Help Center/ Relational Database Service/ Billing/ Arrears
Updated on 2023-09-12 GMT+08:00
View PDF
Share

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

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 purchasing new DB instances, scaling up storage space, upgrading instance classes, 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 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 compute resources (vCPUs and memory) and EIPs will be released and cannot be restored.

    Figure 1 Lifecycle of a pay-per-use DB instance
    • During the retention period, you cannot access or use your DB instance but the data stored in it can be retained. The retention period for the Huawei Cloud International website is 15 days.
    • During the grace period, you can access and use only some resources of your DB instance. The grace period for the Huawei Cloud International website is 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.