This document covers the following topics:

• Enabling Trial Registration
• Suspending and Resuming Trial Accounts
• Grouping Trial Plans

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 for fee. 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. However, when they become pay users, they are charged for the resources they have used during the trial period. Trial users become pay users at the moment when their billing information is verified and accepted, and their custom settings remain unchanged.

Enabling Trial Registration

To enable trial hosting for an individual plan, do the following:

1. Select Plans in the Info menu and click the plan name to start the plan edit wizard:

   

2. On the page that appears, scroll down to the last section and select Trial as the Billing Type.
3. 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.
4. 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. In this case users can acquire only free resources. Usually this amount is 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 is offered with the standard plan configuration.
5. 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 gets suspended. The suspension disables all features, including website, mail, ftp, and others, and when logging into Control Panel, users will see the page saying to become a pay user. When the user pays up, the account gets 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.