Understanding active site licensing

The active site licensing is there because it simply is easier for you, the users. It allows you to install the plugin as many times as you want, but instead the license covers usage on X sites, depending on subscription plan, in a 30 day moving window. That essentially means that you dont have to bother with the activation/deactivation of plugin on sites to prevent you from hitting the licensing limits. So it actually covers your actual use instead.

In practice, the license server is contacted on each synchronization, to verify the license and potentially count it as a active site. It only counts as a active site, if it uses a non-local domain name. Meaning domain names reserved as per https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606. Such as .local, .test, .localhost etc. is not counted as active site. Staging/dev sites containing 'staging' or 'dev' is not counted either. Any other sites is counted as active sites. So if you do a synchronization from your local environment http://mywebsite.test to https://mycoolwebsite.com, it will count as one active site because of the domain mycoolwebsite.com.

Let us check out some examples:

Example 1 - The basic case:

User has a production site called mywebsite.com, a staging site on staging.mywebsite.com and a local development site on mywebsite.local to do development.

This example requires only 1 active site, as the local development site and staging site is free.

Example 2 - The basic case, but weirder:

User has a production site called mywebsite.com, a staging site on staging.mywebsite.com and a online development site on mywebsite.mycompany.com.

This example requires 2 active site licenses as the production site and dev environment is both online and not covered by staging site exception because of the domain and subdomain.

Example 3 - Maintaining multiple sites

User maintains 20 sites for their own customers, which they regularly update and develop stuff for. They also have 20 local development sites, each with <customer-name>.local type url, matching each of the 20 sites they maintain. But they do not update all of them monthly. On average they develop stuff and update 7-10 sites in a month.

This example requires a minimum of 10 active site licenses, to make sure they are covered on the busy months. But they do not need licenses for all the sites they have under their wings. Just the ones being used in a synchronization in the last 30 days, even if their license key is installed on all 40 sites (20 production site and 20 local sites).

Feel free to contact us if you have questions about the licensing

If you want have any questions about the licensing, just contact us on contact@daev.tech.