a Retention Period of Huawei Cloud? How Long Is It?

Avoiding and Handling Arrears

Make sure that your account has sufficient balance to pay your amount due. For details, see Topping Up an Account.

If an ECS is no longer used, you can delete it and its associated resources 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.

If your account is in arrears, address the issue in a timely manner. If the resource usage for your service is stable, you can change the billing mode to yearly/monthly to save money. For details, see Yearly/Monthly Billing.