Parallels Plesk Panel - 11.0 Reseller's Guide

Parallels® Panel

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Contents

Preface 6

Typographical Conventions ........................................................................................................... 6

Feedback ....................................................................................................................................... 7

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel 8

Acquainting Yourself with the Panel Interface ............................................................................. 10

Becoming Familiar with Business Manager ................................................................................ 12

Managing Your Profile ................................................................................................................. 15

Viewing Your Subscription Properties ......................................................................................... 16

Viewing Resources ........................................................................................................... 17

Viewing Permissions ......................................................................................................... 19

Viewing IP Addresses ....................................................................................................... 20

Changing Branding and Interface Settings 22

Setting Up Your Hosting Offers 25

Understanding Service Plans and Subscriptions ........................................................................ 27

Properties of Hosting Plans, Add-ons and Subscriptions ................................................. 29

Syncing Subscriptions and Plans ...................................................................................... 50

Starting Business with Business Manager .................................................................................. 51

Managing Security Settings .............................................................................................. 53

Configuring Payment Methods .......................................................................................... 56

Configuring Taxation ......................................................................................................... 67

Managing Online Stores .................................................................................................... 71

Setting Up Invoicing .......................................................................................................... 74

Configuring Schet-Facturas .............................................................................................. 83

Account Creation and Suspension Policies ...................................................................... 84

Changing Company Details .............................................................................................. 86

Applying Your Branding .................................................................................................... 87

Plans and Add-ons .......................................................................................................... 112

Achieving EU Business Compliance ............................................................................... 120

Starting Business Without Business Manager .......................................................................... 120

Offering Domain Names and SSL Certificates 123

Domain Name Registration ....................................................................................................... 124

Setting Up Accounts with Registrars ............................................................................... 125

Managing TLDs ............................................................................................................... 126

SSL Certificate Selling ............................................................................................................... 128

Configuring SSL Certificate Providers ............................................................................ 129

Offering Hosting Plans with SSL Certificates .................................................................. 129

Maintaining and Growing Your Business 131

Promoting Your Plans ............................................................................................................... 132

Coupons and Discounts .................................................................................................. 133

Preface 4

Affiliate Programs ............................................................................................................ 134

Administering Customers .......................................................................................................... 135

Adding New Customers .................................................................................................. 136

Managing Existing Customers ........................................................................................ 136

Managing Customer Accounts in Panel .......................................................................... 149

Managing Subscriptions ............................................................................................................ 149

Adding New Subscriptions to Customer Accounts.......................................................... 151

Viewing Subscriptions Details ......................................................................................... 151

Changing Subscription Status ......................................................................................... 151

Activating or Suspending Subscriptions .......................................................................... 153

Canceling Hosting Subscriptions .................................................................................... 153

Running Subscription Tasks ........................................................................................... 154

Editing Subscriptions ....................................................................................................... 155

Upgrading and Downgrading Subscriptions .................................................................... 155

Adding an Add-on to a Subscription ............................................................................... 156

Viewing Add-ons with Their Properties ........................................................................... 157

Viewing Subscription Properties ..................................................................................... 157

Transferring a Subscription ............................................................................................. 157

Managing Subscriptions in Panel .................................................................................... 158

Performing Manual Payments ................................................................................................... 159

Using a Credit Card to Pay an Invoice ............................................................................ 160

Capturing Authentication-only Payments ........................................................................ 160

Capturing Uncaptured Payments .................................................................................... 161

Issuing Refunds .............................................................................................................. 161

Generating and Running Payment Queue ...................................................................... 162

Managing Invoices and Payments ............................................................................................ 163

Generating Invoices Manually ......................................................................................... 164

Viewing Invoices ............................................................................................................. 164

Editing Invoices ............................................................................................................... 165

Taking Credit Card Payments ......................................................................................... 165

Applying Payments Manually .......................................................................................... 166

Paying by Credits ............................................................................................................ 167

Voiding Invoices .............................................................................................................. 167

Printing Invoices .............................................................................................................. 168

Manually Paying an Invoice Using Saved Credit Card Information ................................ 168

Viewing Transactions List ............................................................................................... 169

Re-sending Invoices ........................................................................................................ 169

Viewing and Downloading Schet-Facturas ..................................................................... 169

Limiting Discounts and Exempting Subscriptions from Suspension ......................................... 169

Managing Bank Transfers ......................................................................................................... 170

How Bank Transfer Processing Works ........................................................................... 171

Supported Operations ..................................................................................................... 173

Configuring Automatic Processing .................................................................................. 175

Viewing and Running Scheduled Tasks .................................................................................... 175

Viewing Accounting Information ................................................................................................ 176

Generating Accounting Reports ...................................................................................... 176

Generating Daily Journals ............................................................................................... 177

Viewing General Journal ................................................................................................. 178

