When you start your hosting reselling business, you should define how you will offer your hosting resources and services to customers. Parallels Plesk Panel lets you organize your business by means of service plans and subscriptions.
A service plan is a combination of hosting resources that you sell to your customers. For example, a plan can provide customers with the web hosting service, five gigabytes of disk space on the server, and ten gigabytes of data transfers each month.
There are also add-on plans that let you offer additional resources and services to subscribers, such as, for example, an additional gigabyte of disk space.
When customers want to host a website on a Panel-managed server, they subscribe to a plan that offers the resources they need. In other words, a subscription is a set of resources defined by a plan and available to a certain customer.
The section Properties of Hosting (Add-on) Plans and Subscriptions provides a complete list of Panel server resources and services that you can include in your hosting plans.
Allocation of Resources and Services
Service plans define potential services; the Panel does not check if a service or a resource that a service plan should provide is actually available, whether in the system in general or in your reseller subscription. For example, when creating a plan, you can choose to allow subscribers to connect to the server shell over SSH even if your subscription does not provide the Management of access to the server over SSH privilege. In such a case, the Panel will let you do this and will show no error or warning messages.
Subscriptions provide actual resources and services that are allocated during the creation of each subscription.
Relations Between Subscriptions and Service/Add-on Plans
Normally, a subscription is associated with a service plan, and this association is reflected in a list of subscriptions: each subscription name contains the service plan name in parentheses at the end. The amount of resources and services provided with a subscription can be extended by associating the subscription with add-on plans. A subscription can be associated with several add-ons, but each add-on can be added to the subscription only once.
It is also possible to have subscriptions that are not associated with any service plans or add-on plans. We call such subscriptions custom subscriptions, and their names are extended with "(Custom)" in the list of subscriptions. Having a custom subscription may be useful if you want to provide services on specific terms that differ from the usual offerings in your business model.
At any time, you can change the association between a subscription and plans in the following ways:
- Associate the subscription with another service plan.
- Add and remove add-on plans.
- Remove the subscription association with the service plan and add-ons.
2) Properties of Hosting Plans, Add-ons and Subscriptions
a) Resources
Resources (located at Service Plans > select a plan > Resources tab) define what system resources are provided with the subscription.
Overuse Policy
Defines what happens if the subscription's usage of disk space and traffic reaches limit values:
- Overuse is not allowed will suspend the subscription only if you select the checkbox Suspend subscription when its disk space or traffic usage goes beyond the limit. If you do not select it, websites will not be suspended; only a notice will be sent to the subscribers.
You can set up sending of notifications as soon as usage of disk space or traffic reaches a particular value (the Notify upon reaching options), in order to prevent subscriptions from suspension. The notifications will be sent according to the server notifications policy. - Overuse is allowed will let the subscription operate properly.
The option When limit on usage of a resource is reached, send e-mail according to the server notification settings triggers sending notifications according to the server notifications policy.
Disk space.
The total amount of disk space allocated to the subscription. It includes disk space occupied by all files related to the subscription: content of websites, databases, applications, mailboxes, log files, and backup files.
Traffic
The amount of data that can be transferred from the subscription's websites and FTP/Samba shares during a month.
Notify upon reaching
Available only if overuse is not allowed. This sets the soft quota for disk space or traffic usage in order to prevent subscriptions from suspension. When the quota is reached, the Panel sends notifications to users' e-mail addresses specified in Settings > Notifications: Resource usage limits exceeded by subscription.
Sites published with Presence Builder
The number of websites that can be published with Presence Builder.
Domains
The total number of domain names that the subscriber will be able to host within the subscription. This includes websites, web forwarding configurations that point to websites hosted on other servers, and domain names on which a website or web forwarding is not yet set up (domains with no hosting).
Mobile sites
The total number of websites that can be hosted with the UNITY Mobile online service, which optimizes sites for viewing on mobile devices. UNITY Mobile hosts the optimized site copies on their own servers.
How it works:
- A user creates a website with the domain name example.com and clicks the link Create Mobile Site in the Control Panel.
- The user is prompted to specify a domain name for access to the mobile site copy. The user specifies mobile.example.com.
- The Panel connects to the UNITY Mobile hosting servers, sets up an account with UNITY Mobile for the domain name mobile.example.com.
- The user's browser opens the UNITY Mobile website, where the user is automatically logged in to their account and prompted to import their website from the Panel-managed server.
- After the site is imported and optimized for mobile viewing, it becomes accessible by the address mobile.example.com. The Panel's DNS server keeps a CNAME record pointing to the site on a UNITY Mobile server.
The user can now perform the following operations on mobile site using links in the Control Panel:- Open site editor.
- Change mobile site name.
- Remove mobile site.
Subdomains
The total number of subdomains that the subscriber will be able to host within the subscription.
Domain aliases
The total number of additional alternative domain names that the subscriber will be able to use for their websites.
Mailboxes
The total number of mailboxes that the subscriber can host within the subscription.
Mailbox size
The amount of disk space that is allocated to each mailbox in a subscription for storing e-mail messages and auto-reply attachment files.
Total mailboxes quota (available only for Windows hosting)
The total amount of disk space in megabytes available for all mailboxes within the subscription.
Mailing lists
The total number of mailing lists that the subscriber can host within the subscription.
Additional FTP accounts
The maximum number of FTP accounts used to access the files and folders created within a subscription. This number does not include an account that is always created during the subscription creation.
Databases (Linux hosting)
The total number of databases that can be created on the Panel database servers and used by the subscription's websites.
MySQL databases and Microsoft SQL Server databases (Windows hosting)
The maximum number of MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server databases respectively that can be created on the Panel database servers and used by the subscription's websites.
MySQL databases quota and Microsoft SQL databases quota (Windows hosting)
The maximum amount of disk space (in megabytes) that the subscription's MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server databases can occupy respectively.
Validity period/Expiration Date
The term for a subscription.
In service plan properties, it is Validity period: it is used only when a subscription is created: the Panel derives the subscription expiration date from it.
In subscription properties, it is Expiration date: At this date, the subscription will be suspended, meaning that all sites within the subscription will be suspended, their Web, FTP and mail services will no longer be accessible to the Internet users, and the subscriber and their users will not be able to log in to the Control Panel.
Subscriptions are not renewed automatically, so to bring a subscription's services back to operation, you will need to manually activate the subscription.
Java applications ( According to Hosting Provider )
The total number of Java applications that can be hosted on the subscription's websites.
Web users
The total number of personal Web pages that the subscriber can host for other users under their websites. This service is mostly used in educational institutions that host non-commercial personal pages of their students and staff. These pages usually have addresses like http://example.com/~webuser.
FrontPage accounts (Windows hosting)
The maximum number of Microsoft FrontPage accounts that the subscriber can create within the subscription.
Shared SSL links (Windows hosting)
The total number of shared SSL links that the subscriber can use within the subscription.
ODBC connections (Windows hosting)
The total number of ODBC connections that the subscriber can use within the subscription.
ColdFusion DSN connections (Windows hosting)
The total number of ColdFusion DSN connections that the subscriber can use within the subscription.
