How to Upgrade or Downgrade Your Hosting Plan
As your website grows or your needs change, SakuraHost makes it simple to scale your hosting plan up or down directly from your client area at billing.sakurahost.co.tz. Whether you need more disk space, bandwidth, or email accounts — or want to reduce costs during a quieter period — this guide walks you through the entire process.
When Should You Upgrade?
Consider upgrading your hosting plan if you experience any of the following:
- Disk space warnings: Your cPanel shows storage usage above 80%
- Bandwidth limits: You're approaching or exceeding your monthly data transfer allocation
- Performance issues: Pages load slowly due to increased traffic or resource-intensive applications
- Email needs: You need more email accounts or larger mailbox sizes
- Additional websites: You want to host more domains under a single account (addon domains)
- Advanced features: You need SSH access, staging environments, or priority support
When Should You Downgrade?
Downgrading makes sense when:
- Your current resource usage is well below your plan's limits
- You've moved some websites to a different server or provider
- Your business needs have scaled back temporarily
- You want to reduce monthly or annual hosting costs
Step-by-Step: Upgrading Your Plan
Log Into Your Client Area
Visit billing.sakurahost.co.tz/clientarea.php and sign in with your credentials.
Navigate to Your Active Service
Go to Services > My Services and click on the hosting service you wish to upgrade. This opens the service detail page showing your current plan, resource usage, and management options.
Click "Upgrade/Downgrade"
In the left sidebar or action panel, click the "Upgrade/Downgrade" button. This opens the plan comparison page showing all available plans you can switch to.
Select Your New Plan
Browse the available plans and select the one that best fits your needs. Each plan card displays the included resources: disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, databases, and addon domains. Plans higher than your current one are upgrades; lower ones are downgrades.
Review the Prorated Invoice
The system automatically calculates the price difference. For upgrades, you'll see a prorated invoice for the remaining days in your current billing cycle. For downgrades, credit may be applied to your account balance.
Pay the Difference
For upgrades, pay the generated invoice via SakuraPay (M-Pesa, CRDB, Mixx/Yas, Selcom/TTCL, or Bank Transfer). Once payment is confirmed, your plan is upgraded automatically — no downtime, no data migration needed.
How Proration Works
SakuraHost uses a fair proration system to ensure you only pay for what you use:
- Upgrades: You pay the difference between your current plan and the new plan, calculated for the remaining days in your billing cycle. For example, if you're 15 days into a 30-day monthly cycle and upgrade from a TZS 15,000/month plan to a TZS 25,000/month plan, you'd pay approximately TZS 5,000 for the remaining 15 days
- Downgrades: The unused portion of your current plan is calculated as account credit and applied to future invoices. No cash refunds are issued for downgrades
What Happens to Your Data?
When upgrading or downgrading within the same server type (e.g., shared hosting to shared hosting):
- All your files, databases, and email accounts remain intact
- Your cPanel login credentials stay the same
- Your website URLs and DNS settings are unaffected
- SSL certificates continue to work normally
- Resource limits are updated immediately upon payment
Upgrading to a Different Service Type
If you're moving from shared hosting to a VPS or dedicated server, the process is different and involves a full migration. In this case, please open a support ticket at billing.sakurahost.co.tz/submitticket.php and our team will handle the migration with minimal downtime. Cross-server migrations typically take 2-4 hours and are performed during off-peak hours.
Changing Your Billing Cycle
You can change your billing cycle without changing your plan. From the service detail page, look for the "Change Billing Cycle" option. Available cycles include monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, and biennially. The price difference is prorated automatically.