Generating General Ledgers........................................................................................... 178

Viewing Statistics ....................................................................................................................... 179

Automating Report Generation and Delivery by E-mail .................................................. 180

Monitoring Connections to the Control Panel and FTP Services.................................... 181

Presetting Content of Customer Websites ................................................................................ 183

Backing Up and Restoring Data 184

Configuring the Control Panel for Using FTP Repository .......................................................... 185

Backing Up Your Account with Your Sites ................................................................................ 185

Scheduling Backups .................................................................................................................. 186

Preface 5

Restoring Data From Backup Archives ..................................................................................... 187

Downloading Backup Files from Server .................................................................................... 188

Uploading Backup Files to Server ............................................................................................. 188

Removing Backup Files from Server ......................................................................................... 188

Managing Web Hosting 189

Quick Start with Parallels Panel ................................................................................................ 191

Set Up Your First Website ............................................................................................... 192

Set Up Mail Accounts ...................................................................................................... 197

View Site Visit Statistics .................................................................................................. 215

Customer Account Administration ............................................................................................. 215

Changing Your Password and Contact Information ........................................................ 219

Viewing Subscription Summary ...................................................................................... 220

Managing Account Balance and Invoices ....................................................................... 227

Ordering More Resources ............................................................................................... 230

Viewing Statistics ............................................................................................................ 232

(Advanced) Managing Auxiliary User Accounts .............................................................. 234

Websites and Domains ............................................................................................................. 241

Domains and DNS .......................................................................................................... 242

Changing Hosting Settings .............................................................................................. 259

Suspending and Activating Websites .............................................................................. 267

Managing Website Content ............................................................................................. 269

(Advanced) Restricting Access to Content ..................................................................... 276

Previewing Websites ....................................................................................................... 278

Using Website Applications ............................................................................................. 279

(Advanced) Securing Your Websites .............................................................................. 286

(Advanced) Extended Website Management ................................................................. 291

Building Websites with Web Presence Builder ......................................................................... 325

Getting Familiar With Web Presence Builder .................................................................. 327

Creating a Website .......................................................................................................... 329

Importing Sites from SiteBuilder 4.5................................................................................ 330

Editing Websites ............................................................................................................. 331

Saving and Loading Copies of a Website ....................................................................... 361

Publishing a Website to the Internet ............................................................................... 363

Publishing a Website Copy to Facebook ........................................................................ 364

Viewing Site Visits Statistics, Comments, and New Orders on the Dashboard .............. 366

Deleting Websites ........................................................................................................... 368

FTP Access to Your Websites ................................................................................................... 368

Changing FTP Access Credentials ................................................................................. 368

Adding FTP Accounts ..................................................................................................... 369

Setting Up Anonymous FTP Access ............................................................................... 371

Mail ............................................................................................................................................ 372

Adding Mail Accounts ...................................................................................................... 373

Configuring Mail .............................................................................................................. 374

Using Mailing Lists .......................................................................................................... 382

Scheduling Tasks ...................................................................................................................... 383

Scheduling Tasks (Linux) ................................................................................................ 384

Scheduling Tasks (Windows) .......................................................................................... 387

Using Databases ....................................................................................................................... 389

Managing Databases ...................................................................................................... 389

Accessing External Databases (Windows) ..................................................................... 393

Backing Up and Recovering Websites ...................................................................................... 394

Backing Up Data ............................................................................................................. 395

Managing Backup Files ................................................................................................... 401

Restoring Data ................................................................................................................ 403

6 Preface

In this section:

Typographical Conventions ............................................................................... 6

Feedback .......................................................................................................... 7

Formatting convention

Type of Information

Example

Special Bold

Items you must select,
such as menu options,
command buttons, or
items in a list.

Go to the System tab.

Titles of chapters,
sections, and subsections.

Read the Basic Administration
chapter.

Italics

Used to emphasize the
importance of a point, to
introduce a term or to
designate a command line
placeholder, which is to be
replaced with a real name
or value.

The system supports the so
called wildcard character search.

Monospace

The names of commands,
files, and directories.

The license file is located in the

http://docs/common/licen
ses directory.

Preface

Typographical Conventions

Before you start using this guide, it is important to understand the documentation
conventions used in it.

The following kinds of formatting in the text identify special information.

Preface 7

Formatting convention

Type of Information

Example

Preformatted

On-screen computer
output in your command­line sessions; source code
in XML, C++, or other
programming languages.

# ls –al /files

total 14470

Preformatted Bold

What you type, contrasted
with on-screen computer
output.

# cd /root/rpms/php

CAPITALS

Names of keys on the
keyboard.

SHIFT, CTRL, ALT

KEY+KEY

Key combinations for
which the user must press
and hold down one key
and then press another.

