How to Create a User or Contact
There’s a few reasons why you might want to create users or contacts. The following types of users and contacts can be created along with details about how each should be used. Client Centre Users are easier to manage and have far greater reach into your account, while Plesk Users provide more fine-grained controls over specific hosting features.
- Client Centre Users can be created to provide someone access to your account to complete payments or view and respond to tickets from directly within the Client Centre or manage your domain name.
- Client Centre Contacts can be created to ensure your accounting personnel receive invoice notification emails, or your tech support team receives copies of support emails. Any contacts you add here do not have access to your account, but are authorized to communicate with us through tickets. Contacts are *not* authorized to request changes to your account, so the owner of the account will need to chime in on any tickets to provide authorization for changes.
- Plesk Users can be created to supply your web developer access strictly to your hosting (no domain registration access, ordering, billing, invoices, etc) and you can configure their role with fine-grained permissions to ensure they can only access the parts of Plesk of your choosing. This will allow them to complete actions like alter DNS records or create or manage website files with the File Manager or by FTP.
- Plesk Customers (available to resellers only) can be created to provide your customers access to manage their own subscriptions. This is the correct type of User to create for your customers if you’re a reseller.
If you’re looking for FTP or SFTP users, head over here. The details and steps in this article were updated on Mar 14, 2021 to replace the former “Sub-Accounts” functionality with the all new Client Centre Users system.
Client Centre Contacts
To create a Client Centre Contact, login to our Client Centre, then in the upper right corner, choose More > Contacts. Beside “Choose Contact” at the top of the page, select “Add New Contact” from the dropdown. Fill out the person’s contact details, then check off the email notifications you wish for them to receive. For example, if this person works in your accounting department, you would likely check off only “Invoice Emails”. If they work in your tech support department, then you should check “Support Emails”.
Client Centre Users
This replaces both “Client Centre Sub-Accounts” and “Linked Accounts“.
These User Accounts are typically used for employees of your organisation and not occasional contractors.
To create a Client Centre User, login to our Client Centre, then in the upper right corner, choose More > User Management. Under “Invite New User” enter the email address of the person you wish to invite. You may provide them with All Permissions for full access to your account, or you can allow the user access only to the areas they need access to (this is best). Here are some examples:
- For personnel in your accounting department, you would likely enable access to “View & Pay Invoices”
- If this is an account for a manager you trust, you would probably assign access to all areas except “Modify Master Account Profile”
- If you haven’t yet ordered any products and want someone else to do that for you, you probably want to provide “All Permissions” and then you can always step them back later.
- If you’re assigning someone access to manage your domain name registrations, you would check off everything pertaining to domains: View Domains and Manage Domain Settings.
When you invite someone that already has a Websavers account under that email address, they will be able to login to their own account and then access yours from the User Management page. When you invite someone that does not have a Websavers account, they will be prompted to create an account.
Tips:
- Warning: If you assign the user access to “View & Modify Product Passwords”, the sub-account will be able to see and change your login credentials for Plesk.
- If you want the user to be able to access Plesk with the same level of access that you have, enable the Perform Single Sign-On permission and they’ll be able to login to Plesk without seeing your Plesk credentials.
- If you’re inviting your own Account A as a User of Account B, make sure you log out of all accounts after you send the invite. Then when you receive the invite, click the URL within and log in to Account A to accept the invite and the link will be created successfully. If you’re already logged into an account when you click the link, it will not create the link successfully.
Plesk Users
We recommend creating Plesk user accounts when you have a contractor working for you that only requires access to your hosting environment to make changes to your website. Most website developers will want access to your Content Management System (like WordPress) and your hosting control panel so that they can manipulate the underlying files that make up the CMS and its themes and plugins. A Plesk User is the best way to supply this kind of access.
If the person that you’re providing access to already has a Websavers account, rather than creating a Plesk User for them, you may wish to instead invite them to be a user under your own Websavers account. See Client Centre User above to learn how to do this.
Here’s how to create a Plesk User:
- Log in to Plesk.
- Click the Users tab in the main menu
- Select the “Create User Account” button
- Fill in the contact’s name
- Choose the “Use an external email address” option, then fill in their email.
- Select their User Role. In most cases you want “WebMaster”. If you don’t like the roles provided (or you wish to examine them in detail) you can check the specific permissions for a role or create new roles under the “User Roles” sub tab
- You may limit the subscriptions they have access to if you have more than one.
- Provide a username and password for them to login
- Click OK to save your settings
Once the user is created, they will be able to login at the “PLESK URL” shown in the Client Centre after you clicked Manage beside your hosting plan. When you’re logged in to Plesk already, the URL will also be shown in your address bar. It typically looks like this: https://{server_name}.websavers.ca:8443
Plesk Customers (for Resellers)
If you’ve got a reseller account, you’ll want to organize your customers as, well, customers! This way you can give each of your customers their own Plesk access if you decide to, and it gives you a lot of flexibility in managing each customer.
To create a customer account:
- Log in to Plesk.
- Click “Customers” on the left sidebar
- Click “Add a customer”
- Fill out the customer’s information and:
- If you’re moving an existing subscription to this customer, un-check “create a subscription for this customer”
- If you’re setting up a new customer with a new subscription, leave it checked and fill in the subscription details.
- Click OK to save
- If you’re moving an existing subscription to this customer, click Subscriptions on the left, then find the subscription to move in the list. Check the box beside it to select it, then choose the “Select Subscriber” button at the top of the page. Choose your newly created customer in the list and save your changes.
- Your customer will now have access to their subscription(s)!
Security Alert: No matter if it’s a Client Centre or Plesk User, it’s important for security reasons to remember to:
- Only assign permissions or roles that the user absolutely requires to get their job done, and most importantly
- Remove the User when they no longer require access