Upgrading or Downgrading Your Hosting Plan Print

How to start the change

Log in to your client portal, open the hosting service you want to change, and click Upgrade/Downgrade in the Actions menu, the same menu described in our article on accessing your cPanel and webmail. You will see the plans available to you, and choosing one generates the order.

The same tool also changes your billing cycle, so moving from monthly to annual, or the other way, happens here rather than through a separate request.

What happens when you upgrade

1. You choose the new plan and our system calculates the cost, charging the pro-rata difference for the remainder of your current term, whether that term is monthly, annual, or anything between. You pay only for the upgrade from now until your existing renewal date, not for a fresh term.
2. You pay the invoice. As with every order with us, nothing happens before payment is confirmed.
3. Our billing staff activate the change by hand. Every order is manually reviewed and processed, new, upgrade, or downgrade alike, following the rhythm set out in our article on how our billing works.

Your renewal date does not move. It stays fixed to your original signup date, which is precisely why the invoice is pro-rata: you are topping up the difference for the time remaining, not restarting the clock.

Upgrading close to your renewal date

If you upgrade within five days of a monthly renewal, we waive the pro-rata upgrade charge entirely, there is little sense invoicing a few days' difference. Annual plans are handled case by case, and an upgrade falling within a month of the renewal is often done at no charge. If your timing is close, ask us before ordering and we will tell you where you stand.

What happens when you downgrade

Downgrades work through the same tool, with two differences worth knowing before you commit:

• There is no refund or credit for the current term. The lower price simply applies from your next invoice onward. You keep what you have already paid for until the renewal date.
• Your account must fit the smaller plan. Our system will let you order a downgrade to a plan your account has outgrown, but our billing staff check this during the manual review, and we will come back to you rather than proceed with a change that would break your site or mail. Clear the space first, our article on managing mailbox size covers the email side, and cPanel's Disk Usage tool shows what is consuming the rest.

Downgrading to a parking plan: read this first

Moving from a hosting plan to a parking plan is not a smaller version of hosting, it is the end of hosting for that domain. You lose your disk space, your website files, your databases, and your email accounts along with their mail.

• Free parking has no cPanel access at all.
• Parking with redirect gives you access to the Zone Editor and nothing else.

So before any downgrade to parking, take a full backup of your files, databases, and any mail you want to keep. Once the change is processed, that content is gone from our servers. Our article on domain parking explains what each parking product does and does not do.

What you can and cannot change automatically

• Any shared hosting tier to any other, in either direction. A cPanel tier can become a WordPress tier or an eCommerce tier, and back again, all through the Upgrade/Downgrade tool.
• Shared hosting to a server, or a server to shared hosting, cannot be done this way. Moving to a VPS or dedicated server means ordering the server, which we then provision and secure, followed by migrating your shared hosting account across to it. Entirely possible, just not automated, and it starts with a support ticket or a new order rather than this tool.

Good to know

Because every order is reviewed by a person, a change that looks wrong to us gets a conversation rather than a silent execution. If you order a downgrade that would strand your data, or an upgrade you may not need, expect us to come back to you first. That is the value of the manual step, and it is worth remembering that a quick ticket asking which plan actually suits your usage will get you an honest answer before you spend anything, not after.