Parallels ® Plesk Panel
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Contents
Preface 4
Terms, Acronyms, and Abbreviations ... 4
About This Document ... 5
Who Should Read This Document ... 6
Before Proceeding to Configuration ... 6
Typographical Conventions ... 7
Feedback ... 7
Introduction to Business Manager 8
Achieving Hosting Services Provisioning 11
Business Manager Configuration Walk Through 16
Adding a Payment Gateway ... 16Associating the Payment Gateway with an Online Store ... 17
Adding and Configuring a Hosting Plan ... 17
Setting Taxes Applied to Subscribers ... 18
Verifying Business Manager Configuration 19
Appendix A. Modifying Online Store Appearance 21
Appendix B. Building Online Store into Your Website 22
4 Preface
In this section:
Terms, Acronyms, and Abbreviations ... 4
About This Document ... 5
Who Should Read This Document ... 6
Before Proceeding to Configuration ... 6
Typographical Conventions ... 7
Feedback ... 7
Terms, Acronyms, and Abbreviations
Throughout this guide, we use the following terms, acronyms and abbreviations:
Service plan is a set of services and resources offered to hosting service customers.
Typically, the resources include disk space on the server and bandwidth for hosting websites, and the services include web hosting service, mail hosting service, and such. It is assumed that a service plan you create in the Panel represents your particular
business offer.
Subscription is an instance of service plan assigned to a customer. To provide a particular customer with services and resources offered with a service plan, you
subscribe the customer to the service plan, or, in other words, you create a subscription for the customer.
The Panel is a shorthand for Parallels Plesk Panel.
Business Manager is a shorthand for Customer & Business Manager.
Online store is an automatically generated website with a shopping cart that displays your service plans and helps you distribute them.
Preface
Preface 5
About This Document
This document contains introduction to Customer & Business Manager and instructions on how to configure it to provide customers with web hosting services managed by Parallels Plesk Panel. In brief, the document explains how to create a hosting plan in Business Manager, import it to the Panel, and automate the process of subscribing to this plan.
With Customer & Business Manager you can easily leverage provisioning of domain names and SSL certificates, but as they require you to register an account with a domain registrar or an SSL provider, we will narrow the application facilities to web hosting services in this guide for the sake of simplicity.
This guide also has two appendices that are optional from the configuration standpoint but useful if you intend to customize your online store. They are as follows:
How to modify an online store appearance (header and footer) to match your branding
How to build an online store into your website
6 Preface
Who Should Read This Document
This guide is addressed to hosters who intend to use Business Manager as business automation software for Parallels Panel.
Before Proceeding to Configuration
Before you go the configuration steps described in this guide, make sure that the following requirements are met:
Business Manager is installed as the Panel component.
Business Manager builds into the Panel installer, so you have the Panel and Business Manager bundle ready to work together after successful installation. When Business Manager is installed, you are able to connect other control panels to it.
The deployment scheme is a single Panel with Business Manager.
We limit the initial deployment configuration to a single Panel and Business Manager bundle to simplify the explanation of how to configure end-to-end solution out of Business Manager and the Panel.
Shared IP pool is configured in the Panel.
The available shared IPs are required to properly allocate web hosting resources. To configure them, log in to the Panel as the Administrator and perform the initial
configuration.
You are in the Panel interface.
To configure Business Manager, log in to the Panel as the Administrator. If you are not logged in to the Panel, locate the following URL and enter the Administrator's credentials.
https://<your hostname>:8443/
Initial configuration wizard is skipped for Business Manager.
Business Manager offers the initial configuration wizard when you log in to the application for the first time. To acquaint you with the administrative interface and to explain the basic concepts, we suppose that you skip the wizard. This will also let you return to a particular step and adjust the configuration to tailor it to your needs without running the wizard in future.
Preface 7
Typographical Conventions
The following kinds of formatting in the text identify special information.
Formatting convention Type of Information Example
Special Bold Items you must select, such
as menu options, command buttons, or items in a list.
Go to the QoS tab.
Titles of chapters, sections, and subsections.
Read the Basic Administration chapter.
Italics Used to emphasize the
importance of a point, to introduce a term or to designate a command line placeholder, which is to be replaced with a real name or value.
These are the so-called shared VPSs.
msiexec /i <name of the aforementioned *.msi file or GUID>
Monospace The names of style sheet
selectors, files and directories, and CSS fragments.
Install Plesk to the
"c:\plesk bin" directory.
