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.

How to replace an Amazon EC2 instance running CentOS and Plesk

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In this video I will show you how you can replace a running EC2 instance with a larger one. You may want to do this if you find that you need bigger and better hardware to serve your website, or to move from a development system to a more powerful production system. In this example … Read more

How to log into MySQL as root user in Plesk

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You may have noticed that there is no MySQL root user on servers running Plesk. That’s because Plesk renames this user into “admin” by default – for security reasons. The password for the admin MySQL account is the same as for the Plesk Panel admin account. Even so, when you try to login to MySQL … Read more

How to install WordPress in Plesk 11.5

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In this video I will show you the two ways of installing WordPress in Plesk 11.5: the “one-click” way and the “custom installer” way. Both options have their advantages: the first offers extremely fast deployment, and the other offers very fine grained control, all courtesy of the WordPress APS package. This screencast was inspired by … Read more

How to allow passive FTP connections in Plesk on Amazon EC2

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AWS LogoPassive FTP connections should work out of the box in Plesk. If no other firewall or NAT is interfering with it.

I’ve recently noticed that when I install Plesk on Amazon EC2 every passive FTP connection fails with an error such as “Server sent passive reply with unroutable address. Passive mode failed.”

The reason for this mishap is twofold:

EC2 instances are behind a NAT, and therefore have an internal (unroutable) IP, and an external (public) IP. When a passive connection request comes in, ProFTP – Plesk’s default FTP Server – tells the connecting client its internal private IP address, and in turn quite rightly fails to connect to it.

On top of that, we need to make sure to open a range of ports we want to use for passive FTP connections and tell ProFTP only to use those.

Let’s do all this this step by step!

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How to change the default directory for backups in Plesk

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By default the Backup Manager in Plesk stores local backups in /var/lib/psa/dumps. You can change this location by editing /etc/psa/psa.conf. Find the following block in the file: # Backups directory DUMP_D /var/lib/psa/dumps DUMP_TMP_D /tmp Change the path for DUMP_D to your new desired location, then restart Plesk for the changes to take effect: service psa … Read more

How to install Apache mod_pagespeed on CentOS with Plesk

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Apache-LogoI bumped into Kristian Markroft from Simplyroot in New Orleans last week, and he told me about an interesting speed-up module for the Apache Webserver.

mod_pagespeed is an open source project which speeds up page loads without having to change the code of the actual page. mod_pagespeed does this by adding filters before pages are served. For example it will resize images and minify CSS/JS files, which can speed up page load considerably. The project is hosted on Google Code:

Let’s see how we can install it on CentOS, test to see if it works and how to manage it in Plesk.

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How to create an Extension in Plesk

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Extensions are to Plesk what Plugins are to WordPress. They allow developers to add functionality to the Plesk Panel via PHP, make CSS and JavaScript tweaks and allow a very fine grained amount of customisations. Creating modifications in isolated files instead of hacking Plesk core files also assures that upgrades won’t overwrite any changes you’ve … Read more