Becoming Familiar with Plesk

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

  • Reseller 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 Reseller Panel, see the section Acquainting Yourself with the Plesk Interface.

  • Customer Panel.

    When someone subscribes to one of your hosting plans, Plesk 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 Customer Panel. To learn more about operating in the Customer Panel, refer to the section Website Management.

    Power users also use the Customer Panel but in Power User view. In this view, the Customer Panel gets additional capabilities for Plesk administration. Learn more about interface views in the section Interface Views.

So, after logging in to Plesk, customers see the Customer Panel while resellers see the Reseller Panel or the Customer Panel in the Power User view. 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 Customer Panel in the following cases:

  • To assist customers with performing their tasks. In this case, you log in to the Customer 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 Customer Panel using your account.

The links that let you log in to the Customer Panel using your own and your customers’ accounts are located in the list of subscriptions (Reseller Panel > Hosting Services group in the Navigation Pane > Subscriptions.)

Your Plesk Account and Subscriptions

When you subscribe to a reseller plan, you get a reseller account in Plesk. 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 Plesk. You can change these at any time. The section Managing Your Profile explains how to do it.

To allow you to easily monitor the current state of your resources and services (for example, disk space currently consumed by your account and your customers), Plesk 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 .