Plesk Overview:

The Parallels Plesk Panel is a Web Hosting Control Panel developed and released under Plesk Inc. used by the web hosting providers and server administrators on both Windows and Linux platforms. The Plesk Panel was developed and released under the Plesk Inc. that was acquired by SWSoft, the parent company of Parallels.

Parallels Plesk Panel is designed to work as a control panel for the web hosting providers to manage their clients, websites, email accounts, databases, etc. with a web based interface. Parallels Plesk Panel is available for both Linux and Windows platforms with the ability to support Linux/Apache as well as Windows Server 2003/Windows Server 2008. Plesk panel is also available on other OS platforms like Debian, Fedora, Red Hat Linux, Suse and Ubuntu.

The latest version of Plesk Panel is 11.0 released on 13th June, 2012, provides you a very user-friendly interface to the server. It is available in Power User Mode and as a Service Provider Mode also. For a hosting provider (whether as a Hosting Reseller or a Server Administrator) the service provider mode is comfortable.

So let's start with the Creating a Hosting Plan in Parallels Plesk Panel. Follow the below steps:

1) To begin, first get your server Login credentials (url, username and password) and login using those details as a administrator or as a reseller (depending on your hosting plan). The login URL is generally provided as: https://:8443.

2) If you are currently in the Power User Mode then change the panel interface to Service Provider Mode. This you can do from your control panel itself. Just go to Tools and Settings then to the Panel Appearance and then select Interface Management. Then you can select the radio button of Service Provider View and click OK.

3) After switching to the Service Provider View look for the Service Plans on the left hand panel under the Hosting Services category and click on it.

4) After clicking on the Service Plans, on the next page you can see three tabs of Hosting Plans, Reseller Plans and Additional Services. Using the Hosting Plans you can create Hosting packages for individual Customers. From Reseller Plans you can crate Hosting packages for your Customers who prefers to sell you hosting services under their name. Additional Services let you add extra services to for your clients that are added in the extensions in the Plesk Panel.

5) On Hosting Plans page click on Add new plan and on the next page you can see the necessary fields for the resources provided with the plan. Here on this page you will find three options of Overuse. Selecting the first option will not allow your clients to exceed the allotted server resources. The second option allows them to use only disk space and traffic/bandwidth than allotted. The third option will give the liberty to your clients to use the complete server resources. This feature also found with many hosting plans as unlimited. But this is not recommended as it will let all your customers to use the server to its full extent and thus resulting in server slow-down.

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• Service plan name: Enter the name by which you want to create the Hosting Plan.
• Disk Space: Enter the desired disk space required to assign to that particular Hosting Plan. Right below this field you will find the option of notification. With this option you can get the notification of your user when he will reach a specific disk limit.  You can enter the limits in MBs, GBs or in TBs or can also select Unlimited.
• Traffic: This is the bandwidth part. Enter the desired units, you wish to specify.
• Sites with Web Presence Builder: The number of websites your client can add that is designed in Web Presence Builder.
• Domains and Mobile Sites: The number of domains that the user can add in this Hosting plan and the maximum number of Mobile websites that can be published.
• Sub-domains: The number of Sub-domains allowed to be created.
• Domain Aliases: Domain Aliases are the number of alternate domains pointing to a single website.
• Mailboxes: These are the number of email accounts that the user can create under the hosting plan.
• Mailbox size: The size of per email account.
• Total Mailbox quota: This is the size of all the email accounts allowed in the particular hosting package. You can use number of mailboxes, mailbox size and total mailbox quota collectively to assign the email facility.
• Mailing List: The number of emails allowed to send in an hour.
• Additional FTP accounts: The number of FTP accounts allowed in the package.
• My SQL Databases: Specify the limit of My SQL databases to be allowed.
• My SQL Database Quota: The size of all the Database.
• Microsoft Server SQL Database: The number of MS SQL database to be allowed.
• Microsoft Server SQL Database quota: The total size of Ms SQL Databases.
• Validity Period: If you wish to set the availability of the hosting package for a specific duration, select this option.

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6) Click on OK button.

You are finished with creating the Hosting Plan.

The above steps are the very basic configurations that you have to do while creating a Hosting Plan. Apart from these you can see more options as in Permission, Hosting parameters, php settings, mail, dns, performance, logs and statistics and applications.