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New account creation doesnt work

Amin Taheri

Golden Pleskian
Plesk Certified Professional
I just upgraded a test box from 9.5.3 to 10.2.0 and I got to say I am quite horrified by what I have found, and the absolute lack of all the configuration parameters and pages, as well as the changes to the account creation process.

With the subject of templates, branding, customization, hiding buttons/sections, your advertisements all over the place (even though they are all turned off) and the constant warnings that making a change to the default service plan is against a server policy - and gives you no where to view or change this policy, and the many more confusing changes and port changes, the biggest problem is that the API doesn't work the same anymore.

Previously we used to create an account, and all that was required was the basics:
username, password, phone, email, country and a user template ("template-name" xml node) to create the account, and set the account defaults. This template is what sets the basic and global settings for each, and sets a base disk and bw limit of Xgb - knowing that we will change it immediately.

So know when we use the same exact API call that our system was already using, it seems to work just fine, however the customer can not login.
"Error: Access denied. There are no subscriptions available for this account."

Not having your API be backwards compatible or at least throw an error is horrible.

On top of that, in order to create a subscription they have to have provided you with a domain name.
WTF?

Why would you give such a hurdle to a sign up process?
yes I know in order to have web hosting work you need a domain name, but in our point of view we just want to take their money and set them up with an account - we don't care if they never setup a domain name or not.

Now we are forcing them to have this domain name already before they can buy web hosting - instead of potentially buying hosting and then getting a domain name later. This is a poor user experience.

Now we try and "set account limits" for that customer based on the plan they purchased - using the client set methods to set disk space and bandwidth, etc - it gives back an "OK" - but never changes in the control panel - even after half hour and logging out and back in several times.

Not to mention one thing that is very annoying aside from the loads of spam advertising in the application vault and not being able to find anythign anymore is that when a new domain gets created, it is created like a full blown domain in /var/www/vhosts - however when you go to that disk path there is never an httpdocs folder and there is no indication where the web files actually are.

This means that our support staff actually has to login into the control panel in order to find out where the files are, and then relay that to the admin staff who do the support escalations.

You guys could have made this so much easier on everyone...
As it stands there is no way we could use this product in our production environment and so we have to start looking at Cpanel instead as we cant sit still in our control panel offering too long or we become obsolete.

Its just going to be a pain migrating dozens (almost 100) of servers to another provider, which makes me even more mad lol !
 
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When creating a username I get:

"You can use lowercase alphanumeric, dash, and underscore symbols in the username. The username should start with a lowercase alphabetic character and should be between 1 and 16 characters in length."
and
"The password should be between 5 and 20 characters in length."

When the username and password typed in are clearly within these parameters.
 
RusselM, can you provide a sample username / password (perhaps modified a little to ensure security) which don't pass the validation?
 
I can comment a couple of your concerns

he constant warnings that making a change to the default service plan is against a server policy - and gives you no where to view or change this policy

Default service plan is called "Default Domain" and you can change it anytime. Can you cite or screenshot the warning?

So know when we use the same exact API call that our system was already using, it seems to work just fine, however the customer can not login.
"Error: Access denied. There are no subscriptions available for this account."
Not having your API be backwards compatible or at least throw an error is horrible.

The API is completely backward compatible. Each API call you developed for Plesk 9 will work for Plesk 10 and provide meaningful result. If you find any call which is rejected by Plesk 10, please report it to us - that must be a bug.

Meanwhile Plesk 10 is a huge change comparing to Plesk 9. That means a result of legacy API call cannot be 100% the same as before. It is advised to switch to the new model in order to manage it efficiently. We have a dedicated documents describing all changes in short.

The particular problem you mention has nothing about API, but rather to an UI limitation not allowing "empty" customer to login until a subscription is produced for them. Anyway they cannot do anything until you give them actual hosting to manage. If you still prefer your customers to produce hosting on their own, you can use Reseller accounts. The API syntax will remain almost the same with only few words in XML call changed, so it shall be easy.

On top of that, in order to create a subscription they have to have provided you with a domain name.
WTF?

Hosting subscription requires a domain name naturally for configuring Web, Mail and DNS services. Some systems can offer default 3rd level names in provider's domain like mysite.provider.com or even aw12a34b76.provider.com. Plesk doesn't have native support of that yet, but since you provision account through API you can easily assign a name like that. If you sell a domain name later, they can configure it as a site within given subscription or rename.

If you mean to have your customer creating hosting on their own and you give them only virtual resources, then a Reseller account will solve this problem.

Now we try and "set account limits" for that customer based on the plan they purchased - using the client set methods to set disk space and bandwidth, etc - it gives back an "OK" - but never changes in the control panel - even after half hour and logging out and back in several times.

The documentation I referenced above explains this change clearly. But if you still want to limit an account rather than a hosting subscription - you can use Reseller accounts as a solution.

when a new domain gets created, it is created like a full blown domain in /var/www/vhosts - however when you go to that disk path there is never an httpdocs folder and there is no indication where the web files actually are.

When a new site is created you (or your users) specify its docroot location and it will be located there. As for the folder created in /var/www/vhosts - those are our system files. Same for cPanel - if you created Addon Domain in cPanel, where will you look for its web files?

Regards
 
Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the problem with the given login/password - tried for Users, FTP users and default webspace/subscription user. Could you post exact product version and screenshot?
 
Sergey,

Thanks for the reply.

These issues have left a bitter taste in our mouth and as such we have determined that we will not use Plesk 10 and we are currently evaluating moving to cPanel and migrating all current plesk customers.

Thanks anyways.
 
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