Billing and licence

You set your own capacity, per resource type: virtual machines, dedicated machines, hosting accounts and game servers. It is a limit and a price at the same time.

Raising your capacity takes effect immediately. The extra for the rest of this period is prorated and added to your next invoice.

Lowering also takes effect immediately. The unused part of the period you already paid for comes back as credit on your next invoice, and lowering below your running machines puts you over your limit.

Pricing is per unit per month, and the unit price falls in tiers as the count rises. The price shown on the capacity page is calculated per resource type and totalled, excluding VAT, with the VAT added on the invoice.

A new organisation starts on a trial that runs for two weeks. No payment details are asked for, and everything works.

When it ends without a payment method you are told, and nothing changes yet. A week later the panel starts warning you, and two weeks after the period ended your servers are suspended. Every step is announced before it happens.

The first payment both settles the first month and records the mandate for the ones after it. Changing your method later costs a one-cent verification charge, which is returned to you as credit, so changing is free.

You can top your account up in advance. The balance is a ledger: one line per change, never edited, and the balance is their sum. A correction is an opposite line with a reason, not a rewrite.

If your balance covers the whole month, the month is paid from credit and nothing is collected from your account. If it does not, the full amount is collected and your balance is left alone. There is no partial settlement.

Each period produces a proforma you can read and print, listing what was charged and why. The definitive invoice comes from the bookkeeping and can be downloaded as a file. The payments page shows the last ten payments with their method and status.

Running more than you bought is not blocked at the moment you do it. It is detected, you are told, and you are given time.

1. 01The excess is detected and you get a notification and a banner naming the resource type and by how much.
2. 02You have a full working day to fix it. Remove or stop servers, or raise your capacity.
3. 03If the grace period expires, the platform switches off the newest servers above your limit, newest first, so what you built earliest survives. A suspended server keeps its disk and its data.
4. 04Once you are back within your limit the overage closes and you can start those servers again yourself.

A second overage within a week gets an hour instead of a day. Otherwise the grace period could be renewed indefinitely by dipping under the limit and going over again.

Your organisation carries one status: active, grace or suspended. Two things can push it: an overage and an outstanding payment. When both apply, the stricter one wins, so the banner does not alternate.