Upgrading and Downgrading Plans

Your customers may want to change plans to which they are subscribed, for example, if they need more resources that their current plans provide, or otherwise, if they do not want to pay extra money for resources that they do not use. For these cases, define available upgrades and downgrades for each plan.

You can use plans upgrades and downgrades to create a hierarchy of plans. The table below shows an example of plans set with available upgrades and downgrades:

If you offer plan upgrading and downgrading, define how to process upgrade and downgrade requests for all plans, for example, when to perform requested upgrades: immediately after requests or and the end of current billing cycle. The section Configuring Upgrade and Downgrade Requests Processing provides a list of system-wide properties related to upgrades and downgrades and description of these properties.

Besides, Business Manager provides an option to charge customers for upgrading or downgrading their subscriptions. Define upgrade and downgrade fees for each plan on the Prices tab of the plan settings page.

Upgrade and Downgrade Requests Processing

The Business Manager allows you to define what actions the system takes when upgrading or downgrading plans. This includes the following:

• Who can initiate upgrades and downgrades.
• How to perform upgrades and downgrades.
• How to bill upgrades and downgrades.

The controls to configure upgrade and downgrade requests processing are located at the Business Setup > All Settings > Upgrade/Downgrade Requests.

Customer-Initiated Upgrades and Downgrades

If you allow your customers to initiate upgrades and downgrades, define when to change their plans: immediately after request or at the end of current billing cycle.

If you decide to perform upgrades and downgrades immediately, define what to do with unused money on customer's billing account:

• Return the unused money to customers as credits. Choose this option, for example, for hosting plans.
• Do not return the money, Do it, for example, for domain registration plans, when the registrar does not return the money if you stop using a domain name.

Troubleshooting Delayed Upgrades and Downgrades

If you configure your Business Manager to perform subscription upgrades and downgrades at the end of billing cycles (or perform delayed upgrades and downgrades), then upgrade and downgrade requests receives advanced handling. To help you troubleshoot potential issues with delayed upgrades and downgrades, below we will describe handling of such requests in details.

For example, a customer has a Bronze hosting subscription and orders an upgrade to the Silver hosting plan. In this case, Business Manager will do the following:

1. Immediately after triggering the upgrade request, the system creates a new subscription to Silver hosting with the Pending status. The Bronze hosting subscription remains Active.
2. In a few days before the end of the current billing cycle, Business Manager issues an invoice for the Silver hosting subscription renewal.
3. At the first day of the next billing cycle, the system upgrades the subscription on Panel and removes the Bronze hosting subscription. If the upgrade was successful, Business Manager changes the Silver hosting subscription's status to Active.Otherwise, the Silver hosting subscription receives the Error status.

Before the system issues an invoice for the upgraded subscription, either you or the subscriber can cancel the upgrade by clicking Cancel subscription upgrade or downgrade on the Bronze hosting subscription's page. If you do this, Business Manager cancels the Silver hosting subscription and issues the next invoice for the Bronze hosting as usual.

After issuing the invoice for the upgraded subscription, neither you nor the subscriber can cancel the upgrade request.