Managing ICP Permits

According to the policy set by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, a state agency of the People's Republic of China, all China-based websites need to receive a special permit, called an ICP permit, to be able to operate in China. Websites that do not obtain a valid permit are blocked after the grace period expires, and every domain needs to have a separate permit. If you plan to run your hosting business in China, Plesk makes it easy for you to assign and manage ICP permits for the websites you host.

Overview

Enabling the ICP permit functionality allows you to do the following:

• Grant or revoke the "ICP permit approved" status to any domain, subdomain, or domain alias. Domains that have not been granted the "ICP permit approved" status are unavailable, though Plesk users can still view them via the site preview functionality.
• Set the ICP permit ID for any domain, subdomain, or domain alias. Both the ICP permit status and the ICP permit ID are clearly visible in the Plesk GUI.

Note: Plesk does not check the validity of permits, it merely blocks or allows domains based on their "ICP permit approved" status. In other words, even if you grant the "ICP permit approved" status to a domain, it will be blocked by the Chinese Internet providers if the permit is not valid.

The proposed usage scenario looks like this:

1. A customer creates a domain in Plesk. At this moment the domain is blocked by Plesk, as no permit is installed.
2. The customer provides the necessary information to the hosting provider, who then files a request for an ICP permit on the customer's behalf.
3. If the permit is denied, most likely the information provided by the customer was incomplete or wrong. The hosting provider clarifies this with the customer, than re-submits the request.
4. If the permit is approved, the hosting provider notifies the customer and tells them the permit ID.
5. The customer adds the permit ID to their website's footer and notifies the hosting provider.
6. The hosting provider associates the permit with the customer's website in Plesk and unblocks the website.

Enabling ICP Permits

To comply with the requirements of the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and enable you to do business in the People's Republic of China, Plesk features the ICP permit functionality. This functionality makes it possible to assign ICP permits to primary domains, additional domains, subdomains, and domain aliases using the XML-API and command line, and also to block access to websites with no ICP permit assigned.

To enable the ICP permit functionality, add the following lines to the panel.ini file:

[domainManagement]

features.icpPermit = true

features.icpPermitLink = http://www.miitbeian.gov.cn/

features.icpPermitLearnMore = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license

Assigning ICP Permits to websites

Once the ICP permit functionality has been enabled, the ICP permit status of every primary domain, additional domain, subdomain, or domain alias is displayed in the Plesk interface:

If no valid ICP permit has been assigned, the status is displayed as Not Permitted. Domains with this status are unavailable. Browsing a website with no ICP permit assigned results in a custom 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons error page. The website preview still works for authenticated Plesk users.

To make a website available, it has to be granted the "ICP permit approved" status, and have an ICP permit assigned to it. This can be done in three ways:

• Via the Plesk interface. Once the ICP permit functionality is enabled, the controls for managing ICP permits (Grant Approval/Revoke Approval and Enter Permit ID) are displayed for every domain, subdomain, and domain alias.
• Via the site.exe and the domalias.exe command line utilities.
• Via XML-API requests.