Preformatted On-screen computer output
in your command-line sessions; logs; source code in XML, C++, or other programming s.
05:31:49 Success.
Admin John Smith was added.
Preformatted Bold What you type, contrasted with on-screen computer output.
>cd %plesk_bin%
Feedback
If you have found an error in this guide, or if you have suggestions or ideas on how to improve this guide, please send your feedback using the online form at
http://www.parallels.com/en/support/usersdoc/. Please include in your report the guide's title, chapter and section titles, and the fragment of text in which you have found an error.
The Parallels Panel concept implies that you organize available hosting services and resources into plans and offer your customers to subscribe to these plans. If you wish to reduce time costs, you should consider a solution that automatically subscribes your customers to your plans eliminating any actions from the administrator's part. Along with the automation, you should present your hosting plans to customers and keep them in actual state giving your customers a choice. Finally, you should take control over money flows from your customers. To assist you in these three aspects, we offer Customer & Business Manager (Business Manager) - the Panel component that leverages hosting provisioning. Two major advantages of Business Manager are as follows:
The component automates the creation of new subscriptions by accepting them through automatically-generated online stores. Instead of creating accounts manually, customers visit your store, pick a plan that fits them best, and subscribe to it. Each change you make to your plans is reflected in all your online stores.
The component is responsible for the financial part of subscriptions distribution. It generates invoices, takes payments, performs administrative actions to accounts, and maintains other financial routines.
The major responsibilities of Business Manager are reflected in its architecture. The component has own hosting plans, subscriptions, and customer accounts that are linked to the corresponding objects in the Panel. This makes it possible to divide the financial and technical information between the Panel and Business Manager. For example, when you need financial details about a certain subscription, you refer to it in Business Manager. When you wish to manage hosting resources, you refer to the subscription in the Panel. Subscriptions in the Panel and in Business Manager are different objects. The same approach applies to hosting plans and customer accounts.
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Introduction to Business Manager
Introduction to Business Manager 9
Figure 1: Relations between Business Manager and the Panel objects.
Business Manager keeps its hosting plans, subscriptions, and customer accounts in actual state by syncing them with respective Panel objects. It means that the
component periodically requests to create, modify, or remove objects owned by the Panel. At the same time, Business Manager is unaware about the state of these objects in the Panel. This means that when you, for example, create a subscription in Business Manager, it is created in the Panel. Alternatively, when you do the same in the Panel, the object is not created in Business Manager. In other words, there is only one-way sync between the applications.
This one-way sync scheme dictates that if you want both Business Manager and the Panel to recognize and handle a hosting plan, it is obligatory to create this plan in Business Manager and sync it with the Panel. This way of sharing the plan data between the two applications makes it possible to implement a typical distribution scenario. The scenario is as follows:
1. Customer subscribes to a plan through a Business Manager online store. At this step, Business Manager creates a new customer account and subscription.
2. Business Manager syncs information about customer account, service plan, and subscription with the Panel.
3. The Panel receives this information and sets up the subscription.
4. When the customer pays for the subscription, Business Manager notifies the Panel about it.
5. The Panel grants the customer permissions to log in and use services provided with the subscription.
In this guide, we will explain how to set up Business Manager to accommodate this scenario.
10 Introduction to Business Manager
The Business Manager configuration as well as the other operations is performed through the Panel. After you log in as the administrator to the Panel and complete the initial configuration, you notice Business Manager operations in the left menu: Business Operations, Business Monitoring, Business Setup. The operations are grouped by usage frequency.
The first group contains day-by-day operations on customer accounts and
subscriptions (be it a web hosting subscription, domain name, or SSL certificate). Use them to update subscription or contact details, generate invoices, view customer balance, etc.
The second group - business monitoring - includes operations typically performed every week: Generating statistical and financial reports, reviewing and managing the invoices and transactions, and monitoring the scheduled tasks results.
The third group - business setup - consists of service plans and overall system configuration. We will mostly use operations from this group to set up Business
Manager to make end-to-end hosting provisioning. To learn more about the operations and the steps we will take to set up Business Manager, see the next chapter.
This chapter explains how to set up Business Manager to accommodate the typical provisioning scenario. It is the conceptual part of the instruction. If you wish to see the step-by-step instruction, refer to Business Manager Configuration Walk Through (on page 16).
In short, this chapter tells how to perform the following operations:
Add a payment gateway to accept payments from customers
Associate the gateway with an online store
Create and configure a hosting plan you want to offer to customers
Set taxes applied to subscribers
You will find details on each of them below.
