How to create mail only Hosting Plan using MS Exchange Server for different business model?


Question: How to create mail only Hosting Plan using MS Exchange Server for different business model ?
 
 Answer:

 

This article explains how to configure HC Hosting Plan in accordance with the business offerings of Exchange Hosting Providers.

When you login in HC panel as reseller; go to Hosting Plan > Add Plan, select Plan mode as "Mail Only Hosting" you see different mail related resources with two options "Accumulated & Plan Based".
 
 Using these two options while creating Generic or Mail Only Plan; reseller can create plans according to his exchange hosting business requirements.

Using these two options you can create plans according to your hosting business requirements.

Accumulated

This option is ideal if you plan to offer Exchange services to an organization who wants to create Exchange mailboxes based on total resources available to them. For example, Company-A requested Exchange email hosting with total MailboxSize = 15 GB with 10 Mailboxes, where Company-A has the choice to create up-to 10 mailboxes with different mailbox size but total mailboxes size of all will remain within 15 GB of available quota. Now the domain administrator of this organization can create mailboxes with different mailbox sizes, e.g. assigning 1 GB to Asst. Managers, 2 GB to Managers and 3 GB to Directors.

Now if reseller sells two plans to this Company-A using accumulated options like:

Plan AlphaPlan Bravo
Mailboxes 10Mailboxes 10
Total Mailbox size 15 GBTotal Mailbox size 10 GB

 

These two sold plans resources will be accumulated for Company-A; the total mailboxSize available will increase to 25 GB and they would now able to create 20 mailboxes.

Plan Based

There are Exchange hosting companies which target single email customers and want to charge per mailbox depending on the mailbox size. For example, Company-A requested Exchange email hosting for 10 of his employees where they want 5 mailboxes with 1 GB and 5 mailboxes with 500 MB each. Now to do this, reseller needs to sell Company-A two hosting plans, where resources type of these plans are selected as "Plan Based".
 
 To reflect it in an example; login in HC panel as reseller, go to Hosting Plan > Add Plan, select  Plan mode as "Mail Only Hosting" and on next page, mail resources type as "Plan Based".

Let’s assume reseller creates 2 plans using "Plan Based" options:

Plan AlphaPlan Bravo
Mailboxes 1Mailboxes 1
Mailbox of size 500 MBMailbox of size 1 GB

To meet the requirements of Company-A; reseller will now sell 5 instances of Plan Alpha and 5 instances of Plan Bravo to Company-A.

Now when domain administrator of Company-A will login in HC panel and go to Hosting Services :: Manage Exchange :: Exchange Enabled Organizations :: Mailboxes :: Add Mailbox, HC will give him option to create new mailbox and select Exchange Plan under which this mailbox will be created – the HC panel will list all 10 plan instances sold to Company-A. Once he creates 5 mailboxes with 1 GB (of Plan Bravo) then he will not be able to create another mailbox with 1 GB unless he purchases another plan instance of Plan Bravo from reseller. But obviously he would able to create 5 mailboxes of 500 MB sizes each.
 
 NOTE: The reseller cannot sell both "Accumulated" and "Plan Based" Exchange plans to same webadmin.