Understanding active site licensing

Active site licensing exists because it is simpler for you as a user. It allows you to install the plugin as many times as you want, while the license instead covers usage on a certain number of sites, depending on your subscription plan, within a 30-day moving window. That essentially means that you don't have to worry about activating and deactivating the plugin on sites just to avoid hitting the licensing limits. It covers your actual usage instead.

In practice, the license server is contacted on each synchronization to verify the license and potentially count it as an active site. It only counts as an active site if it uses a non-local domain name, meaning domain names reserved under https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606. Domains such as .local, .test, and .localhost are not counted as active sites. Staging or development sites containing 'staging' or 'dev' are not counted either. Any other sites are 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:

A user has a production site called mywebsite.com, a staging site on staging.mywebsite.com, and a local development site on mywebsite.local.

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

Example 2 - The basic case, but weirder:

A user has a production site called mywebsite.com, a staging site on staging.mywebsite.com, and an online development site on mywebsite.mycompany.com.

This example requires 2 active site licenses, as the production site and development environment are both online and the development site is not covered by the staging-site exception.

Example 3 - Maintaining multiple sites

A user maintains 20 sites for customers, which they regularly update and develop. They also have 20 local development sites, each with a URL like <customer-name>.local, matching the 20 sites they maintain. They do not update all of them every month. On average, they work on and update 7 to 10 sites in a month.

This example requires a minimum of 10 active site licenses to make sure the user is covered during busy months. They do not need licenses for every site they manage, only for the sites used in a synchronization during the last 30 days, even if the license key is installed on all 40 sites (20 production sites and 20 local sites).

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

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