Adding a Payment Gateway
The first step is to add a payment gateway. If you plan to process credit cards, add an on-site payment gateway. If you wish to rely on payment intermediary service when processing credit cards, add an off-site payment gateway.
The list of supported on-site payment gateways is as follows:
Authorize.net
BluePay
Echo, Inc.
eWay
InternetSecure
LinkPoint
Moneris
PayFlowPro
ProTX
PSiGate
Quantum
Velocity Pay
etc.
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Achieving Hosting Services Provisioning
12 Achieving Hosting Services Provisioning
To add one of these gateways, you need a merchant account with a corresponding payment processing service. In addition, if you plan to store credit cards details in your database, you need to configure encryption in your system. For details on encryption configuration, see section Managing Security Settings > Setting Up Encryption of
Administrator’s Guide to Customer and Business Manager, which is accessible from the Parallels website.
The list of supported off-site payment gateways is as follows:
PayPal
WorldPay
You also need a merchant account registered with one of these processing services.
Quick link: step-by-step instruction (on page 16).
Associating the Payment Gateway with an Online Store
After adding a payment gateway, modify online store settings to accept payments from this gateway. Online store is a shopping cart with checkout to let customers subscribe to your plans. Customer payments are processed by a payment gateway associated with the store.
Quick link: step-by-step instruction (on page 17).
Adding and Configuring a Hosting Plan
Once your store is ready to accept payments, add a hosting plan to it. A hosting plan comprises hosting services and resources you offer to your customers. You are free to add new plans or update the predefined ones. The new plans become available through your online stores after you configure them. The configuration consists of the following steps:
1. Add your plan to one of available online stores.
2. Add billing cycles to the plan.
A billing cycle is a period between two subscription renewal dates, or, in other words, the subscription length. By adding multiple billing cycles you let customers choose the subscription length that fits them best.
3. Associate the plan with server groups.
Each server group includes control panels of the same type connected to Business Manager. The groups corresponding to the Panel for Linux and for Windows are created during the installation. Initially, the local Panel instance appears into one of these groups.
When you associate a plan with a group, this lets the system to access the information about all possible services and resources managed by the Panel.
Additionally, this facilitates load balancing. If your plan is associated with a certain server group, a subscription will be provisioned onto the machine with the fewest number of subscriptions among this group.
Achieving Hosting Services Provisioning 13
4. Set the plan properties.
Plan properties define privileges granted to a subscriber account on a related hosting panel. For example, this includes account limits on bandwidth, had disk space quotas, scripting support, and many others.
Note: The Panel functionality might partly be unavailable due to license limitations or other reasons. Please check the availability of a service or a resource before adding them to your plans.
5. Set the subscription price for each billing cycle you would like to appear in online stores.
When you finish the configuration, you can verify that the plan is displayed among others in the online store.
Quick link: step-by-step instruction (on page 17).
Setting Taxes Applied to Subscribers
As you run a hosting business in a particular country, you should set taxes to conform to legal standards of your country. Customer & Business Manager lets you achieve this through tax rules and taxation policies.
Tax Rules
A tax rule defines a tax for a particular country or sub-national unit where you offer your plans. For example, if you serve the American customers from states with different sales tax rates, create a separate tax rule for each state and specify their rates in these rules. The rates can be either fixed ($10) or progressive (15%). Business Manager calculates fixed rates in the currency of the online store where you sell the plan.
There are two types of tax rules: stackable and non-stackable. Stackable rules are applied to a subscription price, while non-stackable rules are applied to a total of the price and stackable tax rules values. To see an example of stackable and non- stackable rules application, refer to the Applying Taxation Policies section.
A state or a province where the rule applies can be a two character state abbreviation or a combination of a two character state abbreviation and city. You can also add a county name. In this case, separate location parts by dashes (-). For example, use state-city to specify a particular city in a certain state. The other accepted locations are:
state-county, state-city-county, state. Set the state to asterisk (*) or leave the corresponding field blank to apply the rule to the whole country.
Taxation Policies
A taxation policy links together tax rules and plans to which you want to apply them.
For example, to serve the American customers, create a taxation policy that contains all US tax rules and apply it to the plans you intend to sell in the US. If you offer the same plans to all customers, simply modify the default taxation policy and apply it to all plans.
14 Achieving Hosting Services Provisioning
Note: Each plan can have only one taxation policy applied. If you apply a new taxation policy to a plan, the existing one will be replaced.
