Serving Non-Technical Customers

Some of your customers may lack technical background in system administration, so it is natural for them to feel uncomfortable when they see the full set of tools that the Customer Panel offers. Even worse, they may corrupt configuration files and complicate troubleshooting if they attempt to use the tools. To avoid these situations and present your customers with a simple and lightweight Customer Panel, we recommend that you subscribe them to the Default Simple hosting plan available in Service Plans > the Hosting Plans tab.

This plan allows customers to carry out only simple routine operations, leaving more complex tasks to your support service. Although it already contains only the most frequently used and popular tools, you are free to fine-grain the plan settings.

If you do not intend to create special plans for such audience, it is possible to limit the number of tools and settings on the per-subscription basis using the instructions we provide in this section. The instructions below explain how to achieve the successful user interface simplification: Practically, you should hide resources and tools your customers are not going to use.

Hiding Unused Resources

The idea of this modification is straightforward: In hosting plan or subscription settings, the Resources tab, set all unused limits to 0. According to Visibility of Hosting Features in the Customer Panel, this will hide such resources in Customer Panel.

For example, if you set the mailboxes limit to 0, the Mail section will not be shown in Customer Panel. Read more about the resources in the Resources section.

Hiding Unused Tools

The set of tools available to customers in Customer Panel is defined by the subscription or plan settings, the Permissions tab. For example, if you clear the DNS zone management option, the tools to manage DNS will not be shown in Customer Panel. Read more about the permissions in the Permissions section.

Resources and Tools of Default Simple Hosting Plan

Initially, the Default Simple hosting plan includes the following tools and settings:

  • Web hosting access
  • Presence Builder
  • File Manager
  • Website statistics
  • Securing sites with SSL/TLS
  • Applications
  • Databases