Getting Ready for Selling Hosting Services to Customers

Before you can sign up customers to hosting services, you need to configure the following items in CloudBlue Commerce to reflect your hosting offerings:

1. Create special tags (referred to as provisioning attributes), assign them to service nodes, and then assign them to service templates.

   This step is optional. It might be useful if you have numerous service nodes in different geographical regions and you want to make sure that users' data are hosted on the node that is nearest to the users. This can help you reduce latency and comply with GDPR or other local regulations on data residency.

2. Create a service template or configure an existing one.

   
   Service templates define the hosting settings, the operations that the hosting customers can perform in the system, and the amounts of allotted resources such as the number of websites, disk space, and monthly bandwidth. There are four predefined service templates that you can install as described in Installing the WebHosting Plesk Module: DNS Hosting, WebHosting Plesk Linux, WordPress WebHosting Plesk Linux, and WebHosting Plesk Windows. You can review and change them to suit your needs or you can create new service templates. To view and edit the service templates, go to Products > Service Templates.

3. Create a service plan or configure an existing one.

   
   Service plans are based on service templates. In addition to the hosting settings, resource allotments, and operations defined by service templates, a service plan specifies the billing settings, such as subscription period and pricing. You need to set up service plans only if you are using CloudBlue Commerce with the Billing component. There are a number of predefined service plans in Billing: Small WebHosting Plesk Linux, Medium WebHosting Plesk Linux, Large WebHosting Plesk Linux, WordPress WebHosting Plesk Linux, Small WebHosting Plesk Windows, Medium WebHosting Plesk Windows, Large WebHosting Plesk Windows, and DNS Hosting. To view and edit the service plans, go to Billing > Products > Service Plans.

4. Configure the online store.