4PSA Clients Area 3 Is Available!

This is quite of a long expected announcement. We have more formal announcements on our PR, but I think that you are interested on what happened behind the stages :). BTW, we have a 10% discount to celebrate this release (for all 4PSA and Parallels owned licenses). The discount code is

clarea3

and can be used in the Online Store when you make a purchase! The discount code is valid until 23 September 2008.

Why an Updated Clients Area?

There are a couple of reasons.

First:
Our ordering facilities were designed five years ago. At that time, software was owned. As far as I remember, we started to offer leased licenses, but they were not very successful. Even providers used to purchase licenses rather than lease them. However, in the last year we noticed that there is a powerful trend to lease rather than own licenses. This is quite normal, considering that most of our customers are providers. For them it makes more sense to lease licenses because this better fits into their business structure.
So, with the new Clients Area customers can provision and terminate (unfortunately providers will have customers that want to cancel their server or VPS) leased licenses. This can be done from the Clients Area or using an API. The interesting part is that they can do this not only for 4PSA products, but for Parallels products also. We have a lot of customers purchasing Parallels licenses from us and they will find it very easily to provision licenses.

Second:
Partners’ invoicing was pretty complicated for us, therefore smaller partners had to pay per purchase.
With the new features, even smaller partners can be invoiced monthly. This way they will not spend precious time on submitting payment information with any purchase.

Third:
There were some areas of the Clients Area that were not so efficient from the customer’s perspective. It was OK to manage 10-20 license keys, but we have partners with several thousands keys under their administration. For these it was kind of difficult to manage the keys.

We fixed all these issues in the latest release.

7 Comments

You can post comments in this post.

  • Looks like a back door way to increase prices and force many users on to unlimited user plans when we may only have 200 accounts on the server 🙁

    Not good – sorry guys, but this is a step in the wrong direction.

    Christian 16 years ago Reply

  • This was done to match Plesk licensing as it was very confusing for many users, there is no price increase. Actually we decreased many lease licenses prices.

    I don’t think that anyone needs a backdoor to increase prices these days. For example we have not increased prices in the last 5 years, although even the utility prices doubled.

    4psa 16 years ago Reply

  • Thanks.

    So if I have 200 accounts on a server will it cost me the same to buy an owned licence now as it did last week?

    Especially as you say there is no price increase?

    Many thanks.

    Christian 16 years ago Reply

  • For 200 accounts you will have to go with the unlimited license. Last week maybe you could have bought the 300 domains license. If you have 200 domains on the server most likely you have the Plesk unlimited license, therefore the logical step, considering that you want to grow is to buy the unlimited license for the 4PSA as well.

    For the record, over 93% of the old 4PSA 300 domains license are installed on servers with Plesk 100 domains license.

    To avoid confusion is normal to sync the licensing methods with Plesk licensing.

    I guess you can not make everyone happy.

    4psa 16 years ago Reply

  • I’m a little confused by this move. When plesk announced their pricing changes we received an email from 4psa sales urging us to purchase owned licenses from 4psa (we purchased a plesk 10 and 100 license) because 4psa would be still honoring the old pricing. Now that’s all gone? How do these pricing changes affect me?

    Also at the parallels summit 2008 parallels announced that they would be creating an SMB edition of plesk (for one domain with one admin). What the status of this now? Our plesk 10 server only has one domain on (never more) it and I don’t want to be forced to pay even more! Even at the parallels summit they stated that the majority of plesk servers only have a few domains on them.

    I’ve emailed 4psa sales at 11:30 MST yesterday and still haven’t got a reply back ..

    Marcel 16 years ago Reply

  • Hi,

    First, this is not a price change, it’s only a licensing change for 4PSA products.

    Also, users that purchased the products in the past will be able to renew/reinstate with the old licensing limits and the same prices.

    The same with Plesk and owned licenses (although does not have any connection with Plesk).

    I don’t know when Plesk SMB will be released, it’s not our product. 🙂

    4psa 16 years ago Reply

  • Thanks for explaining things!

    Marcel 16 years ago Reply

Post A Reply