My client added their credit card a few hours before the free trial expired. That should be enough to just keep the server running. I believe they then got a mail saying "Congrats. Account activated" or words to that effect, so they assumed it was all ok. However, it seems they needed to also click further confirmations on the dashboard. By the time, they realised this - only an hour after the expiry - the server had to be "recovered". This actually means a brand new server needed to be setup with a different IP address, etc. As the developer, I then had to re-do the DNS, meaning a second propagation period. The Cloudways support agent was brilliant, re-adding the domain and re-configuring the SSL cert so I didn't have to do this again. However, the whole "recovery" took another hour or so. I have just have to absorb this time, as the client - rightly - felt the whole process was flawed and not very clear and was unwilling to cover my time. They also said they were "bombarded" with notifications. Personally, I get the need to notify multiple times, but for my client, they said they just started to ignore them. I know that in itself is probably why they then failed to activate the account properly (ignoring was the wrong approach!) but maybe one mail 24 hours prior to the end and just one more 1 hour beforehand followed by automatic, seamless transition to the active account once the credit card info is received would work much better.