When your account incurs an overdue payment, the system will send you a payment reminder. After receiving the notification, promptly go to the console Billing Center to top up your account to avoid service disruption. The following section describes details about overdue payments.
Overdue Payment Reasons
You can review the following common questions to understand the reasons for overdue payments:
Note:
If you have questions about overdue payments, you can review and verify your consumption details on the Billing Statements page in the console. For the procedure, see the View Consumption Details document.
If you have questions about specific billing items, you can refer to Billing Items to understand their specific meanings and billing rules.
To understand the billing and settlement cycles for each fee, see Billing Items.
Service Status After Overdue Payment
Account Overdue Payment
Fees are deducted based on the generated bill.
If your account balance is insufficient and the available balance + frozen funds remain negative, the fee deduction cannot be completed, and your account enters an overdue payment state.
Within one day of incurring an overdue payment, the account is placed in an overdue payment protection period.
Details:
COS: The service is available, and data is readable and writable.
Console: It provides overdue payment reminders and handling suggestions.
Notification: The system sends an overdue payment reminder when an overdue payment occurs.
Note: Top up your account promptly during this period to keep your account balance greater than or equal to 0, avoiding service disruption.
After one day of overdue payment, the account is placed in an overdue payment service suspension period (that is, isolation period).
Details:
COS: The service is unavailable, and data cannot be read or written.
Console: It provides overdue payment reminders and handling suggestions.
Notification: The system sends an overdue payment service suspension notification during this period.
Note:
Given the importance of data, your data in COS is retained for 15 days by default.
If you do not need to retain the relevant data, clean up the data immediately. For details, see Emptying and Deleting Buckets.
If you need to continue using COS, top up your account in the console. The service is automatically enabled after your account balance becomes greater than or equal to 0.
If you access data at this time, the server returns a 451 status code and generates a request quantity. This request quantity incurs request fees.
If data is not deleted, it occupies storage space and incurs storage usage fees. These fees continue to accumulate until the data is terminated.
After the overdue payment service suspension period (that is, isolation period) ends, resources enter the overdue payment resource reclamation (that is, termination) phase.
Details:
COS: The service is unavailable, and data cannot be read or written.
Console: It provides overdue payment reminders and handling suggestions.
Notification: The system sends a resource reclamation notification during this period.
Note: At this point, you are considered to have voluntarily abandoned the COS service. Tencent Cloud does not commit to retaining your data. Your data will be terminated and cannot be recovered.
Note:
COS will change the pay-as-you-go (postpaid) overdue payment service suspension policy. After your account has an overdue payment for one day, the default retention period for your data in COS is adjusted from 120 days to 15 days. This policy starts to be notified from April 15, 2024, starts to take effect from April 30, 2024, and starts to be enforced from May 15, 2024. For details, see the Notice on the Change of the COS Pay-as-you-go (Postpaid) Overdue Payment Service Suspension Policy.
If you do not clean up data in a timely manner after an overdue payment, storage usage fees will be incurred.
If your account has an overdue payment for 15 consecutive days, you are considered to have voluntarily abandoned the COS service. Tencent Cloud does not commit to retaining your data. Your data will be terminated and cannot be recovered.
Note:
Notification methods include voice calls, SMS, emails, and internal messages. The actual notification methods and recipients are determined by the user's Message Center subscription configuration.
How to Avoid and Handle Overdue Payments
If you no longer use data stored in COS, you can choose to delete it to avoid continued billing.
You can configure the Billing Alert feature in the console <1>Billing Center</3>. When the available balance falls below the alert threshold, an alert notification will be sent to you. For details, see the <7>Balance Alert Guide</7>.
When an overdue payment occurs, please top up your account in a timely manner to keep the account balance greater than or equal to 0. Additionally, you can go to the Billing Center to query the Billing Details. Based on your actual requirements, if the resource consumption of your business scenario is relatively stable, you can choose to purchase a resource pack to offset the corresponding resource fees, which can reduce your usage costs. For details, see Resource Pack (Prepaid).
How to Disable COS or Stop Billing
COS does not currently support one-click disabling. You can use the following methods to disable COS or stop billing.
If you no longer use the COS service, you can completely delete all data in COS (including incomplete multipart uploads, historical object versions, and so on) to avoid continued billing. You do not need to deactivate your account (if you use other Tencent Cloud services, account deactivation will be affected). For instructions on deleting data, see the following Operation Guide.
If you do not use the COS service for an extended period (more than one month), you can configure a lifecycle rule to transition data in the STANDARD storage class in your bucket to colder storage classes such as STANDARD_IA, ARCHIVE, or DEEP_ARCHIVE. This can reduce your storage usage fees. For details, see Setting Lifecycle. Transitioning storage classes generates read requests for the source storage class and write requests for the target storage class. Therefore, transitioning storage classes via lifecycle rules incurs read and write request fees. For details on request billing, see Request Fees.
Notes
Once data in a bucket is completely deleted, it cannot be recovered. Please back up your data in a timely manner.
If versioning is enabled for a bucket, please suspend the versioning feature before performing the deletion operation.
You need to pay attention to the billing cycle to avoid overdue payments on your account. If all your billable items are settled daily, the bill for the day of cleanup will be generated on the day after you perform the cleanup. After data is completely cleaned up, the system will not generate new charges. For details, see Billable Items.
When your account has insufficient balance and an overdue payment occurs (account balance less than 0), COS will stop the service 24 hours after the overdue payment, regardless of whether you are within the validity period of a resource pack.
If your account has a free-tier resource pack, the resource pack will become unavailable after service suspension due to an overdue payment.
If data in your bucket violates relevant regulations and is subject to a secondary block, it cannot be deleted. If you have any questions, please contact us.
Operation Guide
Step 1: Empty the Bucket
Empty a bucket via Setting Lifecycle: This method is suitable for buckets containing greater than or equal to 10,000 objects. After the lifecycle policy meets the trigger conditions, a deletion task is executed. The task start and completion times are subject to the instructions for setting the lifecycle policy in the console.
Empty a bucket via the console Empty Bucket: This method is suitable for buckets containing less than 10,000 objects. The bucket emptying task takes effect immediately upon completion.
Note:
If your bucket contains a large amount of data, emptying it via the console may be slow due to network conditions or fail if the network connection is interrupted. We recommend that you empty the bucket by configuring a lifecycle rule instead.
Step 2: Delete the Bucket
Delete a bucket via the console Delete Bucket.
Delete a bucket via the DELETE Bucket API.
In addition, you can also delete a bucket via SDKs, tools, or other methods. For details, see Delete Bucket.
Step 3: Confirm Deletion
After completing Step 1 and Step 2, log in to the console again to confirm that the data has been cleaned up and the bucket has been deleted. If the bucket list is empty, it indicates that there are no buckets under your current account.
Step 4: Confirm Charges
Storage usage fees are settled daily, and the storage usage fees incurred on a given day are reflected in the next day's bill. Therefore, after cleaning up your bucket data, you should continuously monitor your bills for the three days following the cleanup to ensure no other charges are generated.