Plesk

Technical Aspects

The protocol is based on HTTP/1.1. The same endpoint (URL) is used for
all operations. The data is sent using
“application/x-www-formurlencoded” encoding.

In order to prevent malicious usage, the protocol access should be
authenticated. BASIC HTTP authentication is supported (see the section 2
of RFC 2617). It is required
to use HTTPS protocol to protect login/password from being intercepted.

There are two types of the protocol implementation:

Name Description License Billing Conditions Supported Requests
Standard

Intended for managing regular third-party licenses.

Example: an application that scans the server for
vulnerabilities and reports them to the administrator.

One license per server/instance. Each active license is a
subject for billing with the flat SKU/price.
  1. License Creation/Renewal/Upgrade Request
    (the PURCHASE, RENEW, and UPGRADE actions)
  2. License Termination Request
With reporting

In addition to what is possible with “standard”, it can be also
used to collect resource usage statistics per each license from
the ISV endpoint.

Typically this type of protocol is used for licensing access to
SaaS applications, where the end customer is billed based on
the amount of used resources (so-called “pay-as-you-go”
licensing).

Example: an application that stores backups in the cloud (a
customer is billed based on the amount of actually consumed
disk space).

One license per server/instance. Each license is free and is
used for identifying the Plesk server instance for usage
tracking. License can be considered as a container for certain
resource usage counters. Each such counter is used for billing
a customer at the flat SKU/price multiplied by the counter
itself.
  1. License Creation/Renewal/Upgrade Request
    (the PURCHASE, RENEW, and UPGRADE actions)
  2. License Termination Request
  3. Get License Key Info Request