Hosting Plans and Subscriptions

A hosting plan is a set of hosting resources and services you offer to your customers. For example, the properties of a hosting plan define the server resources available in a plan subscription, such as disk space, traffic, number of mailboxes and so on. To learn more about how plan resources are allocated in the subscription, refer to the section Relationship Between Plans and Subscriptions.

This section will guide you through the process of creating a hosting plan and starting to serve your customers.

The amount of resources and services provided with a subscription can be extended by associating the subscription with add-on plans. To learn how to create add-on plans, refer to the section Setting Up Add-on Plans in Plesk.

Relationship Between Plans and Subscriptions

Normally, a subscription is associated with a service plan, and this association is reflected in a list of subscriptions: each subscription name contains the service plan name in brackets at the end. The amount of resources and services provided with a subscription can be extended by associating the subscription with add-on plans. A subscription can be associated with several add-ons, but each add-on can be added to the subscription only once.

It is also possible that a subscription may not be associated with a service plan, and so it cannot be associated with any add-on plans: add-ons are only added to a "main" service plan. We call such subscriptions custom subscriptions, and their names are extended with "(Custom)" in the list of subscriptions. Having a custom subscription may be useful if you want to provide services on specific terms that are different from the usual offerings in your business model.

You can change the association between a subscription and plans at any time as follows:

• Associate the subscription with another service plan.
• Add and remove add-on plans.
• Remove the subscription association with the service plan and add-ons.

States of Subscription

Subscriptions associated with a particular plan are synchronized, or synced, with it: any changes made to the plan are automatically applied to all its subscriptions. This is true for all kinds of plans: service plans, their add-ons, and reseller plans.

Plesk allows the following deviations from the default subscription state (active and synced with the service plans):

• Locked state, which means locked for syncing, indicates that a subscription is excluded from syncing with the associated plans.

  A subscription gets locked if you change the parameters of the subscription, without changing the associated service plan. Such locking secures your customizations so that they are not overwritten the next time you change the plan and all its subscriptions are synced.

• Unsynced state indicates that some services or resources offered with the associated plans cannot actually be provided with the subscription.
• Suspended state. This state is not related to the synchronization of a subscription with the service plan, but it affects the behavior of websites. Plesk suspends subscriptions automatically if their expiration date passes. In addition, you can suspend a subscription manually. To learn more, see Managing Subscriptions.

Note: If a plan offers a privilege that makes it possible for a subscriber to change a particular resource or service, this resource/service allocation is ignored during a sync. For example, if the plan provides the privilege of PHP settings management and a customer changes some PHP setting, its subscription remains synced with the plan (even if a value of the PHP setting in the subscription differs from the corresponding one in the plan).

Unsynced Subscriptions

Plesk does not check whether a service or a resource that a service plan should provide is actually available in the system. For example, when creating a plan, you can select to provide Perl support when mod_perl is not installed on the server, and Plesk will let you do it and will show no error or warning messages.

A subscription is automatically marked as Unsynced if Plesk cannot provision the resources and/or services defined by the plan. This may happen in the following cases:

• When the subscription is created.
• When the properties of the associated plan are changed.
• When an add-on plan is added to or removed from the subscription.

To know which of the subscription's resources or services are not synced with the plan:

1. Go to Subscriptions, and click the unsynced subscription name.
2. Click Sync.

   Plesk will retry syncing the subscription with associated plans, and will display the conflicting properties if syncing fails.

   Be sure to take the note of the conflict report: which properties are affected, and what the Plan value and the Available value are.

   Clicking OK at this page will initiate setting the subscription values according to the available values, Cancel will leave everything unchanged.

Once you have identified the problem, you can resolve it. There are two possible ways:

1. Fine-tune the plan to conform to the system actual state.
2. Fine-tune the system to provide resources and services offered with the plan.

To change the plan properties to conform to the available values:

1. Go to Service plans > <plan name>.
2. Adjust values of the problem properties so that they correspond to the Available values (see above).
3. Click Update & Sync.

   The subscriptions will be synced automatically.

To adjust the system and re-sync a subscription:

1. Adjust your system: install missing components, add hard disks - whatever is indicated by the conflict report.
2. Go to Subscriptions, and click the unsynced subscription name.
3. Click Sync.

Plesk will retry syncing the subscription with associated plans.