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Overcome to Windows Azure free trial cancellation by adding a new plan

I decided to try Windows Azure more than 3 months ago, most likely because of it’s free 90-day offer. I can tell that I’m amazed on all the posibilies you have for free (Websites, Virtual machines, Mobile Services, etc.).

So then, I decided I wanted to continue with the service after my trial period ended by “acquiring” a Pay-As-You-Go plan (that as the name says, you pay only what you use only if you use it, so at the time of my purchase my total was $0.00).

Since I was swamped with many things at job, I didn’t payed much attention on the warning e-mails saying that my account was about to expire. As it might be expected, my account was cancelled 2 weeks ago. Last week I was trying to upgrade my account, so I signed up on the Pay-As-You-Go plan but after several tries and wating days, I still wasn’t able to use it to create new websites with it.

So this is the process that you need to follow in order to be able to use your new plan in your account:

  1. Acquire a new plan (Pay-As-You-Go, 6 or 12 month, etc.)
  2. Go to Preview Features page and select the feature that you want to enable for your new plan, in my case I wanted to be able to create websites again
  3. Click on “Try it now”
  4. Select the plan you want to associate (your new plan). In this case I’m showing an example with Media Services because I already joined to the Websites preview
After completing this, you will see a label on the screen saying that the feature is active
and you will be able to create websites (or any of the preview features that you selected) under your new plan
Sadly, my previous websites remain cancelled and it doesn’t seem to be possible to associate them with my new plan, or at least I couldn’t find a way to edit them on the manage portal.
So, if possible try to avoid your account cancellation, but if that already happened, this post might help you if your plan is not shown on some items on your account.

2 thoughts on “Overcome to Windows Azure free trial cancellation by adding a new plan

  1. Hi Jorge,

    I ran into this same problem, and to get my VM disk back, I opened a support ticket:

    Support -> Get Support -> Billing -> Problem Type: Subscription Transfer and Migrations, Category: Transfer data to different subscription.

    When they called, the support representative said that they were unable to transfer the data, but they could upgrade the free trial account to a pay-as-you-go plan for me, at which point I was able to recreate the virtual machine with my existing disk and (thankfully) get back to work.

    1. Hi Jacob, I think at the time I had this issue support tickets were not yet available for free for Pay-As-You-Go, but it’s good to know that you can solve your issue in an easier way 🙂

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