CTRL+P, ALT+F4

Feedback

If you have found an error in this guide, or if you have suggestions or ideas on how to
improve this guide, please send your feedback using the online form at

http://www.parallels.com/en/support/usersdoc/. Please include in your report the guide's title,

chapter and section titles, and the fragment of text in which you have found an error.

Parallels Plesk Panel offers an easy and convenient graphical user interface that

C H A P T E R 1

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel

enables you to start your hosting business quickly and maintain it effortlessly. With
Panel, you set up your hosting offers, manage customer accounts, and do other tasks
to run and grow your business. Your customers benefit from using Panel too since it
gives them a complete set of tools for creating and editing their websites. For serving
both resellers and customers, the Panel GUI is divided into two parts:

 Server Administration Panel.

In this panel, you set up and maintain your business. Here you create hosting plans
and customer accounts, manage subscriptions, and so on. For a comprehensive
overview of operations available to you in the Server Administration Panel, see the
section Acquainting with the Panel Interface (on page 10).

 Control Panel.

When someone subscribes to one of your hosting plans, Panel sets up an account
for the subscriber. Under this account, the customer can add domain names and
mailboxes, edit website content, and carry out other hosting management routines.
Customers perform these operations in a separate panel called the Control Panel.
To learn more about operating in the Control Panel, refer to the section Managing
Web Hosting (on page 189).

So, after logging in to Panel, customers see the Control Panel while resellers see the
Server Administration Panel. This is for convenience, to separate the administration of
customer accounts from administration of websites and hosting services.

However, you will need to go to the Control Panel in the following cases:

 To assist customers with performing their tasks. In this case, you log in to the

Control Panel on a customer's behalf.

 To create and manage your own websites. In this case, you create your own

subscription and log in to the Control Panel using your account.

The links that let you log in to the Control Panel using your own and your customers'
accounts are located in the list of subscriptions (Server Administration Panel > Hosting
Services group of the navigation pane > Subscriptions.)

Your Panel Account and Subscriptions

When you subscribe to a reseller plan, you get a reseller account in Panel. This
account stores your profile information and is linked to your subscription - the package
of hosting resources that you lease for reselling and use for your own needs.

Your account has a unique username and a password that you use to log in to Panel.
You can change these at any time. The section Managing Your Profile (on page 15)
explains how to do it.

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel 9

To allow you to easily monitor the current state of your resources and services (for

In this chapter:

Acquainting Yourself with the Panel Interface .................................................... 10

Becoming Familiar with Business Manager ....................................................... 12

Managing Your Profile ....................................................................................... 15

Viewing Your Subscription Properties................................................................ 16

example, disk space currently consumed by your account and your customers), Panel
automatically calculates the resource usage and displays it to you on the appropriate
pages. To learn how to track the usage of your hosting resources and services, refer to
the section Viewing Your Subscription Properties (on page 16).

Parallels Customer and Business Manager

In a hosting business, you have to deal with two money flows: payments to your
hosting provider for resources that you lease, and payments from your customers.
These flows are difficult to handle if you have a lot of customers who use different
payment methods and adhere to different tax codes and regulations. To automate the
financial aspect, Parallels offers a turnkey solution – Parallels Customer and Business
Manager. This component comes in a bundle with the Parallels Plesk Panel package
and provides tools for carrying out the following operations:

 Periodical issuing of invoices for your customers.
 Selling hosting-related resources such as domain names and SSL certificates.
 Calculating and applying appropriate taxes.
 Updating and storing accounting information.
 Other business operations.

If your service provider uses Business Manager, then additional tools are available in
your Server Administration Panel. Learn more about Business Manager tools and the
workflow used in Business Manager in the Becoming Familiar with Business Manager (on
page 12) section.

If your service provider uses alternative billing solutions, refer to the documentation for
the respective software.

If you do not have integrated tools for managing the financial aspects of your business,
consult the section Starting Business Without Business Manager (on page 120) to learn how to
manually perform hosting operations that billing systems normally perform in Panel.

10 Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel

Acquainting Yourself with the Panel Interface

When you log in to Parallels Plesk Panel, you see the Home page with a summary on
allocated and used resources.

The top banner area provides the following links:

 A link with your name. Click this if you need to update your contact information. Find out

more about updating contact information in the section Managing Your Profile (on page 15).

 Log out. This is where you close your session when you have finished working with the

Panel.

 Help. This provides context-sensitive help with a search function.

The navigation pane on the left provides access to the following sets of functions:

 Home. This is where you start working with the Panel. On this page, you can see the

following elements.

 Overview. This widget contains information about your hosting package and provides

links to the detailed information about available hosting resources and your
permissions. The section Viewing Your Subscription Properties (on page 16) provides
information that helps you understand the Panel resources and learn how to view the
set of resources that you can use or sell.

