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This document covers the following topics:
Each pay plan can have trial registration enabled. It enables
users to signup for evaluation without paying. Users are given
a certain number of days to decide if they want to continue with
this service and pay for it. If a user decides not to pay, the
account gets suspended when the trial period ends. You can
delete it later.
Trial users are not charged for the resources
they use, unless they decide to stay with you upon trial period expiration and
become pay users. In this case they are
charged for the resources they have used during the trial
period and recurrent fees
for an open billing period.
Trial users become pay pay users at the moment when their billing information
in created billing profile
is verified and accepted. Their custom settings remain unchanged.
Enabling Trial Registration
To enable trial hosting for an individual plan, do the following:
- Select Plans in the Info menu
and click the plan name to start the plan edit wizard:
- On the page that appears, scroll down to the last section
and select Trial as the Billing Type.
- In the Duration field, enter the days of the trial period.
If you leave the field empty, the duration of the trial period will
be set to zero, and all accounts under trial registration will be
suspended immediately after signup. Usually trial period does not
exceed one month.
- In the Credit Limit field, enter the maximum negative balance
you want to allow for one trial user. Trial Credit Limit is the
maximum amount of credit a trial user can run up acquiring paid
resources. If you leave the field empty, the Trial Credit Limit
is set to zero, and users can acquire only free resources. For trial
periods of up to one month, this amount is usually set to slightly
exceed the initial registration payment plus the recurrent fee for
one payment period to disallow free use of extra resources. If you set
Trial Credit higher, trial users will be able to acquire more resources
than it is offered with the standard plan configuration. For trial
period of more than a month, you need to set a higher credit limit
to ensure that the trial account has enough balance to pay subsequent
recurrent fees.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the form. Check the Don't change resources prices
and click Next.
Suspending and Resuming Trial Accounts
If the user hasn't paid by the end of the trial period, the
account automatically gets suspended
and when logging
into H-Sphere, users will see the page saying to
become a pay
user. When the user pays up,
resume their account,
as it doesn't get automatically resumed.
Grouping Trial Plans
To ensure correct transition from one plan to another,
you should always group plans based on their compatibility,
so plans with the same settings belong to the same group.
Don't group plans of different nature (for example Windows
and Linux hosting), as this will lead to unexpected results.
A very common mistake is to create dedicated Unix and Win2000
trial plans and put them in a separate trial plans group.
On the one hand, this will not allow trial users to switch
to pay plans, as they are in a different group. On the other
hand, when switching from Win2000 Trial to Unix trial, a user
will lose the settings that are unavailable under Unix plan,
such as ASP and ODBC service.
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