It'd be nice if one could pay a bit more in advance, so one's data stayed some weeks or months longer than default, after the servers got powered off. — As an extra safety net, if the credit card expires when one is in bed for a month with a broken leg or some bad luck thing like that.
The hold happens right away and prevents you from creating new billable resources.
Then a suspension happens several weeks later, which powers off your servers.
You don’t get terminated until a couple weeks after that, at which point the data is irretrievable.
The time between each stage can vary depending on how long you’ve been a customer or what your monthly payments in the past have been, but that’s the gist of it.