Any environment that you create in your Enscale account can now be transferred to another Enscale user. The environment owner is responsible for usage charges, and may control which users have collaborative access to it – if you want to change the person in your organisation with these responsibilities, this gives you a way forward.
This feature is also perfect for digital agencies and freelancers. It allows you to create, fully configure, deploy, and test an environment for your customer – then when you’re done you can transfer billing responsibility for this environment to your customer as part of the project handover process. It saves you time (you don’t have to redo that work on a new environment they create for themselves), and avoids many potential headaches.
You can only transfer the environment to an existing user with a paid account; you will receive a warning if the person you wish to transfer it to does not have an account, or their account is not in the correct status (e.g. a trial or expired account).
If you want to transfer to a user without an Enscale account, add them as a collaborator on your account first, and then simply ask them to upgrade to a paid account.
Meanwhile you can view the transfer status in Environment Settings > Change owner, and if you change your mind you may cancel the transfer request to immediately invalidate the approval link.
The environment is marked with a custom icon within your environment list, so you can see at a glance that it has a pending transfer request:
Usage charges for the environment for each subsequent hour are charged to the new owner. Historical charges remain on the previous owner’s account.
Any users sharing the environment are immediately removed (from this environment only) when the transfer completes. This is an important security feature to ensure that the new owner is explicitly aware of all users with access to the environment, and permission levels are explicitly set by the new owner to suit their own needs.
There is no requirement for the environment to be running. You may transfer an environment even if it is stopped.
All environment settings, alerts, scaling thresholds, files, configuration settings, IP addresses etc. are retained entirely untouched during the transfer process. There are no changes to the server(s) themselves, which remain online and fully operational throughout the transfer process.