vCluster Billing System

By Joe Gardiner Thursday, 24th June 2010

After many weeks of development I am happy to announce the release of the CatN Control Panel 1.1, a complete billing system, and the finalised pricing page. You can view our vCluster packages and allowances, usage prices, and support packages at catn.com/vcluster/pricing/. If you're yet to add a payment method please remember you have until the 15th July, and if you're deciding to leave us, a big thank you for all the feedback you gave over the development process. Let's take a quick look at the new releases...

CatN Control Panel 1.1

Following the feedback of our testers and our in house use for our own hosted products numerous updates have been made to the development control panel.

Resource Usage
A new panel added to the statistics screen of the CP now gives percentage use and overage of allocated allowance (Data Transfer, Database Storage, Document Storage, and Platform Hours) depending on your vCluster package. This usage is given a cost allowing you to easily control and view your bills, something I feel is vital for a usage billing hosting product.
Credit Limit
A Credit Limit panel now allows the user to choose the maximum amount they will pay for a bill each month. When this limit is reached an alert is sent and the limit can be increased before being reached. This allows total control over your monthly bills, necessary with usage billing.
Guides
A Guides panel under the Support Desk nav, takes you directly through to CatN guides without leaving the Control Panel. An easy to use search function helps you find the guide you need quickly and easily. If you can't find the right guide leave some feedback using the Feedback panel, and we'll publish something to help you out quickly.

Our live billing system coincides with, and is integrated into the CatN Control Panel. This now allows us to charge for vCluster and bring to an end any test accounts. Following my email sent on Friday the 18th June notifying all current vCluster users, if any questions remain about these changes please don't hesitate to contact me... catn.com/support/contact/, or leave me a comment.

Pricing page

Up to now I've held off publishing our pricing page to avoid confusion and allow vCluster accounts to be created for free for testing purposes. With the release of our Control Panel and billing system I've now publish our prices and packages.

Head over to vCluster Pricing to have a look.
Along with the new pricing page explanatory " Platform Hours" and " Data Transfer" pages have been deep linked, outlining exactly what and how we charge for these two billing metrics.

Have a look at our new releases and let me know what you think... We'll continue to develop vCluster to provide a powerful managed platform for your php application development and deployment, and enjoy any feedback our users may have.

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