Feb 19 2010

How to cancel your Plesk Billing license

Brandon Yap

Parallels don’t make it easy for you to cancel your license. Just about every webform will not submit unless you have paid for support.

I have managed to successfully cancel my license by going to the following URL and using it. This URL doesn’t not appear anywhere on the Parallels site. I can’t remember where I found it but it works.

https://www.parallels.com/support/pleskbillingkey


Jun 19 2009

SSL products – addons or stand alone?

RocketGirl

In my little debacle with addons and the default order form, I was made to think about how to use the SSL products.  I wanted it to show as an addon during the ordering process, but in setting up the addon, it wanted to align the billing cycle with the hosting plan cycle, and well.. this just wasn’t going to work, as the SSL couldn’t be monthly!  I also had the problem of wanting a dedicated IP to be a required addon for the SSL cert, and well.. you can’t have addons for an addon!

So after being advised the following: “The same product can be used as a product or as an add-on, not both. What’s worse is that an add-on can only be added once to each product.” I decided that we will have SSL products as standalone with the addon of the dedicated IP.  And perhaps during the ordering process I will pose the question of whether they needed an SSL cert and link back to our SSL cert page for them to select it and put it in the cart.

Oh, and speaking of addons.. it seems you can’t delete them without going into the database to do so!  Why they can’t be listed & managed like all the other products I don’t understand.  So I will be renaming the addons I was playing around with so I know they’re not in use.

Also, the SSL product – because I said yes to it being an addon (in advanced mode for product details) and then applied it as an addon.. it has now disappeared into addon-land where I can’t delete it!  Before I actually used it as an addon it was still listed as a normal product which I could have easily deleted.  But now it’s officially an addon that I will have to just tuck away somewhere never to be used again!

Which reminds me.. I need to setup the SSL cert product again….


Jun 19 2009

My first hiccup – order form broke!

RocketGirl

I’m currently playing around with the default order page just to place dummy orders and see how everything works, and see how it provisions the control panel etc.

But for some reason, now when I select the product and click buy now, it takes me to an almost blank page! All it has there now is the product I selected and the price.. but no other buttons to click anywhere! Normally it has the domain info next or any addons for the product. So it has the one line saying the product & price.. then underneath a blank box called Product Options, but I can’t get anywhere from there.

Here’s what’s happened recently: (but I don’t see how this could have impacted the order form?)

- I removed the tax group and made everything non-taxable. Have decided it’s easier to just say all displayed prices include GST.

- I removed an addon that was mistakenly on each product.

- Had a licensing issue, which parallels logged into our system and fixed.. they said it was a bug (it wasn’t accepting our activation key) so that worked, but then there was a problem with the install domain being different from the license.. so they told us which config file to amend to make it the correct domain. I’ve also corrected the appropriate url info in the order form and company settings. This sounds fairly relevant.. but I’m not even sure it coincides with when the order form stopped working.

I can’t think of anything else I’ve changed.

And even now if I add a new product and assign it to the order form, it’s not showing up on that default order page.

It was suggested to me to clear down the tmp directory, so we tried this.  Still no luck.

Finally a solution:

After fiddling with technical things and trying the tmp directory etc etc etc…I decided to retrace my steps. I added back the addon option, and it worked!! Became thoroughly confused at the terms “options” & “addons” etc and couldn’t understand why it required the product to have addons to work… then remembered the first part of setting up products that had me stumped and which I had initially taken a punt at the answers LOL. It was in the Product Display Information “Addon Option – Require an associated domain, make optional, or make hidden”. I hid it and my order form now works. I still don’t fully understand these 2 options LOL.. but I am getting closer!


Jun 19 2009

My journey begins..

RocketGirl

I have decided to blog my journey of setting up Plesk Billing.  I have read many complaints on the lack of documentation and the costly support from Plesk themselves, and I’m finding it to be true.  I have searched the member forums for answers, but found I had to ask my own questions, and whilst the responses I received were helpful, I was still having to nut things out for myself as I went along, and I found myself wanting to post threads on everything I was learning just so other people searching would actually find some answers!  I said to my husband, I should just blog this, because my threads & posts in the forum (some going unanswered except by myself) were starting to look very blog-like.  So here I am.  I confess my first few posts will be pretty much copy & pasted from my threads in the support forum (lazy :) ) but from hereon in I will try to update this blog as I go.

So, to begin with, I will clarify that I am setting up Plesk Billing v6 which is bundled with Plesk Panel v9.

I must say, it’s quite an overwhelming task, trying to get my head around all the potential orders & processes that we will require, but this week I decided I just need to dive in there and work it out.

I managed to create our hosting products and addons & I added them to the appropriate widget and order form.  I setup client templates and a domain template on the server and selected to use these in the product attributes.  I sorted out the list of TLDs that we sell, but still need to finish the lookup info.  Haven’t sorted out registrar modules just yet either..

Anyway, I got enough things ready for making my first dummy order.