Automatic renewal only applies to instances in Subscription mode.
Introduction
If you have activated the automatic renewal feature, Alibaba Cloud will charge fees from your linked credit card or PayPal account on the day when the instance is expired.
After purchasing an ECS instance and before the instance is shutdown, you can activate the automatic renewal feature any time on the Renew Management page.
If the automatic renewal feature is activated:
- When a monthly subscription instance expires, it will be renewed on a monthly basis automatically.
- When an annual subscription instance expires, it will be renewed on a yearly basis automatically.
Notes:
The automatic renewal feature does not support switching between monthly subscription and annual subscription. If you want to change the service duration for the instance, you can use the Manual Renewal feature.
After your subscription instance expires, Alibaba Cloud will automatically charge fee of the instance from your linked credit card or PayPal account on the day of expiration (T). If the fee deduction fails, Alibaba Cloud will try again on Day 7 (T+6) and Day 15 (T+14) until the renewal is successful, or until the instance is shutdown after all three renewal attempts fail.
If the automatic fee deduction is successful before Day T+14, your instance will go into the next billing cycle from the day of expiration.
For example, if your monthly subscription instance expired at 00:00:00 on April 25, 2016, but it was successfully renewed automatically on May 9, 2016, the billing cycle for this renewal was from 00:00:01 on April 25, 2016 to 00:00:00 on May 25, 2016.
If all three renewal attempts fail, the instance will be shutdown after 15 days after expiration. When an instance is shutdown, it will stop providing services and you will not be able to log on or remotely connect to the instance. At this point, you can only choose Manual Renewal. If the instance renewal fails within the following 15 days after it is shutdown, your instance will be released and the data will not be restored.
If you have manually renewed the instance before the automatic renewal, your instance will go into the next billing cycle, and no automatic renewal will be performed within this billing cycle.
Alibaba Cloud will send a reminder message to your linked e-mail address for each fee deduction failure. Please keep an eye out for the notifications and take actions as necessary to avoid downtime of your instance and impact on your business.
Activate automatic renewal
Follow the steps below to activate the automatic renewal feature.
Log on to the ECS Management Console.
At the top of the page, click Billing Management to go to the Billing Management page.
In the left navigation pane, select Renew Management.
On the Renew Management page, search for the instance for renewal by:
- Product: Select Elastic Compute, that is, the product category is ECS instance.
- Region: Select the region of the instance, such as China East 1 (Hangzhou).
- Date: Set the expiration time of the instance.
In the filtered instance list, find the desired instance to activate automatic renewal for, and click the Auto Renew toggle.
In the Activate Auto Renew dialog, click OK to activate the feature. After the feature is activated, the Auto Renew toggle of the selected instance is displayed in green.