◭For agencies and IT service providers

Three things that work together:

• Fast building. The website wizard produces a framework with real texts in minutes; the time goes into content instead of construction.
• The customer maintains it themselves. With Aurora Hive Live they change texts on the finished page — without access to the content management system and without having to ask you.
• Operations at the push of a button. Create the customer, issue the licence, create the instance — environment, database, containers and licence in one go.

What remains is your actual work: advice, content, design.

Create a prospect → start the trial → send the invitation → once they buy: “Move to subscription”.

Technically, behind this:

1. Create the customer — the company is enough; enter the monthly price straight away, as it controls the later invoice.
2. Issue the licence — modules, budgets and term are signed into the key.
3. Brand and logo, if the instance is to look like the customer.
4. Create the instance.
5. Set DNS, wait, then enable the domain.

If the trial expires without a purchase, the case appears under “Tidy up”.

Yes — brand and logo per customer in the customer file. All of it is optional; without it, the built-in look stays.

For the logo: PNG, JPEG or WebP, at most 512 KB. SVG is deliberately not accepted, because it can contain executable parts.

Brand and logo are saved even if no instance exists yet — they are ready as soon as it does.

For the data on the customer’s website: the customer. They are the controller within the meaning of the GDPR.

For your work on their data: you are a processor — that requires a contract between you and the customer. And between the customer and the operator of the instance as well.

This is a chain, and it has to be complete. Aurora Hive Sales generates a draft of the data processing agreement (AVV) for you from the master data — have it checked before you present it to your first customer. It has the longest lead time.

In three steps, and the third is often forgotten:

1. Set up accounts — Aurora Hive Sites for the website, Aurora Hive Live for simple text changes (no admin account needed).
2. Hand over what belongs to them: domain, accounts, recipient addresses of the forms.
3. Explain what takes effect immediately. Changes via Aurora Hive Live go to the public page without an approval step — that should be said, not discovered.

And: the domain should be registered to the customer. Anything else leads to an unpleasant discussion sooner or later.

With Sites: a site is a complete website with its own address; one installation can run many side by side.

The most important habit: check at the top which site is selected. Everything — pages, media, forms, donations — belongs to one site, and an area that looks empty is almost always the wrong selection.

Where customers need separate systems, they get their own instances: their own database, their own users, their own licence. Two instances cannot see each other.

The Marketplace has ready-made template packages — complete websites with sample content as a starting point.

Two warnings that belong together: adopting a template cannot be undone, and after “Use this template” the browser asks which website it should go into. If in doubt, adopt it into a new website rather than one that already has content.

For recurring elements within a project, reusable symbols are the better tool: change once, up to date everywhere.

The billing preview shows per customer what has accumulated in the period and provides a file for your invoicing program.

Aurora Hive Sales does not write invoices itself — that is intentional: invoicing has its own requirements for number sequences and retention and belongs in a program built for it.

For the preview to be useful, the monthly price must be stored for each customer. Without it, every invoice has to be filled in by hand.

With budgets per instance. Once the budget is reached, paid runs are refused instead of carried out — all other work continues untouched.

Set it before the handover, not afterwards. The three places where money is incurred are: research in the opportunity search, application runs and the paid parts of Visibility.

The licence always remains the outer upper limit.

Four things someone has to take on:

• Updating — first backs up the database, fetches the current version, rebuilds and runs the migrations. The instance is briefly unavailable during this, so not during main working hours.
• Keeping an eye on backups — the age of the last backup is shown in the system status.
• Disk space — usually it is stored mail attachments.
• Reachability from outside. The system status checks from inside; in principle it says nothing about reachability.

For the last point there is “Check the instance” in the customer file — the view from outside.

Step by step, and with some lead time:

1. Back up the data they want to take with them — texts, media, form responses, contacts.
2. Hand over the domain, if it is held by you.
3. Let the licence expire or revoke it. After that, the tiered model applies: first sending and AI pause; after 14 days the instance becomes read-only — sign-in, access requests and export always remain open.
4. Take down the instance — back up first, then remove. That deliberately stays manual work.

Do not take it down on the day of cancellation. There is no reason to hurry, and experience shows the follow-up question comes after two weeks.

That is exactly what it is built for. Two areas are particularly useful for an agency:

• Visibility: check a prospect’s website — it costs nothing and may run at any time — and hand over the findings as a PDF. The second check after the rebuild is the proof and the best argument for the next invoice.
• Opportunity search: tenders and projects with a visible price tag.

Plus the core: contacts, campaigns in stages, follow-ups.

Each person with their own account — shared accounts make every log worthless.

Two agreements save most of the trouble:

• Who publishes. As long as everything is a draft, someone could otherwise push a half-finished version out along with their own.
• Who looks after which site. Having the wrong site selected at the top is the most common mix-up of all.

For customers who only change texts, Aurora Hive Live is the right access — with translator mode if the structure is to stay protected.

So that you know before you promise it to a customer:

• No shop. Donations yes, sales no.
• No free design outside the blocks. What the blocks cannot do is not possible — and embedding third-party content that loads from other servers creates exactly the problems described in the Legal section.
• No synchronisation of contacts and form responses between Aurora Hive Sales and Sites. The two programs share the website after the handover, but not the address book and the form responses.
• No approval step in Aurora Hive Live. Whoever has it publishes immediately.

All of this is a deliberate decision, not unfinished work.

A division that works well:

• You: content, design, training the customer, everything to do with their business.
• Vendor: errors in the program, running the instance, questions about licence and billing.

The practical way for your customer is the same as for you: “Report a problem” in the program, because the report brings the technical details with it. Agree whether the customer reports directly or through you, and tell them.