Hovixa is designed to scale alongside your project. Whether you are experiencing a surge in traffic and require more NVMe storage or need to reduce resources during a development lull, you can adjust your plan directly from the client portal. Our system calculates adjustments using pro-rata billing, ensuring you only pay for the exact difference in resources for the remainder of your billing cycle.
1. Initiating a Plan Change
Scaling actions are performed at the individual service level. Note that while upgrades are generally instantaneous, downgrades may require manual verification to ensure data safety.
- Log in to the Hovixa Client Portal.
- Navigate to Services > My Services.
- Locate the service you wish to scale and click Manage.
- In the sidebar or under the "Actions" section, click Upgrade/Downgrade.
2. Understanding Pro-Rata Billing
When upgrading, the system does not charge you the full price of the new plan immediately. Instead, it calculates the difference between your current plan and the new plan based on the number of days remaining in your current month.
Example: If you are halfway through a $10/month plan and upgrade to a $20/month plan, you will be invoiced for roughly $5.00 to cover the increased resources for the rest of the month.
3. VPS vs. Shared Hosting Scaling
The technical implications of scaling vary depending on the product type:
| Product Type | Technical Behavior |
|---|---|
| Shared Hosting | Instantaneous. CPU/RAM limits and disk quotas are updated in cPanel immediately upon payment. No migration or downtime. |
| VPS (vm.hovixa.com) | Requires a reboot. The system must resize the virtual disk and reallocate RAM. Ensure you have backups before performing a VPS scale. |
4. Technical Implementation & Constraints
- Downgrade Restrictions: You cannot downgrade a service if your current disk usage exceeds the storage limit of the lower plan. You must delete unnecessary files or databases before the downgrade can proceed.
- IP Addresses: Scaling your plan (Upgrade or Downgrade) does not change your IP address. Your configurations remain intact.
- Invoicing: For upgrades, an invoice is generated immediately. The plan change is finalized only once the invoice is marked as "Paid." For downgrades, any resulting credit is usually applied to your account balance for future use.
Critical Notes for VPS Users:
- While our SolusVM2 platform handles disk expansion automatically during an upgrade, some Linux distributions may require you to manually resize the partition within the OS using tools like
resize2fsorxfs_growfsto see the new space. - Downgrade VPS have limitations: reducing resources like RAM, CPU, or disk is not fully dynamic and often requires a reboot, manual intervention, or even a full rebuild depending on the virtualization type. Disk size usually cannot be reduced safely at all, forcing providers to migrate or recreate the VM, which increases downtime risk. These constraints make VPS downgrades less flexible and more disruptive compared to upgrades, especially in production environments.
