Upgrade a Free Trial Account to a Full Account

Whether you are upgrading your free trial account to add capacity or to extend your usage beyond your first 500 hours, Engine Yard makes it easy to add as much computing power as you need for your application.

At any point during your free trial, click the Upgrade Account link to submit your billing information and gain access to the full options and features of Engine Yard Cloud. After you’ve provided the requested information and arrived back at the dashboard, you will notice that previously disabled features are now available (for example, all Add-ons become available).

Unless you stopped your environment before upgrading, the instances that your Free Trial began with are still running and your application is still deployed. You will not be billed for any usage that occurred prior to upgrading, but billing does begin as soon as you unlock Engine Yard Cloud’s full feature range.

Adding capacity to your account

Trial accounts provide users with High-CPU Medium instances. While this instance type provides more than sufficient capacity for developing your application, many customers will want to add additional capacity when deploying to production.

If you need to grow from a single to a multi-instance configuration, you will need to be in a position where you can safely bring your application down for a few minutes without disrupting your developers or users.

The next step is to determine what kind of environment you’d like to configure. Options include a single instance or one of the multiple-instance configurations.

  • Single Instance: If this is a staging environment without strict uptime requirements and you don’t expect to grow in the future, select a single instance environment.

  • Staging Configuration: For non-production environments, a staging config gives you room to expand in the future and also allows us to implement takeovers if your application master server goes down.

  • Production Configuration: For production environments, the production config is recommended. It provides for future app growth and includes a database replica (slave) in case your database goes down.

  • Custom Configuration: If your needs cannot be met by the pre-configured options above, select custom config to suit your unique environment.

Using multiple-instance architectures to improve scalability

We recommend that most customers who are going into production move to a multi-instance configuration; this allows you to separate instances for your application and database, and will lead to improved performance and stability.

The staging and production config options provide you with a pre-configured environment, or you can choose custom configuration to have fine-grained control over the instances in your environment.

Custom environments provide you with the greatest flexibility, and after you’ve upgraded to a custom environment, adding additional application, database, and utility instances is easy and generally does not require additional down time.

Configuring your new environment

If you currently have a single-instance environment, you will need to run through these steps.

When you are ready, go to your dashboard and click the Stop button associated with the environment you are planning to upgrade.

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This will cause a snapshot to be taken of the current /data and /db directories in your instance. Your new instances can use this snapshot to load the data that was on the previous environment.

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Next, choose Boot to configure and create new instances. You’re presented with the environment choices. For this example, we will choose Custom Configuration.

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Specifying site info

After you’ve selected the Custom Configuration option, you can scroll down to see more options in a section entitled Site Info. You can specify the quantity of application instances you’d like to add as well as their sizes. For more information on the various instance sizes, check out the Engine Yard Cloud price list.

After you’ve specified your instance requirements, the next step is to choose which snapshot you’d like to boot from. The most recent snapshot should appear at the top, or notify you if the most recent snapshot is still pending. You can also choose how much room you want to reserve for future snapshot storage -- the default is 5 GB and it can range up to 1024 GB. Finally, you can choose to add utility instances (servers designed to run dedicated tasks) if you need any.

Booting and verifying your environment

Click Boot This Configuration and your instances will begin to boot. Your browser will return you to the dashboard and you will see status messages about the progress of the boot process. After this is done, you can click Visit Your Application to verify your application is up and running.


If you have feedback or questions about this page, add a comment below. If you need help, submit a ticket with Engine Yard Support.

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