Starting Your Business in Plesk

Organizing your offerings into service plans is only one of the many steps required to get your business ready to run. Before you can start serving customers, you should also think about how potential customers will find your offerings, how you will subscribe new customers and take payments, and other aspects of your business. To start your business more easily, you can use automation solutions that carry out different routines for you, for example, issue invoices and take payments from customers.

The automation tools included in your reseller package by your hosting provider define whether you will be able to automate certain business routines. If your hosting provider offers you a business automation solution, learn how to automate certain routines in the appropriate documentation. Otherwise, you should take care of various aspects of your business on your own before you start serving customers. However, in this case, you can automate some aspects, for example, financial ones, by means of the appropriate software as well.

To start your hosting business in Plesk, do the following:

• Rebrand Plesk and prepare hosting plans.
• Set up a website for your own company.

After you complete these operations, you can start subscribing customers to your services.

Rebranding Plesk and Preparing Hosting Plans

Before you can start serving your customers, you should do the following:

1. Adjust Plesk branding and appearance as described in the section Changing Branding and Interface Settings.
2. On the Service Plans page, add service plans and add-ons that you will offer to your customers.

Setting Up Your Company's Presence on the Web

To let your prospective customers become acquainted with your offerings and contact you, set up a website and email addresses for your company on the Plesk-managed server.

To set up your website, create your own hosting subscription by clicking Subscriptions > Create Subscription. This will enable you to log in to the Customer Panel and manage your web hosting just as your customers do: you can create web pages and mailboxes, install web applications, secure access to websites with SSL/TLS certificates, and so on. For detailed information about using your hosting resources for your own needs, see the chapter Website Management.

Subscribing Customers to Your Services

After you set up hosting plans in Plesk, you can start subscribing customers to your services. When a new customer subscribes to your services, create an account and a subscription for this customer in Customers > Add Customer. You will be prompted to enter the following information:

• The customer's contact information.
• A username and a password that the customer will use to log in to the Customer Panel.
• Subscription details:
  • A domain name that the customer owns and will use for their website hosted in Plesk.
  • An IP address used by the customer's website.
  • The customer's username and password that they will use to access their folders, for example, using FTP.
  • The service plan to which the customer subscribes.
  • (Optional) Add-ons that the customer wants to add to the subscription.

  If the plan selected by the customer does not completely meet their needs and you do not offer add-ons that could help, adjust the subscription settings by selecting the checkbox Proceed to customizing the subscription parameters after the customer account is created.

Once you create the account and the subscription, pass on the Plesk access credentials to the customer and they will be able to log in to Plesk and create their website.

Periodically, you will need to manually perform various operations on user accounts and subscriptions. For example, renew (prolong) subscriptions at the end of subscription periods, or suspend the accounts of customers who do not pay on time. To learn how to manage existing customer accounts and subscriptions in Plesk, refer to the sections Managing Customer Accounts and Managing Subscriptions.