Setting Up Branded Domain Names for Resellers

Resellers naturally want to hide the fact that their business is selling resources of their hosting providers. If the customers know this fact, they may refuse the resellers' offerings and subscribe directly to the hosting provider. To avoid this, Business Manager allows resellers to use their own domains names as access points to the system.

When a reseller asks you to configure the access with a branded domain name, perform the following steps:

1. Define what Panel serves the reseller's subscription. This will help you define how much domain names (one or two) you will need to hide your domain names from the reseller's customers.
2. Adjust DNS settings. Update the settings so that the branded domain names point to Panel and Business Manager IP addresses.
3. Adjust the domain name branding on the Panel server.
4. Change the reseller's URLs.

Below we discuss these steps in more details.

Define what Panel serves the reseller's subscription

To see the host name of Panel that serves the reseller's subscription, go to the Business Operations > Subscriptions page and open the subscription page.

If the subscription is created on a remote Panel (a Panel installed on a different host), ask the resellers to provide you with two domain names: you will need the to replace both Panel host name and Business Manager host name to which customers are redirected for authorization purposes. If the Panel that serves the reseller's subscription is local (installed on a single host with Business Manager), one domain name is enough.

Adjust DNS settings

This step requires your cooperation with the reseller. You can make the domain names point to your IP addresses the following ways:

• You add DNS record mapping the reseller's domain names to the IP addresses of the Business Manager and Panel hosts and tell the reseller to set your nameservers in the domain settings. Learn how to add DNS records in the section DNS.
• If the reseller has purchased the DNS service together with the domain names, the reseller should add the corresponding records to the domain name registrar's nameservers.

Adjust the domain name branding on the Panel server.

If the Panel that serves reseller's subscription, skip this step. Otherwise, configure the Panel host to redirect visitors of the <remote_reseller_host> to Business Manager SSO page. To perform this configuration, run the following command on the remote Panel server:

• On Linux systems: /usr/local/psa/bin/sso --set-branded-idp -domain <remoteresellerhost> -url https://<mainresellerhost>:8443
• On Windows systems: %plesk_dir%\bin\sso.exe --set-branded-idp -domain <remoteresellerhost> -url https://<mainresellerhost>:8443, where %plesk_dir% is a directory in which the Panel is installed.

Change the reseller's URLs

Update the reseller's Business Manager URL for customers and Online store URL to the new domain name. To do this, log in as the reseller and go to the Business Setup > All Settings > Branding.

After performing these steps, the reseller's customers access Business Manager and panel with URLs like the these:

• Panel: https://<reseller_host_1>:8443
• Business Manager: https://<reseller_host_2>:8443/plesk-billing/client

Note: if the subscription is served by the local Panel, then the <reseller_host_1> and <reseller_host_2> are equal.

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