Many 3Essentials customers wish to utilize our “multi-domain plans” to resell hosting of domains to their own customers. For example, many of our customers are website designers that combine their “site design and monthly maintenance” services with hosting (provided behind the scenes by us) into a single package for a flat monthly rate. This is an excellent idea, and is exactly what these types of plans were designed for, and the Plesk Control Panel was designed to support just this type of reseller configuration.

When you sign up for a multi-domain hosting plan with us, we’ll create you what’s called a Control Panel “client account”, and we set the limits for this account based on the plan that you’ve signed up for. When you login with the credentials for this account, you will be able to see ALL settings for ALL domains associated with your multi-domain hosting plan. But if you’re reselling our hosting, you may have 10 different domains under this control panel account, and they may be for 10 different customers. Plesk allows you to create a user for each domain whose view is limited to just the settings for that one single domain.

Plesk calls it a "domain user" or "domain administrator" depending on the version of Plesk ... here's the explanation:

Log into the control panel with your regular control panel "client account" credentials... you'll see all of the domains you have under that control panel account. Now, let's assume you have these domains:

• johnnyrotten.com which you host for one of your customers, J. Rotten.
• marthasroom.com which you host for your friend, Martha.
• designandhosting.com, which is your personal website where you advertise your website design and webhosting offerings.

The control panel "client account" credentials are for you, and are designed to let you control all aspects of all domains hosted within your hosting plan with us. The activation of this secondary control panel login, the "domain user", will create another set of control panel login credentials:

• username: domain.com (where domain.com is the actual domain)
• password: whatever you specify when you enable "domain user".

This account will have access ONLY to that one domain... when they log in, they see their domain and NOTHING else. They can add mail users, see their usage, set up mailing lists, etc. But they don't see any other domains, or any settings that are at your client account level.

How do you enable “domain user” / "domain administrator" for a domain:

Log into the control panel account with your regular control panel "client account" credentials, then click on one of the domains... johnnyrotten.com, for my example here. Once in the "domain view", you'll see an icon near the top called "domain user" / "domain administrator" , click that. Check the box to "allow domain user /  domain administrator access", and set the password to whatever you want. Depending on the version of the Control Panel, you may also have the ability to limit some of the management features available to the domain user login, as well as entering their own personal information. If present, you'll want to be sure to select/enable these options:

• Allow multiple sessions
• Prevent users from working with the control panel until interface screens are completely loaded

Then, click ok/submit/update (depending on version) at the bottom to apply your change.

In this example, J. Rotten can now log into the control panel using "johnnyrotten.com" as the username, and whatever password I specified, and he will have complete access to the domain settings for his domain, and his domain only.

Combine this feature with the fact that you can replace the Plesk logo in the top left hand corner of the control panel with your own logo, and you can do a pretty nice job of giving your users a control panel experience, branded under your services, and locked down to just the settings they should access… all with minimal effort on your part. To change the logo, use the "logo setup" icon available to you when you log in with your control panel "client account".