:FAQ about purchases, renewals, upgrades, downgrades, refunds, and expires

The paid version of the resolution service offers higher quality and more comprehensive guarantees, with the following advantages:

• Service quality: The paid version provides a 100% Service-Level Agreement (SLA) and expert technical support, ensuring stability and prompt problem resolution. The free version lacks an availability guarantee and technical support.

• Feature enhancements:

  • Support for more subdomain levels and finer TTL settings, enhancing resolution flexibility.

  • Intelligent resolution that covers carrier, cloud vendor, and region line segmentation, ensuring optimal user access paths.

  • Increased Server Load Balancer IP address capacity to accommodate complex traffic demands.

  • Support for DNSSEC and request volume statistics, enhancing security and data analysis capabilities.

• Advanced features (Enterprise Edition and Ultimate Edition):

  • More refined intelligent resolution.

  • Supports DNS record backup and Secondary DNS, further enhancing availability and security.

For more information, see Editions.

If you have enabled the DNS traffic analysis feature of Public Authoritative DNS for your domain name and you want to reduce the fees of this feature, you can use one of the following methods:

• Method 1: Purchase Authoritative DNS Advanced Service (traffic plan).

• Method 2: Adjust the time to live (TTL) values of DNS records. A larger TTL value indicates longer duration for the DNS records can be cached in the local DNS servers, smaller volume of requests to the authoritative DNS, and consequently, the fewer costs.

  Warning

  Before adjusting the TTL, please thoroughly read how to reduce public authoritative DNS traffic analysis costs to understand the potential impacts.

• Method 3: Request a business discount. If the above methods do not address your issue, please consult via DingTalk. DingTalk ID: behladu.

For specific operation details, see how to reduce public authoritative DNS traffic analysis costs.

1. Log on to the Alibaba Cloud DNS console.

2. On the Authoritative Domain Names tab of the Authoritative DNS Resolution, click Configure Auto-renewal.

   

3. In the top filter pane, select ALL for the Expire At, select Alibaba Cloud DNS for Commodity Name, and select All for Region. On the Manual Renewal tab, select the instances for which you want to enable auto-renewal, and click Enable Auto-renewal.

   You can view the fee deduction time for auto-renewal based on the value of Expiration Countdown shown in the following figure.

   

Changing the DNS server names assigned for the free edition to those assigned for a paid edition has no impact on DNS resolution because this is a process of smooth upgrade. The operation varies with domain name registrar:

• Domain name registered with Alibaba Cloud: After a successful instance upgrade, Alibaba Cloud DNS will automatically update the name of the DNS server for the domain name. If the update prohibition lock is enabled for the domain name or automatic update failed due to Network Issues, you must disable the update prohibition lock for the domain name before you can modify the DNS server. For more information, see Change DNS server.

• Domain name not registered with Alibaba Cloud: You need to update the DNS server name at your domain name registrar to the one provided by Alibaba Cloud DNS.

If you upgrade a paid instance to a paid instance with higher specifications, DNS resolution is not affected even though the names of DNS servers assigned by Alibaba Cloud DNS are modified. The cause is that the paid DNS server cluster remains vip(1-8).alidns.com. You can modify the names of the DNS servers to the newest DNS server names assigned by Alibaba Cloud DNS at the domain name registrars. This does not affect DNS resolution.

The edition downgrade of the paid Alibaba Cloud DNS, such as from the Enterprise Ultimate Edition to the Personal Edition, is not supported.

• If you need to bind your current domain name to another instance of lower edition, see Upgrade, downgrade, bind, or unbind instances.

• If you want to bind your domain name to another instance of free edition, see Upgrade, downgrade, bind, or unbind instances.

Edition downgrade of Alibaba Cloud DNS instance is not supported. A domain name is bound to the free edition of a DNS instance after you perform the Unbind operation or after the expiration of the paid DNS instance. The reasons include:

• For domain names registered with Alibaba Cloud, the primary reason is an enabled update lock, preventing automatic switching. You can perform a whois query. If the domain status is [clientUpdateProhibited], refer to enable update lock to disable the update lock, and then refer to modify domain name DNS to change the name of your DNS server to the name of the free edition of DNS server provided by Alibaba Cloud DNS.

• Alibaba Cloud DNS does not support automatic DNS server switching for domain names not registered with Alibaba Cloud. If your domain name is managed by a third party, you must manually update the DNS server to the free version DNS provided by Alibaba Cloud DNS at the domain name registrar.

Yes, you can downgrade your instance from the paid edition of Alibaba Cloud DNS to the free edition of Alibaba Cloud DNS within seven days after the paid instance expires. Otherwise, the instance will be released, which could interrupt your DNS resolution. In addition, DNS records or features may be disabled due to the differences between the free edition and the paid edition. For solutions and detailed procedures for downgrade, see Suggested check items for users who intend to stop using a paid Alibaba Cloud DNS instance after the instance expires.

Yes, you can apply for a request for your in-use resources and renewal duration. You can request a partial refund for resources in use. For more information, see Unsubscription.

After a paid instance of Alibaba Cloud Domain Name System (DNS) expires, the DNS records of the instance are retained for seven days. If you renew the instance within seven days after it expires, DNS resolution is not affected. If you do not renew the instance within seven days after it expires, the instance is released. After the instance is released, you must follow the following instructions to prevent DNS resolution exceptions:

• If your domain name is registered with Alibaba Cloud, the instance is automatically downgraded to the free edition of Alibaba Cloud DNS and the DNS records that are supported only by the paid editions of Alibaba Cloud DNS are disabled. If the update prohibition lock has been enabled for your domain name or the network times out, the instance fails to be downgraded and the DNS service becomes abnormal. To prevent this issue, you must change the DNS server names to those assigned for the free edition of Alibaba Cloud DNS in the domain name console. You can obtain the DNS server names assigned for the free edition from the Alibaba Cloud DNS console. You can access the WHOIS page to check the state of your domain name. If the update prohibition lock has been enabled for your domain name, Domain Status is clientUpdateProhibited on the query result page.

• If your domain name is registered with a third-party DNS service provider, you must change the DNS server names of your domain name to those assigned for the free edition of Alibaba Cloud DNS to prevent DNS resolution from being affected.

For more information, see: Rules on instance expiration.