Help Understanding Plesk?

Question

TL;DR: Is Plesk simply a control panel? Or does it take the sting out of (web) server management?

I manage a few Wordpress sites for myself and a couple clients. I used to host them on a small Ubuntu VPS, but I migrated to shared hosting since I was afraid I would neglect to do something on my VPS and end up with an insecure or poorly-performing webserver.

I love the horsepower per dollar ratio of a VPS. Somebody mentioned Plesk to me as something of a middle ground between a standalone CLI-based VPS and a shared hosting account.

My question is: What exactly is Plesk? Is it just a control panel? Other than having a GUI to use, does it actually take the sting out of managing a (webserver) VPS?

My issue with a VPS-based webserver wasn’t the issue of having to do things via CLI, per se, but rather that I, as a Linux and Sysadmin novice, was afraid of doing something negligent.

Does Plesk sound like a solution for a guy who wants a good bang-per-buck webserver but doesn’t have a wide range of Linux knowledge?

Lukas Hertig · