was wondering if anyone else was looking at how to implement this... I know yahoo gives like 6mb free and for $20/year you can get 25MB storage... everyone.net also added a premium account with a bunch of other options (more storage, no banner ads, etc..) for $20/year... Has anyone implemented anything like this yet... it seems it's just a matter or processing a credit card and then just updating the user limits, with something to keep track of billing each year... the only tough part I see is whether or not to show ads.. anyone else have any thoughts.. anyone know what percentage of yahoo's accounts are premium, what percent converted, etc... thx.

I don't offer a free service, just a $12 a year fee based service. I deliberated about the banners, then decided to put them in too as I'd seen it done on another site ("we use a combination of fees and advertising to offer you a quality service"). Having had a quick think about a free-to-fee service it should be easy to implement. Depending on your credit card provider (I use WorldPay) you would just pass the username and relevant info onto the payment page, so users could click a link to upgrade at any time.

It's not fully automated, but then I'm not Yahoo so manual processing isn't a chore (yet). I have a general 'Email Service' folder, with subfolders: 'AWAITING check payment' and 'PAID by credit card'; with subfolders in both of them: 'PAID by check' and 'Problems with credit card' respectively.


Regards

Jason

Yeah, I don't thinks it's going to be to hard... we have a membership management program we use that does credit card processing and manages the htaccess files for us and we are going to be able to set up a separate profile for this that will let us automate everything... we'll take their management script that runs on our server and when orders come in on that profile, we'll be able to basically have it run an upgrade account script that makes the necessary changes for the user.

I was just hoping someone might have done something like this already and could provide some tips.