Users who are taking advantage of the Free Trial service option can now get detailed guidance on how to test their websites on our platform.

Thanks to the newly integrated PDF guide, users will learn how to run their existing websites from our servers without having to actually transfer them over.  

This way, your potential customers will be able to evaluate the quality of our web hosting services in real time and get the motivation needed to move to a paid hosting account.

What is the Free Trial option about?

The 1-month Free Trial option was launched on our web hosting platform 3 years ago with the goal of simplifying the signup process and letting users test our service before they make an actual payment.

Thanks to the new changes, the information needed to be presented on the order form was cut down to the account details only and the users started being logged straight into the Control Panel where they are presented with the Free Trial option:

These changes to the signup process offer prospects a few important advantages, which could help increase your customer retention rates as follows:

A more customer-friendly process – moving the service payment step to the Control Panel has helped cut down the time prospects have to spend signing up for a service on your store.

Sense of security – when the user is not required to pay for the chosen service upfront, they will feel more secure and confident in trusting your brand.

Peace of mind – the new Free Trial option allows prospects to evaluate the quality of your services at their leisure before deciding to commit to your brand.

How can users test your service using the new PDF guide?

In Free Trial mode, users have access to a decent amount of resources and features, which allow them to evaluate your web hosting services at their convenience.

Here is what’s included in the free trial:

• full access to the Control Panel for 30 days;
• the ability to send and receive emails;
• FTP access to the server;
• full domain and database management control;
• browsable daily backups of your data;
• 24/7/365 technical support;

To help users evaluate the service more efficiently, we’ve added a step-by-step PDF tutorial on how they can run their existing sites on our servers.

NOTE: The tutorial is based on a scenario featuring a cPanel-based website. However, it could be applied to any other website.

The tutorial is divided into 3 basic phases. Here they are in a nutshell:

1. Downloading a copy of the existing site – here the user is advised to navigate to the home/directory of the cPanel’s File Manager, archive the whole public_html folder and download it to their local computer;

NOTE: If the user has a database, they have to create a database “dump file” via phpAdmin.

2. Uploading the website files to the server – the user is advised to log into their Control Panel on our platform, add the domain name of their website as a hosted domain and copy its IP address listed under “Default Route”.
   
   Then, they will need to go to their domain’s folder in the “File Manager” section, upload the archive of the “public_html” folder and un-archive it.
   
   If the website uses a database, the user is advised to create a new database from the “MySQL Databases” section, log into PhpMyAdmin and import the MySQL dump file created in the previous step.

3. Configuring the website – on their local computer the user will have to edit the “hosts” file by adding the IP address they copied earlier and then adding their site name next to it.

NOTE: For database-driven websites, the user will first need to set their MySQL host to “localhost” and rename the database and the username to the name of the newly created database.

That’s it. After completing all of the steps in the tutorial, the user will now be able to visit their site from their local PC or any other device and load the version they uploaded onto our servers.

Where can users find the PDF guide?

The PDF tutorial will be easily accessible from a link in the header area of the Control Panel.

The link is located right next to the “Web SSH” link as shown on the screenshot below:

Apart from that – the users will be prompted to download the tutorial within 3 minutes of their first and second login to the Control Panel via a special popup box as displayed below:

The Free Trial period is a strong selling point for your web hosting business and with the newly added PDF tutorial we are aiming to help users get a better idea of your services and boost the free-trial-prospect into paid-customer conversions.