To add new taxation policy or manage existing ones, go to the Business Setup > All Settings > Taxation Policies screen.
Applying Taxation Policies
If a plan is associated with a taxation policy, the system searches for matches between subscriber location and tax rules included in the policy. If the system finds the matches, it will calculate the total tax due from rates of matching tax rules.
To calculate the total taxes due for a subscription to a plan, the system uses the following algorithm:
1. Form a list of tax rules matching customer country and the selected plans.
2. Sequentially apply each stackable tax rule to a subscription price. Add up all of the calculated tax values.
3. Sequentially apply each non-stackable tax rule to the total of the price and the step two result. Add up all of the calculated tax values.
4. Add up all of the tax amounts calculated at step two and step three.
For example, a subscription price is $100, and the matching tax rules are as follows:
Rule 1: Apply 10% stackable Rule 2: Apply 20% stackable Rule 3: Apply 5% non-stackable Rule 4: Apply 10% non-stackable
Then the total taxes due is calculated in the following way:
$100 * 0.10 = $10 (for Rule 1) ($100 * 0.20 = $20 (for Rule 2)
$10 + $20 = $30 (subtotal for stackable rules) ($100 + $30) * 0.05 = $6.5 (for Rule 3)
($100 + $30) * 0.10 = $13 (for Rule 4)
$6.5 + $13 = $19.5 (subtotal for non-stackable rules)
$30 + $19.5 = $49.5 (total taxes due)
Quick link: step-by-step instruction (on page 18).
Achieving Hosting Services Provisioning 15
After you set up taxes, check that Business Manager works as it should. For details on how to do it, see Verifying Business Manager Configuration (on page 19).
16 Business Manager Configuration Walk Through
This chapter provides step-by-step guidance on how to configure the Customer & Business Manager to accommodate hosting services provisioning.
In this chapter:
Adding a Payment Gateway ... 16
Associating the Payment Gateway with an Online Store ... 17
Adding and Configuring a Hosting Plan ... 17
Setting Taxes Applied to Subscribers ... 18
Adding a Payment Gateway
In this section, we will add a demo on-site payment gateway that does not require any merchant account and serves only for testing and presentation purposes. Please do not use it in production.
To add the demo on-site payment gateway:
1. Go to Business Setup > All Settings > Payment Gateways.
2. Click Add New Payment Gateway. This will open a payment gateway creation
wizard.
3. Select Demo Gateway option in the On-site payments group.
4. Specify the gateway name and properties. This name is for your reference,
customers will not see it.
5. Click OK.
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Business Manager Configuration Walk
Through
Business Manager Configuration Walk Through 17
Associating the Payment Gateway with an
Online Store
In this section, we will update the default online store settings to accept payments from the previously created gateway.
To associate your on-site payment gateway with the default online store:
1. Go to Business Setup > Online Stores.
2. Click Default Store. This will open the online store settings.
3. Click Change Settings, and go to Payment Options tab.
4. Select checkbox next to On-site payment gateway and select the gateway name.
5. Click Save.
Adding and Configuring a Hosting Plan
In this section, we will add a new hosting plan and configure it.
To add a plan:
1. Go to Business Setup > Plans.
2. Click Add Plan.
3. Select Hosting Plan next to Type, and click OK. This will bring you to the plan
details page.
4. Set the plan name to Sample Plan.
5. Select Is Active checkbox.
6. Specify the resources offered with a plan. To do this, go to the Properties tab
and define the services and resources offered with a plan subscription. For
Sample Plan, we set Disk space (the Web Limits column) to 10 GB.
7. Set the billing cycles and prices for the plan. To do this, go to the Prices &
Taxation page and add 1 Month and 1 Year cycles. This means that customers
will be offered to either to order 1-month or 1-year subscription to this plan.
Then specify prices of these subscriptions.
8. Click Save.
18 Business Manager Configuration Walk Through
Business Manager will add this plan to default online store. To check if the plan is properly configured, go to the default online store (https://<your
hostname>:8443/store/default.html) and find out if the plan is shown and available for subscribing.
Setting Taxes Applied to Subscribers
In this chapter, we will create a taxation policy. We also will create a tax rule that imposes 10% stackable tax on all Canada customers, add the rule to the policy, and associate this policy with the Sample Plan.
