Elastic Compute Service (ECS) provides the renewal and downgrade feature that allows you to renew a subscription instance and downgrade the configurations of the instance at the same time. When you renew a subscription instance, you can downgrade the instance type, modify the public bandwidth configurations, or change the billing method of data disks to meet your business requirements or reduce instance costs for the next billing cycle.
Usage notes
Before you use the renewal and downgrade feature to renew a subscription instance and downgrade the configurations of the instance, take note of the items that are described in the following table.
Item | Description |
Applicable timeframe | From 15 days before the instance expires until the instance is released.  |
Supported downgrade operations | Downgrade the instance type. You can downgrade the subscription instance to a different instance type within the same instance family when you renew the instance. You can perform this downgrade and renewal operation only within 15 days before the instance expires.
Important When you renew a subscription instance and downgrade the configurations of the instance at the same time, you can downgrade the instance only to a different instance type within the same instance family. If you want to downgrade the instance to an instance type that belongs to a different instance family, separately change the instance type. For more information, see Change instance types. If you want to change the instance type of an expired subscription instance, renew the instance and then change the instance type. For more information, see Renew a subscription instance and Change instance types.
Modify the public bandwidth configurations. If the subscription instance uses the pay-by-bandwidth billing method for network usage, you can decrease the bandwidth value, or change the billing method for network usage to pay-by-traffic and specify a bandwidth limit for traffic. If the subscription instance uses the pay-by-traffic billing method for network usage, you can decrease the bandwidth limit for traffic.
Change the billing method of data disks. You can change the billing method of data disks that are attached to the subscription instance from subscription to pay-as-you-go.
|
Need for instance restart | If you downgrade the instance type of a subscription instance when you renew the instance, you must restart the instance. You can wait for the instance to be automatically restarted or manually restart the instance in the next billing cycle for the new instance type to take effect. If you modify the public bandwidth configurations of a subscription instance when you renew the instance, you do not need to restart the instance. If you change the billing method of data disks that are attached to a subscription instance when you renew the instance, you do not need to restart the instance.
|
Effective time of new configurations | If you downgrade the instance type of a subscription instance when you renew the instance, the new instance type takes effect when the instance is automatically or manually restarted in the next billing cycle. The original instance type remains in effect within the remainder of the current billing cycle.
Important If you manually restart the instance in the next billing cycle before the instance is automatically restarted, the new instance type takes effect. The automatic instance restart task that you schedule is no longer run. If you manually restart the instance in the current billing cycle, the automatic instance restart task is run as scheduled.
If you modify the public bandwidth configurations of a subscription instance or change the billing method of data disks that are attached to the instance when you renew the instance, the new configurations do not take effect until the next billing cycle starts. The original configurations remain in effect within the remainder of the current billing cycle.
|
Impacts | If you renew a subscription instance and downgrade the configurations of the instance before the instance expires, you cannot perform the following operations within the remainder of the current billing cycle: Upgrade the instance type. Temporarily upgrade the public bandwidth. Resize disks by extending their capacity, including extending partitions and file systems.
|
Procedure
Log on to the ECS console.
In the left-side navigation pane, choose .
In the top navigation bar, select the region in which the instance that you want to manage resides and the resource group to which the instance belongs.
Find the subscription instance that you want to renew. In the Actions column, choose .

Follow the on-screen instructions to renew the subscription instance and downgrade the instance configurations.
Read and select ECS Terms of Service, click Create Order, and then follow the on-screen instructions to complete the payment.
What to do next
If you downgrade the instance type when you renew a subscription instance, wait for the instance to be automatically restarted or manually restart the instance in the next billing cycle for the new instance type to take effect.
The first time you change the public bandwidth value of a subscription instance that resides in the classic network from 0 Mbit/s to a non-zero value, restart the instance in the ECS console or by calling the RebootInstance operation within the first seven days of the next billing cycle to make the new configurations take effect.