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One of H-Sphere's biggest assets is that it provides fully automated
billing for credit card payment accounts. It also supports other types
of payments including check payments, web payment systems, wire transfers,
etc. This document provides a quick overview of all billing features in
H-Sphere.
Plans
Hosting resources and services are sold in plans, each having its own
price scheme. In plan settings, the administrator needs to set:
- which resources will be available in the plan;
- prices, free units, and max units for each resource;
- credit limit, moneyback period, billing type, etc.
More >>
Billing Types
Plans in H-Sphere can be commercial and free. Free plans are typically
used to host your corporate site, use an external billing system, or to
disable billing for any other reasons. Commercial plans require payments
by credit cards or checks. Commercial plans can allow trial hosting for
a limited period of time. More >>
Trial Hosting
Trial hosting enables users to sign up for a plan and use it for a certain
number of days without paying. If a trial user decides to continue and
become a pay user, H-Sphere charges (1) for the resources that were purchased/used
during the trial period and (2) recurrent fees for the next billing period.
If a user decides to quit, the account gets suspended when the trial period
ends. More >>
Billing Profiles
For the system to be able to charge customers for the resources and
services, each pay user should enter the information about credit cards
or check account. Such info is contained in user's billing profile.
One billing profile can be used for several accounts. At the same time
customers can have multiple billing profiles, but only one active at a
time. Trial and free accounts don't have billing profiles. More
>>
Prices
The system charges users three types of fees:
- Setup: only when
a user purchases a resource.
- Recurrent: at
the beginning of the billing period or billing month.
- Overlimit: for
resources used beyond the pre-paid limit (e.g. summary disk space usage,
traffic, etc.).
Fees are calculated based on prices and billing periods. More
>>
Limiting Resources
You can include a certain amount of free resources in a plan.
If need arises, users can get more, until they reach the maximum
amount of resources you have allowed them to have. For instance, you can
include 5 free mailboxes in the plan and allow users to have no more than
10 mailboxes. More >>
Usage of some resources, such as disk space and traffic, can be controlled
additionally by resource limits. A user can exceed a resource limit, but
every excess unit is charged at the overlimit price. You can configure
H-Sphere to send warnings and suspend accounts when users approach or
exceed traffic or disk usage limit. More
>>
Billing Periods
You can create many billing periods within a plan for customers to choose
from. Billing periods allow you to set discounts for each individual price
type - setup, recurrent, and overlimit. The bigger billing period, the
bigger the discount. More >>
Crediting Accounts
You can manually credit (put money to) individual accounts. Do this
when you receive check or other non-credit-card payments from customers
or when you need to refund a payment. These amounts are credited to the
account balance, not credit cards. More
>>
Debiting Accounts
You can debit (take money from) individual accounts. Accounts are debited
manually when you need to charge your customers extra amounts.
You can configure your system to debit accounts on regular basis for
services offered outside H-Sphere, for instance, antivirus protection.
More >>
Billing Modes
Since 2.5 Beta 1 version, H-Sphere allows you to switch between the
two modes of charging: credit limit based and anniversary based. In credit
limit based mode customers are charged every time their balance exceeds
credit limit. In anniversary
based mode charges are done at the end of each billing period or month,
depending on type of the fee. More
>>
Traffic
Actual use of traffic cannot be physically restricted, but can be regulated
by charging higher prices for overlimit traffic consumption. At the beginning
of the billing period customers pay for traffic they expect to run up.
If they go over this pre-paid limit, they are charged for the excess gigabytes
at the overlimit rate at the end of each billing month regardless the
duration of the billing period. More >>
Disk Space
H-Sphere offers two approaches to paying for disk space. Disk Space
Quota is used to charge users for booked disk space. Web, mail, and
database resources take separate quotas within the same account. Disk
quota can't be exceeded, but users can raise it if they need more disk
space. Summary Disk Space is used to charge users for actually
used disk space. With summary disk space, users can exceed disk space
limit, and pay for excess megabytes at the overlimit rate at the end of
each billing month regardless the duration of the billing period.
More >>
E-mailing Invoices
When creating plans, you choose whether you want H-Sphere to e-mail
invoices to users immediately after they buy resources. With e-mail invoicing
on, customers will receive invoices for every single bill entry, e.g.
overlimit traffic. With e-mail invoicing off, customers will get no invoices,
even at the end of the billing period. After signup, users can change
this option for their accounts. More
>>
Taxes
H-Sphere allows you to apply taxes, such as VAT, to customer charges.
Taxes are added to the summary invoice amounts. More
>>
You can wave individual users from paying taxes. At signup, users enter
tax exemption code, then you need to approve or reject it. More
>>
Promotions
Starting with H-Sphere 2.4, you can apply promotions to plans. You can
give a promo code to eligible users to offer them a discount. Or
you can create an unnamed promotion that will apply to all accounts
under this plan for a specified period of time, for instance the month
before Christmas. More >>
Suspending Debtors
You can set how many days your customers can stay in debt before they
receive a negative balance warning, or get their account suspended or
deleted. More >>
Money Returns
On some account activities, such as quitting hosting, changing plans,
or deleting paid resources, H-Sphere automatically returns recurrent charges
by crediting customer's account balance. Refunds are calculated based
on the moneyback period, refund percentage and the resource billing type.
If a customer quits with positive balance, you need to send him the remaining
amount by check. More >>
Billing Statements
A billing statement is a detail comulative record of paid activity reflecting
all charges and credits incurred during a billing
period. This means each billing statement represents user's paid activity
during the billing period. Starting with H-Sphere 2.5.1 billing
statements get sequential numbering. In other words each billing statement
is identified by account id and statement id in the format account_id-statement_id.
For example, account_id-1, account_id-2, ...
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