Understanding Service Plans and Subscriptions

When you start your hosting reselling business, you should define how you will offer your hosting resources and services to customers. Plesk 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 Plesk-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 Plesk server resources and services that you can include in your hosting plans.

Allocation of Resources and Services

Service plans define potential services; Plesk 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, Plesk 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.

Syncing Service Plans and Subscriptions

When you change the properties of a service plan, Plesk 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.