Start your own hosting brand

This tutorial sets up a hosting brand of your own: an organization that sells Coritan products under your name and at your prices, to customers who sign in on your storefront instead of coritan.com. You create the organization, give it your name, logo and legal details, put a first product on sale, and read your catalogue the way your storefront will. Each section ends with something you can check before you go on.

Your customers pay your prices. Coritan keeps a platform cut of the money they pay you, tiered by your monthly volume, and charges you for the hosting you resell below its list price, by use for compute servers; your price for that hosting can be no lower than it costs you (How money moves). You build the storefront, the site your customers use, on the Organization API: this tutorial gets everything ready for it. How organizations work explains the parts first.

• The Coritan account that should own the organization, signed in. The resources behind the products you resell run on this account, and only this account can delete the organization.
• A slug for the organization, such as acme. It appears in every Organization API path, and you cannot change it later.
• A terminal with curl, for section 4.

1. In the dashboard, go to Organizations and select New organization.
2. Enter a Name, such as Acme Hosting. Customers see it on your storefront.
3. Check the Slug. The dashboard fills it in from the name until you edit it.
4. Under Billing mode, choose Platform merchant of record. Coritan then takes your customers' payments and pays you each month. You can change the mode later (Organization billing).
5. Select Create organization.

The organization's Overview tab opens, and you are its owner. The organization is active, and its header shows the tier Coritan set; the Overview tab shows its limits (Create an organization).

1. In the organization, select Settings, then Storefront.
2. On the Branding card, fill in the Logo URL, the Primary colour and Secondary colour as hex codes such as #0F2A57, and the Support email. Add the Terms of service URL and Privacy policy URL when you have them. Select Save changes on the card.
3. Select General. On the Legal entity card, fill in the Legal name, the Registered address and, if you have one, the Tax / VAT ID. Invoice PDFs print them. Select Save changes on the card.

Each card saves on its own, and the footer counts the changes you have not saved yet. Your storefront reads the saved details through the Storefront API (Change organization settings).

A platform product is backed by a Coritan product: when a customer orders it, Coritan creates the real resource, such as a game server on App Deployment.

1. In the organization, select Catalogue, then New product….
2. Enter a Name, such as Minecraft 4 GB, and check the Slug, which your storefront uses in the product's address. You cannot change it later.
3. Under Kind, choose Platform product, and pick the Coritan product to resell in the Platform product list. The list is grouped by product, such as App Deployment or Cloud Compute, and shows each entry's list price.
4. Select Create product.
5. The product's page opens. Select New plan…, the first button in its heading while the product has no plan on sale.
6. Enter a Plan name, such as Monthly, and choose the Billing cycle.
7. Choose the Currency, one your customers can pay in, and enter the Price. The hint under Price names the least it may be: for a compute plan what it costs you sitting idle all month, and for other plans the wholesale price Coritan charges your organization for the hosting in that billing cycle and currency.
8. Select Add plan.

The plan appears under Plans, and the product list counts it under Plans on sale. Edit plan… changes its price later; the services already on it keep what they pay (Set up products and pricing).

Your storefront reads your brand and your products through the Storefront API, which needs no credential. Read them the same way, with your own slug in place of acme:

curl https://api.coritan.com/api/v1/orgs/acme/storefront/branding
curl https://api.coritan.com/api/v1/orgs/acme/storefront/products

The first answer holds your org_name, logo_url and colours, and the second lists your product in products. A change can take up to a minute to show there, because the answers may be cached (Show your catalogue with the Storefront API).

Slug already taken

Another organization uses that slug. Choose a different one.

Product limit reached

Your organization holds as many products as its tier allows, so New product… is turned off. Reuse a product you no longer sell, or ask support to raise the limit.

404 Organization not found from the Storefront API

The slug in the address is wrong, or the organization is not active. The Storefront API answers only for an active organization.

• Build a storefront on the Organization API, the site where your customers order and pay
• Manage members and roles, to bring your team in
• The staff console, where your team looks after customers and their servers