Arrears

Arrears Reason

• If the usage exceeds a package quota or the package cannot be used for a given bucket, you will be billed on a pay-per-use basis. If your configured payment method or top-up account cannot pay for this amount, your account will fall into arrears. For details, see Why Am I Still Being Billed After I Purchased a Resource Package? To avoid arrears, you can choose a suitable resource package or top up your account.
• You have purchased a resource package, but some billing items are not covered by it. These billing items are billed on a pay-per-use basis, and your account balance is insufficient to cover those pay-per-use costs. For example, if you have purchased a storage package but your bucket incurs both storage and request costs, the storage costs would be covered by the package, while the request costs would still be billed on a pay-per-use basis.
  

  If your bucket incurs pay-per-use costs that your package does not cover, the bucket will be released once your account's retention period expires, even if the resource package itself is still valid.

• If you do not have any resource packages, your account falls into arrears anytime once your configured payment method is unable to pay for the used resources on a pay-per-use basis.

Impacts of Arrears

When your account goes into arrears, the system will not stop services immediately. Instead, your pay-per-use resources enter a grace period. You still need to pay for the expenditures already generated. The expenditures can be viewed on the Billing Center > Overview page.

If you do not pay off within the grace period, your resources will enter the retention period and be frozen. During the retention period, pay-per-use resources cannot be accessed or used, but data stored in OBS will be retained.

If you do not bring your account balance current before the retention period ends, data stored in OBS will be deleted and cannot be recovered.

Figure 1 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use OBS resource

• Validity period: After a resource is purchased, it enters the validity period and runs normally during this period as long as your account balance is sufficient.
• Grace period: If your account is insufficient to pay your amount due, your account goes into arrears, and your pay-per-use resources enter a grace period. The system then will notify the creator of the Huawei Cloud account of the arrears by email, SMS, or in-app message. You need to pay the outstanding amount as soon as possible. You can check the arrears on the Overview page in the Billing Center.
• Retention period: If you do not bring your account balance current before the grace period ends, your pay-per-use resources enter a retention period and their status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on these resources.
  

  If you do not bring your account balance current before the retention period ends, your OBS resources will be released and the data cannot be recovered.

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 your account balance is sufficient or you have a valid payment method as soon as possible after your account is in arrears. For details, see Top-Up and Repayment.

If data stored in OBS is no longer used, you can delete it to avoid 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, anytime an expenditure quota drops 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 purchase resource packages to save money. For details, see Resource Packages.