Troubleshooting Alibaba Cloud Video On Demand Service: Billing Issues, Resource Deletion, and Recovery Steps

After a friend reported that all videos on their website were suddenly unplayable, the author investigated the Alibaba Cloud Video On Demand (VOD) service and initially suspected an unpaid bill.

Reviewing the account’s consumption records revealed that the user had purchased storage, traffic, and transcoding packages, but the usage details showed a sudden drop from over 7 GB to 474 B, indicating that the video resources had been deleted.

Further inquiry with Alibaba Cloud support uncovered that a 0.01 CNY overseas charge had caused the account balance to become negative (‑0.01 CNY), triggering automatic deletion of the VOD resources despite the domestic packages having sufficient quota.

The author confirmed the negative balance, explained why the VOD management console did not show the issue, and noted that the deletion was irreversible, requiring re‑upload of all videos and re‑binding of domain names.

Key operational takeaways were listed:

VOD resource packages are domestic only; overseas charges can still affect them.

Maintain a positive account balance to avoid automatic resource removal.

Pay attention to SMS notifications and regularly check account balances.

Always back up media assets; cloud services may delete data when funds are insufficient.

An additional anecdote described a separate incident where reducing a server’s bandwidth to zero during a promotional purchase inadvertently removed the public IP, making the server inaccessible and requiring an Elastic IP to restore connectivity.

The article concludes with a reminder to keep cloud accounts funded and to be cautious when modifying cloud resources.

Example of a cloud service feature mentioned:

RDS读写分离