After Upgrading to Plesk Onyx

This chapter is intended for the users who switched to Plesk Onyx either from Plesk 9 and earlier. The chapter describes the main changes in the business model of Plesk Onyx compared to these products.

Compared to the previous versions of Plesk software (Plesk 9 and earlier), Plesk Onyx introduces the following changes:

• User accounts. In Plesk Onyx, there are no client accounts and domain administrator accounts. For users who need to resell hosting services and host their own websites, you will set up reseller accounts. For users who do not need to resell hosting services, but only host their own websites, you will set up customer accounts.

  Customers can create user accounts in Plesk if they want to allow other users to access Plesk for managing websites, installed applications, or use email services. In Plesk Onyx, customers can create any number of users for access to their Plesk, and set up multiple additional FTP accounts for access to the subscription.

• Service plans. In Plesk Onyx, there are no reseller, client, or domain templates. Instead, there are service plans that you create according to your service offerings: Reseller plans for signing up resellers, and hosting plans, for signing up customers who do not need to resell services. After plans are created, you create reseller or customer accounts and subscribe them to the plans - and the users are provisioned with the necessary resources and authorized to perform operations in Plesk.

  The most important change brought in by service plans is that, unlike old Plesk templates, they are not applied only once, during the initial resources provisioning, but remain connected to them, so that modifications of a plan change the provisioned resources and privileges.

  In addition to hosting plans, there are also add-on plans. You can use them to allocate more resources and services to customers.

• Subscriptions. Multi-domain hosting subscriptions replace domains. Instead of creating domains for your customers, you subscribe them to a hosting plan, or, in other words, you create a subscription for the customer. Actually, not only customers can be subscribed to hosting services and host their websites and mail, the Plesk administrator and resellers can have their own subscriptions as well, which they may use for their own purposes.

  Subscriptions can be created based on service plans or configured manually.

  When subscribing a new customer to your services in Plesk Onyx, you specify a domain name at the first step. A customer's subscription is always linked to a domain, which is identified by such attributes as domain name, IP address and system user account. All subscriptions are named after the domains to which they are linked. This link is permanent and cannot be broken in any way, so moving a domain from one subscription to another is impossible. However, you can still rename domains.

  You can host a number of websites under a single subscription, and you can create several subscriptions for a single customer account.

• Allocation of resources. In previous versions of Plesk, resources were allocated to reseller accounts, client accounts, and domains. In Plesk Onyx, resources are allocated to resellers and hosting service subscriptions. Customer accounts in Plesk Onyx do not get any resource allocations directly, so they cannot redistribute them among subscriptions that they purchase. All resources allocated to a single subscription are shared among all websites created within the subscription.
• Two separate panels: Server Administration Panel and Customer Panel. System administration and customer and reseller account management tasks are performed in Server Administration Panel. All operations related to managing websites, hosting features, and mail accounts are performed in Customer Panel. Server Administration Panel provides links for access to Customer Panel: You can use them to log in to Customer Panel and manage websites on behalf of your resellers and customers.
• Changes in organization of subdomain-related directories. Due to safety reasons, Plesk now stores content and configuration of hosted subdomains in separate directories:
  • /<VHOST>/<subdomain_name>, the directory that contains HTTP/HTTPs documents (unlike the earlier versions that separated HTTP and HTTPS documents).
  • /<VHOST>/<subdomains>/<subdomain_name>, the service directory that keeps subdomain configuration. We strongly recommend that you do not change the content of this directory.

What Happens When You Upgrade or Migrate to Plesk Onyx

When you upgrade or migrate to Plesk Onyx, accounts, domains, users, and domain templates are transformed according to the following schemes:

• Reseller accounts are transferred without changes, and resources are allocated to them by means of custom subscriptions, which are not bound to plans.
• Client accounts become customer accounts, and after upgrade or migration is finished, you need to perform either of the following operations to make sure that the accounts fit in the new business model:
  • Redistribute former clients' resources among the subscriptions belonging to them.
  • Convert customers to resellers and assign the existing subscriptions to them. This can be done if the customer accounts did not belong to a reseller before upgrade or migration.
• Domains are converted to individual subscriptions. The subscriptions are assigned to the administrator, resellers, or customers, depending on whom the former domains belonged to.
• Domain administrator accounts are converted to user accounts, which are assigned to the customers who own the corresponding domains.
• Domain templates belonging to the server administrator and resellers are converted to hosting plans.
• Reseller templates are converted to reseller plans.

The following table summarizes the conversion of business objects.