How licensing works — Docs

The one rule: your hosting never goes down because of us

Nimbopanel's licensing is built around a single promise: a problem reaching the license server must never break your customers' hosting. It is never "fail-closed".

How it works

When you buy a plan, you get a license key (NIMB-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX).
Your server checks in with the license server and receives a cryptographically signed status token.
Your install verifies the signature with a built-in public key and caches the last good token locally.

The private signing key stays on the license server; your install only ever needs the public key. Nobody can forge a license, and your server can confirm a real one entirely offline.

Offline tolerance

If the license server is unreachable, your install keeps trusting the last signed status: a 30-day validity window plus a 14-day grace period — roughly six weeks of runway. Through all of it, hosting keeps serving and every account keeps working.

Past those six weeks the install still runs, and existing accounts and websites are still never touched. What pauses are the paid entitlements — unlimited websites, addon domains, the reseller tier — until the server manages a check-in again. One successful check-in restores them immediately.

Only a confirmed signal from the license server that a license has expired or been suspended has any other effect, and even then it is gentle: it pauses the creation of new accounts. Existing accounts and websites are never touched.

Unlicensed installs

An install with no license configured is not crippled: every tool works, and nothing nags. It runs on the Free entitlements — one website, no addon domains, no reseller tier. Add a key at any time and the limits lift on the next check-in.

Managing your license

Portal → Licenses shows each key, its tier, its status, and the servers it is activated on, with when each was last seen.

Release frees a server's slot so you can activate a different machine. If the panel is still installed on the released server it drops to the Free limits on its next check-in — so release a server you are decommissioning, not one still serving customers.
Offline / air-gapped activation is for a server that cannot reach this site. On the server run nimbopanel license-fingerprint, paste the id into the form, and it mints a token; run nimbopanel license-import with that token on the server. The token lasts 30 days and can be regenerated whenever you need.

Paid tiers activate on the number of servers included in your plan.

The fingerprint, and what a reinstall does

A license is tied to a server by a fingerprint that is pinned when the panel is installed, in /etc/nimbopanel/instance-id. It deliberately survives a change of machine-id, so ordinary maintenance, a reboot or a hostname change do not disturb it.

Reinstalling the operating system creates a new fingerprint, and therefore a new activation. The old one lingers as a server that is no longer checking in. Use Release on the old row after the rebuild, or you will eventually run out of slots on a server you no longer own.

Moving a licensed install to different hardware keeps working for a 14-day grace window, which is announced in the panel and is there so a hardware move is not an emergency. After it, the install drops to the Free limits until the license is activated for the new machine.