Organizing your offerings into service plans is just one step in getting your business ready to run. Before you can start serving customers, you should also consider how potential customers will find your offerings, how you will subscribe new customers and take payments, and other aspects of your business. To make starting your business easier, you can use automation solutions that perform various tasks for you, such as issuing invoices and processing payments from customers.

The automation tools included in your reseller package by your hosting provider will determine whether you are able to automate certain business routines. If your hosting provider offers a business automation solution, you should learn how to automate certain routines by following the appropriate documentation. If a business automation solution is not provided, you will need to take care of various aspects of your business on your own before you start serving customers. However, in this case, you can still automate some aspects, such as financial ones, by using appropriate software.

To start your hosting business in Plesk, do the following:

• Rebrand Plesk and prepare hosting plans.
• Set up a website for your own company.

Rebranding Plesk and Preparing Hosting Plans

Before you can start serving your customers, you should:

1. Adjust Plesk branding and appearance.
2. On the Service Plans page, add service plans and add-ons that you will offer to your customers.

Setting Up Your Company’s Presence on the Web

To enable your prospective customers to familiarize themselves with your offerings and contact you, create a website and email addresses for your company on the Plesk-managed server.

To set up your website, create your own hosting subscription by clicking on “Subscriptions > Add Subscription”. This will allow you to log in to the Customer Panel and manage your web hosting in the same way as your customers do: you can create web pages and mailboxes, install web applications, secure access to websites with SSL/TLS certificates, etc. For detailed information on how to use your hosting resources for your own needs, refer to the “Website Management” chapter.

Subscribing Customers to Your Services

After setting up hosting plans in Plesk, you can start subscribing customers to your services. When a new customer subscribes to your services, create an account and a subscription for that customer in “Customers > Add Customer”. You will be prompted to enter the following information:

• The customer’s contact information.
• A username and a password that the customer will use to log in to the Customer Panel.

Subscription details:

• A domain name that the customer owns and will use for their website hosted in Plesk.
• An IP address used by the customer’s website.
• The customer’s username and password that they will use to access their folders, for example, using FTP.
• The service plan to which the customer subscribes.
• (Optional) Add-ons that the customer wants to add to the subscription.
• If the plan selected by the customer does not completely meet their needs and you do not offer add-ons that could help, adjust the subscription settings by selecting the checkbox Proceed to customizing the subscription parameters after the customer account is created.

Once the account and subscription are created, provide the Plesk access credentials to the customer, allowing them to log in to Plesk and create their website.