 My Subscriptions. This is where you see a list of your own websites hosted on the

Panel server.

 Customers. This is where you perform operations on customer accounts. Particularly, you

can accomplish the following tasks from this page:

 Create, modify, suspend, unsuspend, and remove user accounts.

 View traffic usage reports.

 Domains. This is where you view information about hosted websites and their domain

names, and go to the Control Panel for managing them.

 Subscriptions. This is where you manage customer subscriptions to your services.

Subscription is a way a customer obtains services and resources provided by a service
plan.

 Service Plans. This is where you manage your service plans. Service plan is a set of

resources and services provided to hosting service customers by means of subscriptions.
There are also service plan add-ons that extend the amount of resources and services
provided with a subscription.

 Tools & Utilities. This is where you configure and manage system services, and view

resource usage statistics.

 Profile. This is where you fill in your contact information. Learn more about the contact

information and other profile settings in the section Managing Your Profile (on page 15).

 Change Password. This is where you change your password for logging in to the Server

Administration Panel.

 Interface Preferences. This is where you set interface language and skin. Learn more about

changing Panel appearance in the section Changing Interface Settings.

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel 11

If your provider uses Parallels Customer and Business Manager for billing their customers,
there are more links in the left navigation pane. You can find a list of Business Manager
functions available from Panel's navigation pane in the section Becoming Familiar with Business
Manager (on page 12).

To see information about a tool or an item on the page, place the mouse pointer over an item
without clicking it, and a small tooltip box appears with supplementary information regarding
that item.

The main working area on the right provides access to the tools available for the section
currently selected in the navigation pane. Additional operations are accessible from the More
Actions menus.

To navigate through Parallels Plesk Panel, you can use a path bar: a chain of links that
appears in the right part of the screen, below the banner area.

To return to a previous screen, use the shortcuts in the path bar, or the Up Level icon in the
upper-right corner of the screen.

To sort a list by a certain parameter in ascending or descending order, click on the
parameter's title in the column heading. The order of sorting will be indicated by a small
triangle displayed next to the parameter's title.

12 Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel

Becoming Familiar with Business Manager

Name

Description

Help link

Business
Operations menu

Contains links for managing customer
accounts and service subscriptions.

Customers

Add, suspend, and remove customer
accounts, change customers' billing
and contact information. Prepare
invoices and collect payments.

Administering Customers
(on page 135)

Business Manager simplifies the process of signing up, provisioning, and billing new
customers according to the following scheme:

1. In Business Manager, you set up service plans and add-ons corresponding to your
service offerings and create online stores where you sell these plans.

2. A user visiting your site selects one of your hosting plans and subscribes to the services.

3. Business Manager processes the order. After the payment is received, it sets up a user

account and subscription in Parallels Plesk Panel, and notifies the new customer by e­mail.

4. The customer logs in to Panel and starts using the web hosting, e-mail, and other
services provided by subscription.

5. Several days before the end of the billing period, Business Manager sends an invoice to
the customer stating the account balance and due payment date. On the due date,
Business Manager charges the due amount on the customer's card or bank account, or
uses another payment collection scheme that you select.

In addition to automated provisioning and billing, Business Manager offers the following
advantages:

 Support for integration with payment systems, domain name registrars, and certification

authorities issuing SSL certificates.

 Customizable online store.
 Compliance with requirements for stores operating in the European Union countries.

To learn what operations are available to you when Business Manager is integrated with your
Panel, see the table below.

Business Manager Navigation Pane

If your Panel is connected to Business Manager, the Panel's navigation pane contains a set
of links leading to Business Manager pages. Each of these links opens the corresponding
page of Business Manager in the same window. To switch back to Panel, click the Back to
Parallels Panel button at the top of Business Manager's navigation pane.

When you are in Business Manager, you see the navigation pane that contains the same
links plus the controls for managing you own hosting accounts in the My Account group. Find
more information about these controls in the section Managing Your Account.

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel 13

Subscriptions

View and change properties of
service subscriptions. Move
subscriptions to other service plans
by upgrading and downgrading them.

Managing Subscriptions
(on page 149)

Invoices

View invoices for customer accounts.

Managing Invoices and
Payments (on page 163)

To-do Items

The purpose of the to-do items is to
act as an automated reminder tool.
Each task that you create will be
listed until the action item is
completed. For example, a To-Do
task can be anything from reminding
yourself to run by the accountant's
office on Thursday to reminding you
to create a website on a control panel
because the control panel you are
using does not support automation of
that action. Tasks can be assigned to
any users in the system.

Business
Monitoring menu

Contains links for viewing accounting
reports and working with invoices and
payments.

Accounting

View accounting reports.

Generating Accounting
Reports (on page 176)

Payments

Monitor and complete payment
operations.

Viewing Transactions List
(on page 169)

Events

View and manage system tasks
scheduled for execution.