To create the taxation policy and apply it to the Sample Plan:
1. Go to Business Setup > All Settings > Taxation Policies.
2. Click the Add Taxation Policy.
3. Fill in the policy name.
4. Select the Sample Plan in Available plans list and move it to the Selected list.
5. Click Add Tax Rule in the Tax Rules group.
6. Fill in the tax rule name.
7. Select the Canada in the Country list.
8. Specify the asterisk ("*") in the State field.
9. Set the Rate to 10%.
10. Select the Stackable checkbox.
11. Click Save.
Now when the configuration is successfully completed, we can verify that our solution works.
We suppose that you have completed all the previous steps and want to verify that your solution works properly. In this chapter, we will imitate the behavior of an ordinary customer who visits your default online store, subscribes to Sample Plan, pays for the subscription, and finally logs in to the Panel to access the services and resources provided with the plan.
To fully automate this scenario, you should have an account with FraudGuardian - the Business Manager module that inspects orders and activates customer accounts if it considers them not to be fraudulent. Alternatively, you can manually activate the accounts from the administrative interface. In this chapter, we will explain how to
perform the manual activation. For details on FraudGuardian, see the chapter Setting Up FraudGuardian of Customer & Business Manager Administrator's Guide.
To subscribe to Sample Plan:
1. Go to the online default store available at:
https://<your hostname>:8443/store/default.html
2. Click the Buy Now button in the Sample Plan group.
3. Select the Use an existing domain name, specify a vacant domain name, and
click Submit. In case you specify an occupied domain name, the
subscription will not be provisioned to the Panel. We will use the
example-123321.cn name.
4. Click Checkout.
5. Specify valid contact information and credentials to access the Panel
account. We will use the following credentials:
Username: customer Password: customer
6. Click Next.
7. Select the Credit Card payment method and the following details.
Name on Credit Card: John Doe
Credit Card Number: 4111111111111111 Expiration Date: specify any date in the future
8. Click Next.
9. Select I have read and agree to the terms and conditions of use, and click place
order.
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Verifying Business Manager
Configuration
20 Verifying Business Manager Configuration
This will open a page displaying the payment status and information about the invoice.
The customer's account is created and the account status is automatically set to Pending.
To activate the customer's account from the administrative interface:
1. Go to Home.
2. Find the newly added customer in the Pending Customers group, select
Activate, and click Submit.
Finally, Business Manager puts the information about the subscription and customer into the queue. The queue entries are periodically sent to the Panel to facilitate load balancing. To speed up the process and initiate the sending of this information to the Panel, run the events from Business Manager manually by clicking Business Monitoring
> Events > Run Events.
After the operation is finished, you can finally log out as the Administrator and log in to the Panel under the customer's account. Follow this link to access the Panel:
https://<your hostname>:8443/sso/ui
If you have successfully logged in, Business Manager is set up to offer hosting services managed by the Panel.
You are able to customize the look and feel of your online store. In this chapter, we will explain how to adjust the presentation of the default online store. You can skip this step for now and return to it once Business Manager is set up.
In an online store, you can change header, footer, or apply a different color theme to the store. To perform these modifications, open the store settings page, tab Appearance and Website Widgets, click either change, or edit header & footer, and follow the on-screen instructions.
To view the results, go to the online store and click any of Order Now buttons.
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Appendix A. Modifying Online Store
Appearance
Business Manager lets you integrate an online store into an arbitrary web page by using website widgets - snippets of PHP code that render an online store interface when you include them into your pages. In this chapter, we will explain where website widgets are stored and how to use them. You can skip this step for now and return to it once Business Manager is set up.
In this chapter, we will include a website widget offered by default into the test.php page.
To retrieve the website widget:
1. Go to Business Setup > All Settings. The CBM panel opens.
2. Go to Plans > Online Stores and click the store you want to display to
visitors when they submit the initial information through a widget.
3. In the list of website widgets, click Get Code.
4. Click PHP Code.
5. Copy the snippet code. In our case, the resulting code is as follows:
<?php readfile("http://a10-52-56-
53.qa.plesk.ru:8880/store/catalog-widget/widget-1.html"); ?>
Note: As file paths in code depend on your OS, you might have a different snippet.
Now when you have the code, create the test.php file in <BM_dir>/lib- billing/order/ and paste the code there.
The widget works correctly only if the page character set is utf-8. To adjust the page character set, add the following PHP code at the very beginning of the page (after the
<?php declaration).
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8");
To check that online store renders correctly, visit the newly created page available at:
https://<your hostname>:8443/plesk-billing/order/test.php
