Parallels Plesk

Plesk-LogoI love Plesk – it’s a work of art that makes my life easier. Rather than a “programme” as such, it’s a web interface that takes control of several thousand services on a web server and makes administering domains and hosting a breeze.

Since 2012 I’ve been a certified Parallels Plesk Automation Technician.

How to restart Plesk on CentOS / RHEL / Linux

I had always assumed that to restart Plesk, all that was necessary was the following command: service psa restart However, since Plesk is in charge of a multitude of services that’s not enough. Instead, we should be using service psa stopall service psa start Or if the service command isn’t working for you, you can [...]

Read the full article →

How to give your Plesk users SSH access

By default SSH access is disabled for FTP and web users which is a very good thing. I’d recommend enabling this only if you know exactly who’s connecting to your server and why. In my case, I want to use my server to host Git repositories so I can collaborate with some trusted coding buddies [...]

Read the full article →

How to bring back Scheduled Backups in Plesk 11

For those of you who hadn’t noticed, automatic scheduled backups are no longer working in Plesk 11 with some distributions. It’s not just you, and it’s not just your configuration. It’s a known issue according to this forum thread. Lucky for us there’s a simple script which can bring this ever so important functionality back. [...]

Read the full article →

How to retrieve the Plesk admin password

If you’ve forgotten your password but still have your server’s root credentials, log in and type the following at the command line: /usr/local/psa/bin/admin –show-password This works in Plesk 10 and Plesk 11.

Read the full article →

How to use SFTP with Plesk 10.4.4

We had a discussion recently about using SFTP under Plesk 10. It’s possible, however the feature is not called SFTP explicitly so I thought it’s best to describe how it works here. Note that SFTP is only possible for the main domain owner, not for additional FTP Users that you may create under Web Users… [...]

Read the full article →

How to remove Customer and Business Manager in Plesk

One of the questions that came up at Parallels Summit recently was how to uninstall Customer and Business manager. Plesk doesn’t offer a solution to uninstall things – even though you can add modules, once they’re installed they’re installed. Luckily I remember a good forum thread that’s a bit long so I’ll give you a [...]

Read the full article →

FIXED: The Problem with running PHP as FastCGI Application (WordPress and Plesk)

We’re currently on our way to Kissimmee, FL to join Parallels Summmit, an annual conference from the people who make Plesk. We’re also taking exams in Plesk 10.4.4 so we’re studying it in-depth – I’ve been using the software for over two years now but never had formal training in it. Well here goes! In [...]

Read the full article →

How to avoid emails from Dr. Web

Dr. Web is a Russian anti-virus utility that comes bundled with Plesk. It’s good and it tries to keep the bad guys out. To keep up with all the mutations out there it tries to update itself frequently but often doesn’t succeed because the Dr. Web server is busy or down or somehow not working [...]

Read the full article →

How to install Plesk on new server

The other day I got myself a brand new server – so barebones that I had to do everything myself, including picking a Linux distribution. Sadly the one I wanted (CentOS 6) did not come bundled with Plesk so I had to install it manually. I thought I’d better take some notes so I can [...]

Read the full article →

How to amend an Application Vault Repository in Plesk

I’m currently building a WordPress Hosting Service where customers get hosting with WordPress pre-installed. I also want to offer several pre-installed Themes and Plugins that I’ll deploy from the Plesk Back End using Application Vault. WordPress is already available as a free repository, however it does take some time for new versions to be made [...]

Read the full article →

When Plesk fails to upgrade

I’ve had this issue before: you get a new server, the image is a few revisions behind the current release and your first line of business is to upgrade the system. A few minutes later you check and find that Plesk refuses to start. Bugger. Now what? My Customer Support Gurus always know what to [...]

Read the full article →

How to install Parallels Plesk on a new Linux server

So I’ve expanded my server arsenal to a fifith machine with Strato in Germany. Sadly they only offer an OpenSUSE installation bundled with Plesk (in German – unchangeable to English). What I really wanted was another CentOS system though, which Strato offer – but without Plesk installed. After a bit of hackage, I found out [...]

Read the full article →

Where are the Backup Files in Plesk?

By default, they’re located in /var/lib/psa/dumps It’s useful to clear this directory out every once in a while, especially because Plesk doesn’t overwrite old backups. So if you ever find that you’re using 60GB of storage on your system, but are fully aware that your entire site shouln’t be bigger than 100MB, then this is [...]

Read the full article →