⚠️ What Happens to Your AWS RDS Instances After Account Suspension? Author: Naami Ahmed

Have you ever wondered what happens to your AWS resources if your account gets suspended—especially your RDS databases?

Recently, I encountered a situation where an AWS account was suspended due to billing issues. After reactivation, some services were still there—like EC2 and VPC—but surprisingly, the RDS database instances were missing. This led me to investigate why RDS behaves differently from other services during suspension.

In this blog post, I’ll explain what I learned, how RDS is treated differently, and what you can do to protect your data.

🔍 AWS Account Suspension: What Actually Happens?
When AWS suspends your account—usually because of unpaid bills—it restricts your access to most services. However, not all resources behave the same way.

Let’s break it down:

✅ EC2 and VPC Resources

• EC2 instances are stopped, not terminated.
• VPC configurations (like subnets, route tables, security groups) remain intact.
• After reactivating the account, EC2 instances can be restarted manually—or automatically if configured.

So far, so good.

⚠️ RDS Resources (The Catch)

• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) behaves differently from EC2. Here’s what I found:
• RDS is fully managed, meaning AWS handles the infrastructure, maintenance, and operations.
• During account suspension, AWS may automatically delete RDS instances, typically within 3–7 days of the suspension.
• There’s no fixed public retention policy from AWS for RDS after suspension.
• AWS might delete these instances earlier to free up storage and reduce management cost, since databases require persistent storage and monitoring.

This behavior can lead to permanent data loss if you’re not prepared.

💾 Can You Recover the Deleted RDS Database?
Yes—but only if you had backups. There are two ways this could save you:

1. Automated Backups: If you enabled automated backups, AWS retains daily backups for a defined retention period (usually 7–35 days).
2. Manual Snapshots: If you manually created DB snapshots, you can restore from them any time.

When you restore from a backup or snapshot, a new RDS instance is created, and that means:

➡️ The database endpoint (URL) changes.
➡️ All connected apps must be updated with the new endpoint.

If you don’t have any backups or snapshots? Unfortunately, there’s no way to recover the data.

🔐 Best Practices to Avoid RDS Surprises
To stay safe and avoid losing your databases, follow these tips:

1. Enable Automated Backups
Make sure every RDS instance has automated backups turned on with a suitable retention period.

2. Take Regular Manual Snapshots
Automated backups can disappear after account issues. Snapshots are manual and can be kept longer—even after deletion of the instance.

**3. Use CloudWatch Billing Alerts
**Set up AWS Billing alerts to get notified when your usage charges increase or when you’re at risk of suspension.

**4. Keep a Recovery Checklist
**When recovering from account suspension or restoring a DB:

• Confirm that backups exist.
• Note the new endpoint.
• Update connection strings in your applications.

5. Document Your Incident Recovery Plan
Have a disaster recovery plan ready—especially if your app depends heavily on RDS. A simple document can save hours of troubleshooting.