Billing period determines how far in advance recurrent fees for billing period resources are prepaid.
In addition to a 1 month billing period coming with each new hosting plan, you can create multiple billing periods of different length for your customers/resellers to choose from at signup or switch between later. This allows you to configure pricing individually for each billing period.
When you create a new hosting plan, you can set prices and free units for the one month default billing period. These are the base prices and free units used in the calculation of actual prices and free units. When you have created a plan, you can go ahead and create actual billing periods for it. Unlike the default billing period, actual billing periods can be chosen by users. If you don't set a price or free units for an actual billing period, it will be calculated according to the corresponding base prices/free units and discounts.
Accounting for such resources as traffic, disk usage, MySQL and PGSQL quotas is determined not by billing periods as it is for the rest resources, but by a billing month. Billing month equals the number of days in the billing period divided by billing period duration in months. That's why these resources are referred to as monthly resources as opposed to billing period resources.
A new billing period/month opens:
- when a new account is activated upon signup or moderation, which makes it start differently for each individual account
- when the billing period closes
- on resuming suspended account after the end of the billing period
- on changing account's billing period
- on changing start billing date
On other events, the billing period doesn't close.
Each new hosting plan comes with 1 month billing period, but you can create multiple actual billing periods.
To create or edit a billing period:
In Parallels H-Sphere billing periods cannot be deleted, but you can change their duration. For instance, if you decide you don't need your yearly billing period, you can change its duration to two months.
Warning: Don't change the duration of a billing period if it has live accounts, as this will mess up billing for them. Instead you can create an identical plan with the same set of resources but different billing periods and move accounts to this plan. Once you know you have no accounts under this billing period, you can safely change its duration.