Viewing and Running
Scheduled Tasks (on page

175)

Reports

View reports on orders, subscriptions,
payments, transactions, and invoices.

E-mails

View a list of automatically sent e­mails and resend them if needed.

Setting Up Automatic E­mails (on page 89)

Business Setup

menu

Contains links for setting up Business
Manager for serving your customers.

Plans

Set up and manage service plans for
provisioning services to your
customers.

Plans and Add-ons (on
page 112)

Online Stores

Create and manage online stores
where customers can subscribe to
your plans.

Managing Online Stores
(on page 71)

Marketing Tools

Set up discounts, coupons and
affiliate programs to promote your
plans.

Promoting Your Plans (on
page 133)

14 Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel

All Settings

Set up all aspects of Business
Manager and prepare it for serving
customers.

Starting Business with
Business Manager (on
page 51)

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel 15

Managing Your Profile

Your account in Panel stores your access credentials and contact information such as e-mail,
address, and phone number. Depending on how you subscribed to a Panel reseller plan, you
can choose your username and password yourself or receive them from your hosting
provider. To change your account password, click the Change Password link in the navigation
pane. Your username can only be changed by your provider. If you forget your password and
cannot log in to Panel, click the Forgot Your Password? link on the login page. Then enter your
username and the e-mail specified in your contact information into the corresponding fields.
When you fill in this information, Panel will send your password to the specified e-mail
address.

If the contact details in your profile require updating, or you want to add or remove some of
them, click the Profile link in the navigation pane or the link with your name at the top of the
page and Panel will take you to a page where you can manage the details.

Managing Your Account in Business Manager

If you use Business Manager, your account contains more details. It includes information
about invoices issued to you by your provider, billing accounts that you use to pay these
invoices, and so on. The controls for viewing and managing details of your Business
Manager account are located in the My Account group of the left navigation pane. The
elements of this group allow you to do the following:

 My Subscriptions. View a list of your reseller subscriptions and their properties, and

request an upgrade or downgrade of a subscription.

 My Invoices. View a list of invoices issued to you by your provider.
 My To-do Items. View items that may require your attention.
 My Billing Accounts. View and manage billing accounts - credit cards, bank accounts, and

so on - that you use to pay for the hosting resources you purchase from your provider.

 Go to Store. Open your provider's online store to subscribe to other reseller plans.

16 Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel

Viewing Your Subscription Properties

In this section:

Viewing Resources ............................................................................................ 17

Viewing Permissions ......................................................................................... 19

Viewing IP Addresses ....................................................................................... 20

The number of hosting resources and services available to you for reselling or to use for your
own needs is defined by your reseller subscription. A subscription can limit the use of a
resource to a certain value, for example, allow you to consume 75 GB of disk space.
Alternatively, it can allow a resource to be used without limits. In addition, the subscription
defines what services you can use and what server management actions you can perform:
manage DNS zones, access application catalogs, and so on.

To view the information about your subscription, click the My resources and permissions overview
link on the Home page.

The subsections of this section tell you more about reseller subscription properties:

 Panel resources sold in reseller subscriptions: Section Viewing Resources (on page 17).
 Permissions and services: Section Viewing Permissions (on page 19).
 IP Addresses: Section Viewing IP Addresses (on page 20).

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel 17

Viewing Resources

This section lists Panel resources included in reseller subscriptions. To view the resources
allotted for your account, go to Home > My resources and permissions overview.

Overselling policy

Defines if you can sell more resources than allocated to you with the plan. If overselling is
allowed, you are governed by actual resource usage instead of initial resource allocation. If
overselling is prohibited, you can create only the number of service subscriptions limited to
the total amount of disk space or traffic provided to you with your plan.

Overselling is a marketing strategy based on the following scheme: a reseller, who was
allotted, for example, ten gigabytes of disk space, allocates five gigabytes of disk space for
each of their customers, assuming that none of them will actually use all of their allocated
disk space.

Domains

The total number of subscriptions that you can create for your customers and for your own
purposes.

Subdomains

The total number of subdomains that can be hosted within the subscription.

Domain aliases

The total number of additional alternative domain names that can be used for websites within
the reseller subscription.

Disk space

The total amount of disk space that can be used by your own websites and sites of your
customers. It includes disk space occupied by all files related to your reseller subscription:
contents 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.

Additional FTP accounts

The maximum number of FTP accounts used to access the files and folders hosted with a
subscription.

Databases (Unix hosting)

The total number of databases that can be created on the Panel database servers and used
by the subscription's websites.

18 Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel

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 database servers registered in the Panel and used by websites hosted
with the subscription.

MySQL databases quota and Microsoft SQL databases quota (Windows hosting)

The maximum total amount of disk space (in megabytes) that the MySQL and Microsoft SQL
Server databases respectively can occupy.

