When you start your hosting business, you should define how you will offer hosting resources and services to customers. Plesk lets you organize your business by means of service plans and subscriptions.

Serving Customers

A service plan is a combination of resources and services that you sell to your customers. For example, a hosting account with 1 GB of disk space and 50 GB of traffic is a hosting service plan. If you use Plesk with the Business Manager solution, you can offer your customers service plans of other types, such as domain name plans and SSL/TLS certificate plans. For example, a 1024 bits SSL/TLS certificate for a year.

When customers want to host a website on a Plesk server, they subscribe to a plan that offers hosting resources. In other words, a subscription is a set of resources and services defined by a plan that is available to a certain customer for a limited period of time.

The typical workflow to start serving hosting customers in Plesk is as follows:

  1. You create a hosting service plan in Plesk.
  2. When a customer is ready to subscribe to the plan, you create the account and subscription for the customer.
  3. Plesk grants the customer permissions to log in and use services provided with the subscription.

Using add-on plans, you can offer resources and services to customers in addition to those provided by their main service plan, for example, an additional gigabyte of disk space.

Learn more about hosting service plans and their relationship with subscriptions in the section Hosting Plans and Subscriptions.

Serving Resellers

Reseller plans allow you to sell your services to a special category of customers - resellers. Resellers are people who sell hosting accounts on your servers to others. From a business perspective, resellers are similar to hosting providers: they have accounts in hosting panels, and their own online stores and customer management tools. The difference is that resellers do not have their own hosting servers. Learn how to start serving resellers in the section Reseller Plans.

This chapter contains instructions on how to set up your hosting offer in Plesk.