Plesk Archives

I 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.

Refreshing a License Key in Plesk

This morning I encountered an odd error on one of my Plesk servers: it wouldn’t let me log in, with an error message like this: I’ve tried running the Plesk repair tool, which found some errors and corrected them, but it kept telling me that that spurious repository could not be opened. I found this … Read more

Redirecting a secure domain in Plesk

There are several ways to make two domains resolve to the same content in Plesk. The easiest option is to setup a Domain Alias. That way, domain1.com and domain2.com both serve the same content from the same subscription. This worked great for non-SSL domains, but if you have a secured domain, the redirection will be … Read more

How to switch off emails from Anacron in Plesk Onyx

In 2011 I wrote an article about how to avoid emails from Dr. Web. In it I was discussing how to switch off these notifications, which are generated when the Dr. Web service updates itself. Here’s an example: /etc/cron.daily/drweb-update: Dr.Web update details: Update server: http://update.msk5.drweb.com/plesk/700/unix Update has begun at Fri May 18 03:53:47 2018 Update … Read more

How to hide the social links at the bottom of Plesk

By default, Plesk displays several links in its footer. Two of them are links to Plesk’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Sometimes less is more, and thankfully there’s an easy way to suppress those links if we don’t want to see them anymore. Simply create a file called /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/panel.ini and add the following content to it: ; … Read more

Testing Incremental Backups in Plesk Onyx

From time to time I get crazy ideas, and last week that crazy ideas was to test how well incremental backups can be restored in the latest version of Plesk. Specifically I wanted to know how Plesk would react in times of a crisis, which usually happens at the worst of times.

Up until recently I’ve always done full backups – but incremental backups are a lot more space saving on the target device, plus it reduces the load on the server and data traffic significantly. Let’s see what these incremental backups are all about.

Wikipedia suggests that after a full backup, each increment needs to be available to make a restore.  This would indicate that deleting one backup in the middle (simulating a failed backup) would mean the restore would fail.

But how does Plesk work, and how would it react if we’d take away an increment in the middle? Would it indeed need all incremental parts to rebuild a backup? Or would it always refer to the full backup and write its increments accordingly? Let’s find out!

I’m using a test system on a CentOS 7.5 server, with Plesk Onyx 17.8 installed. I have a test domain with a default WordPress instance, but it’s not doing much at the moment and could probably do with a quick facelift if anything. 

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How to unlock subscriptions in Plesk Onyx

When parameters for a subscription in Plesk have been modified, Plesk may lock them. This means that when a change is made to the service plan itself, locked subscriptions are not updated by default. To unlock subscriptions and re-integrate them into the service plan, head over to the subscription in question (from the Subscriptions list … Read more