Mailboxes

The total number of mailboxes that can be hosted within the subscription.

Mailbox size

The maximum amount of disk space that can be allocated to a mailbox for storing e-mail
messages and auto-reply attachment files. You will not be able to specify the bigger mailbox
size in your service plans.

Mailing lists

The total number of mailing lists that can be hosted with the subscription.

Customers

The maximum number of customer accounts that you can create and serve.

Web users

The total number of personal web pages that can be hosted on the websites within
subscription. 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.

Java applications

The total number of Java applications or applets that can be hosted on websites within the
subscription

Sites published with Web Presence Builder

The total number of websites that can be created, published, and then edited with Web
Presence Builder.

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.

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel 19

FrontPage accounts (Windows hosting)

The maximum number of Microsoft FrontPage accounts that can be used within the
subscription.

Shared SSL links (Windows hosting)

The total number of shared SSL links that can be used within the subscription.

IIS application pools (Windows hosting)

The total number of dedicated IIS application pools that can be allocated for websites
created within the reseller subscription.

ODBC connections (Windows hosting)

The total number of ODBC connections that can be used within the subscription.

ColdFusion DSN connections (Windows hosting)

The total number of ColdFusion DSN connections that can be used within the subscription.

Viewing Permissions

Your permissions either denote the operations available to you as a reseller in the Panel, or
define which services and privileges can be enabled in the subscriptions of your customers.
If a particular permission in your reseller subscription is set to Off, then a service subscription
will not provide the corresponding service or a privilege. A disabled permission also means
that you are prohibited to perform the designated action in the Control Panel. For example, if
your subscription does not provide a privilege to use Scheduler (Scheduler management is Off),
then none of your subscribers will be able to use it, and neither will you.

Reseller-specific privileges (the ones that do not affect service subscriptions you create for
your customers) are as follows:

 Subscription creation in Server Administration Panel and domain creation in Control Panel. Shows

whether you can create hosting service subscriptions, add domains, create websites, and
set up web forwardings.

 Ability to use API RPC. Shows whether you can remotely manage Web sites through

custom applications. The remote API is an interface that can be used for developing
custom applications integrated with Web sites, which could be used, for instance, for
automating setup of hosting accounts and provisioning of services for customers
purchasing hosting services from your site. To learn more, refer to the Parallels Plesk Panel

11.0: API RPC Protocol Reference.

 Access to the Panel. Shows that you can use the Panel graphical user interface.
 Customer account creation. Lets you create user accounts and subscriptions for your

customers in the Panel.

 Allow overselling. Lets you set up oversell policy, meaning that you yourself can define if

overselling is allowed to you or not.

20 Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel

Overselling allows you to sell more resources than is allocated with a plan. If overselling
is allowed, a reseller is governed by actual resource usage instead of initial resource
allocation. Overselling is a marketing strategy based on the following scheme: a reseller,
who was allotted, for example, ten gigabytes of disk space, allocates five gigabytes of
disk space for each of their customers, assuming that none of them will actually use all of
their allocated disk space.

Meanings of the other permissions are the same as in the service subscriptions (on page

35).

To view the full list of your subscription permissions, go to Home > My resources and

permissions overview > Permissions tab.

Viewing IP Addresses

To view the IP addresses included in your hosting package, go to Tools & Utilities > IP
Addresses. Your IP addresses are listed and the following supplementary information is given:

 An icon in the S (Status) column shows if your IP address is properly configured on

the network interface. If your IP address was removed from the network interface by your
provider, an icon will show .

 An icon in the T (Type) column shows if you were allotted a dedicated IP address, and

if the address is shared among other customers of your service provider. A dedicated

IP address is not used by other users, so you can use it to host either:

 A single e-commerce website secured with Secure Sockets Layer encryption.
or

 A number of websites that do not need Secure Sockets Layer encryption.

Note: Shared IP addresses should be used for hosting only non e-commerce websites.

 The Certificate column shows which SSL certificate (for what domain name) is tied to an

IP address.

 The FTP over SSL column (on Windows-based servers) shows whether it is possible to use

secure FTP connection (FTP over SSL) on one of the domains hosted on this IP address.

 The Hosting column shows a number of websites hosted on an IP address. To view the

domain names of these websites, click the number in the Hosting column.

You can perform the following operations on IP addresses:

 Change IP allocation type. You can mark your IP addresses as shared or dedicated

before you use them for hosting websites. This allows the Panel to distinguish between
them and to not let you use a dedicated IP address for several customers at once. A
dedicated IP address can be used in subscriptions of a single customer, while a shared
IP address can be shared among different customers' subscriptions. Note that SSL
protection with authentic digital certificates and Anonymous FTP services are available
only to a dedicated hosting account on a dedicated IP address. Shared hosting accounts
can also have SSL protection, but visitors of such protected sites will receive error
messages in their browsers.

