As soon as an account expires, the core functions cannot be used any more and it displays a message asking to prolong the account.
People pay via credit card or with their paypal account (I use PayPal as the payment processor). This gets processed immediately and within a couple of minutes, the account is valid for another 6 or 12 months.
The other option is wire transfer (which is very common in many European countries unlike in the US). The advantage here is that nobody needs to share any personal information. I just receive the money on a bank account. So far, there was no need to process that money automatically. I just wrote a little script, which greps for the transaction ID and the amount of money and prolongs an account accordingly.
I do not have an automated recurring payment system. All payments are "one shot", like a prepaid service. I can imagine that this is something people really appreciate. They feel more in control of their money and manually entering the payment information once every 6 or 12 months isn't too much of a hazzle.
Furthermore, I ask for as few personal information as possible. I don't store credit card information on my site. Heck, I don't even store real names in my database (but they are shown in PayPal).
The other option is wire transfer (which is very common in many European countries unlike in the US). The advantage here is that nobody needs to share any personal information. I just receive the money on a bank account. So far, there was no need to process that money automatically. I just wrote a little script, which greps for the transaction ID and the amount of money and prolongs an account accordingly.
I do not have an automated recurring payment system. All payments are "one shot", like a prepaid service. I can imagine that this is something people really appreciate. They feel more in control of their money and manually entering the payment information once every 6 or 12 months isn't too much of a hazzle.
Furthermore, I ask for as few personal information as possible. I don't store credit card information on my site. Heck, I don't even store real names in my database (but they are shown in PayPal).