Cloud Clusters Billing and Account Overview
A Cloud Clusters account is created when you sign up to try or buy Cloud Clusters cloud hosting services. You use your account to manage your account settings, invoices, payment methods, and purchases.
Start a trial
We provide free trials for most applications. After signing up, you can start a free trial on the Cloud Clusters Control Panel. If you are satisfied with our service, you can upgrade your trial service to a paid service. If you decide not to continue with us for some reasons, you are always welcome back to start another free trial later.
Free trial ends
During the trial period, you can see the remaining trial days on the Control Panel for each application. Before the trial ends, we will also send email notifications about the remaining days. If you decide to continue using our services after the trial, you can click the renew button. A step-by-step guide can be viewed at Continuing Your Service After the Free Trial.
Add Your Billing information
If you’d like to upgrade your trial service to a paid service, you’ll be required to update your personal information to activate your paid account.
Verification
Your Cloud Clusters account could be in one of the statuses:
Pending: The Billing Information is incomplete. In this situation, certain applications and services, such as Shell/ SSH, plan upgrading, and PhotoPrism & OpenCart, can not be accessed. The system cannot generate any invoices for you, either.
Processing: Your billing information has been submitted and is in the process of verification. It can take up 2 hours since the submission. If you request for a quicker pass, please send us a ticket.
- Active: Your paid account has been activated after your billing information has been submitted and verified. With an active account, you have access to all Cloud Clusters services, including Shell/SSH service, plan upgrade, PhotoPrism & OpenCart, etc. In this status, the system can generate invoices for your services.
- Closed: An account could be closed due to abuse or violation of Cloud Clusters ToS. Once your account is closed, you will not be able to access the Control Panel or any Cloud Clusters services. If you have any questions, please contact us.
Invoice
- Generation rule: Only when your account is active, can the system generate invoices for you.
- Generation time: Normally, invoices are scheduled to be generated 7 days before your application expires. It can also be generated on your actions. For example, when you click renew, add add-ons, and upgrade plans.
- Accepted currency: currently, we accept payment in US Dollars only.
Payment methods: credit card, PayPal, check, bank transfer,and credits.
- Credit Card: Any US-issued and most internationally-issued magstripe or chip cards bearing a Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, or UnionPay logo.
- Check: The paper check is for US clients only. Your service deployment will be delayed until the payment clears.
- Bank Transfer: the amount should not be less than $100. Your service deployment will be delayed until the payment clears.
- Credits: The credits is the funds in your Cloud Clusters account. It can only be used to pay for your services with us. You can get credits by sharing your feedback, creating CloudClusters related content, ect.
For recurring payments, you can set up Credit Card CC or PayPal Subscriptions to avoid late or missed payments. We offer a guide for this topic. Please refer to Setting up PayPal Subscriptions for help.
Note: If you’d like to make payments in advance, please click renew to get your application invoice generated. If you would like to pay for multiple applications, you will need to repeat the above operation and pay for the invoices one by one as we do not support bulk payments. please do make sure you pay for the right invoices/applications.
Upgrade and Downgrade
we provide four standard plans for our applications: express plan、basic plan、professional plan、advanced plan. You can upgrade/downgrade plans in one click in our Control Panel. If you need assistance on plan upgrading/downgrading, please take a look at Upgrading or Downgrading a Plan. We also support adding/removing add-ons. If you need guidance, please visit Add-ons.
Suspend
Typically, if your application stays unpaid 3 days after the due date, it will be suspended. In such situation, you won’t be able to access the management interface of the application. You can reactivate it by paying for the application invoice before it’s cancelled. If it remains unpaid 14 days after the due date, it will be deleted(canceled) from our system. Your application could also be suspended due to other reasons, such as violation of ToS, per your cancellation request. In such situations, if you’d like to reactivate your application, please contact us for help.
Cancel
If your application remains unpaid 14 days after the due date, it will be deleted(canceled) from our system. You can also request cancellation for applications that you decide to stop using. If you need help on this action, please refer to Canceling a package . A Remove Cancellation Request button in the same section is provided in case you change your mind after requesting cancellation.
If you’d like to run your application again after it’s been cancelled, you can try restoring your canceled application. As long as there is a full backup of your application in our system, it can be restored. Our system will normally keep your backups for 60 days. When you take the action, the system will scan if there is a full backup of your cancelled application. If there is, you can bring back your application in few minutes.
Cloud Clusters Billing Mode
Cloud Clusters is a pre-paid service that is based on applications. You pay for an application service plan at the beginning of a certain billing cycle. A billing cycle is an interval between bills for products and services. Our billing cycle typically comes in Monthly, Semi-Annually, Annually and Biennially. The longer the billing cycle is, the lower the monthly rate will be. Clients can adjust the billing cycles to meet their economic needs.