 Assign an SSL certificate to an IP address. This will assign the selected SSL certificate to

all websites hosted on that IP address.

Becoming Familiar with Parallels Panel 21

 Select a default website. Because users can refer to a web resource on your server by

typing an IP address and there can be several websites hosted on that address, the
Panel needs to know which of the sites to show in such cases. The Panel automatically
assigns the first website created on an IP address as the default website; however, you
can select any other website and make it default.

 To change an IP address allocation type (shared, dedicated), assign another

SSL certificate to an IP address, or select the default website:

1. Go to Tools & Utilities > IP Addresses, and click the IP address you need.

2. Make the required changes, and click OK.

This chapter describes how to select Panel's interface language, rebrand Panel, and

C H A P T E R 2

Changing Branding and Interface Settings

add links to external sites or web applications.

Change Interface Language

In addition to English, Panel can be viewed in the following languages:

 Chinese (traditional and simplified)
 Dutch
 French
 German
 Italian
 Japanese
 Polish
 Portuguese
 Russian
 Spanish

If you want to switch Panel to any of these languages, go to My Profile > Interface
Preferences.

When you switch to a language different from English, some button captions may
become too long and corrupt the Panel layout. To prevent this, you can specify a limit
on button caption length. In this case, the system will automatically shorten button
captions longer than this limit and end them with an ellipsis (...).To define the caption
length limit, enter its value in the Button label length field in My Profile > Interface
Preferences. To disable automatic shortening, clear this field.

Add Branded Content

To disguise the fact that you are reselling another company's hosting resources, you
can add your own branded content to Panel. Specifically, this content may be the
following:

 The logo in the top left corner. Upload your own logo and your customers will see this

instead of the original Panel logo in the Control Panel. Use a GIF, JPEG, or PNG
file for your logo, preferably not larger than 100 kilobytes to minimize the download
time. To ensure that your logo will fit into the top area, we recommend that you use
an image 50 pixels in height.

 The URL to which the logo points. Make your logo a clickable link that points to your

company's website to let your customers easily open the website any time they are
in the Control Panel.

Changing Branding and Interface Settings 23

 The pages title. Let your customers see your company name or other relevant text in

their browsers' title bars when they work in the Control Panel.

To change any of these settings, go to Tools & Utilities > Panel Branding.

Add Links to Websites and Applications

If you want to have quick access from Panel to certain websites and applications, or
wish to provide your customers with such access, create custom buttons. The buttons
may lead to web resources, such as your corporate site, or to a web application that
can process online requests and accept additional information about the users clicking
the buttons. You can place these buttons on your Home page for yourself or in the
Control Panel for your customers.

You can place the buttons in the following locations of the Server Administration Panel
and the Control Panel, and decide who should be able to see them:

 On the Home page in the Server Administration Panel, visible only to you. This is

achieved by selecting the Reseller's Home page option in the button properties.

 On the Home tab in the Control Panel, visible to the hosting service customers and

their users who are allowed to log in to the Control Panel. This is achieved by
selecting the Customer's Home page option in the button properties.

 On the Websites & Domains tab in the Control Panel, visible to the hosting service

customers and their users who are allowed to log in to the Control Panel. This is
achieved by selecting the Websites & Domains page of Subscription option in the button
properties.

 On the Home page in the Server Administration Panel and Control Panel, visible to

you and your customers. This is achieved by selecting the Common access option in
the button properties.

You can specify what information about users should be passed:

 Subscription ID.
 Primary domain name associated with a subscription.
 FTP account username and password.
 Customer's account ID, name, e-mail, and company name.

 To add a custom hyperlink button to the Server Administration Panel or

the Control Panel:

1. Go to Tools & Utilities > Custom Buttons (in the Panel Management group), and
click Create Custom Button.

2. Specify the following properties of the button:

 Type the text that will show on your button in the Button label box.

 Choose the location for your button.

 Specify the priority of the button. Your custom buttons will be arranged in the

Panel in accordance with the priority you define: the lower the number, the
higher the priority. Buttons are placed in the left-to-right order.

24 Changing Branding and Interface Settings

 To use an image for a button background, click Browse to browse for the desired

file. It is recommended that you use a 16x16 pixel GIF or JPEG image for a
button to be placed in the navigation pane, and a 32x32 pixels GIF or JPEG
image for a button placed in the main frame.

 Type the hyperlink to be attached to the button into the URL box.

 Using the checkboxes, specify whether you want the customer information and

other data to be transferred within the URL. These data can be used for
processing by external web applications.

 In the Tooltip text input field, type in the help tip that will be displayed when users

place the mouse pointer over the button.

 Select the Open URL in Parallels Panel checkbox if you want the destination URL to

be opened in the main frame of the Panel; otherwise, leave this checkbox
cleared to open the URL in a separate browser window or tab.

 If you want to make this button visible only to you, select the Show to me only

checkbox.

3. Click Finish to complete creation.

To remove a custom button from the Panel, go to Tools & Utilities > Custom Buttons (in
the Panel Management group), select the corresponding checkbox and click Remove.

When you start your hosting reselling business, you should define how you will offer

C H A P T E R 3

Setting Up Your Hosting Offers

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.

To learn more about service plans and subscriptions in Panel, refer to the section
Understanding Service Plans and Subscriptions (on page 27).

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. Specifically, you may
be provided with one of the following options:

 Parallels Parallels Customer and Business Manager.

The solution that provides the most complete automation of a hosting business on
Panel-managed servers is Parallels Customer and Business Manager. Business
Manager is completely integrated with Panel and automates a number of your
business routines. For example, a typical workflow with Business Manager looks as
follows: When a new customer subscribes to a plan in your online store, Business
Manager creates an invoice. After the customer pays the invoice, Business
Manager automatically creates a Panel account and subscription for the customer,
enabling the latter to create a website.

However, if you run your business with Business Manager, you still have to carry
out some administrative tasks manually, for example, editing customer accounts or
changing subscription properties.

To learn more about how to get Business Manager ready to serve your business
and how to perform certain tasks in Business Manager manually, refer to the
section Starting Business with Business Manager (on page 51).

26 Setting Up Your Hosting Offers

 Third-party automation solution.

In this chapter:

Understanding Service Plans and Subscriptions ................................................27

Starting Business with Business Manager .........................................................51

Starting Business Without Business Manager ....................................................120

Alternatively, your hosting provider can offer you a third-party hosting business
automation solution. In this case, learn how to automate certain routines in the
appropriate documentation.

 No automation solution.

Your hosting package may include Panel without any automation solution at all. In
this case, you will not be able to automate tasks that require interaction with Panel,
for example, creating customer accounts and subscriptions. The section Starting
Business Without Business Manager (on page 120) tells you how to get ready to start your
business in Panel without hosting automation solutions.

Setting Up Your Hosting Offers 27

Understanding Service Plans and Subscriptions

Service plans define what resources you offer to your customers. The properties of a service
plan in Panel define which server hosting resources are available to plan subscribers. 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 add­on 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.

28 Setting Up Your Hosting Offers

Syncing Service Plans and Subscriptions

In this section:

Properties of Hosting Plans, Add-ons and Subscriptions ................................... 29

Syncing Subscriptions and Plans ...................................................................... 50

When you change the properties of a service plan, Panel automatically applies the changes
to all subscriptions to this plan. If you want to prohibit automatic updating of a certain
subscription, you can lock this subscription. To learn how to configure the synchronizing (or
syncing) of your plans with subscriptions, see the section Syncing Subscriptions and Plans (on
page 50).

Setting Up Your Hosting Offers 29

Properties of Hosting Plans, Add-ons and Subscriptions

Properties of a hosting plan and subscription are grouped as follows:

 Resources

Includes validity period, policy on overusing resources, system resources like disk space
and traffic, and service resources like websites, subdomains, mailboxes, databases and
so on.

 Permissions

Includes provided services and privileges.

Note: Some permissions prevent settings of the following services from syncing (on page

50). See the details in the Permissions section (on page 35).

 Hosting Parameters

Includes parameters of the provided hosting service.

 Mail

Includes parameters of the provided mail service.

 DNS

Specifies if the DNS zones of the subscription's domains should be master or slave.

Note: In case the DNS zone management privilege is provided, this parameter is not synced,
and subscribers can set up this parameter on a per-domain basis.

 Performance

Includes parameters that affect performance of all services provided with the plan.

 Logs & Statistics

Includes settings of how statistics and logs of the plan's subscriptions should be stored.

Note: Hosting, Mail, DNS, Performance, Logs & Statistics parameters are fully visible and editable
in the Administrative Panel only for service plans. For subscriptions, these parameters are
available only in the Control Panel. To view or modify the parameters of a particular
subscription, go to Subscriptions and click Control Panel to the right of the subscription name.
Also note that the availability of these parameters to a subscriber depends on the
permissions.

 Applications

Lets you select which applications available to you should be provisioned to your
customers.

30 Setting Up Your Hosting Offers

In this section:

Visibility of Hosting Features in the Control Panel ............................................. 31

Resources ......................................................................................................... 31

Permissions ....................................................................................................... 35

Hosting Parameters ........................................................................................... 39

Mail ................................................................................................................... 47

DNS .................................................................................................................. 48

Performance ...................................................................................................... 48

Logs & Statistics ................................................................................................ 49

Applications ....................................................................................................... 49

Additional Services ............................................................................................ 49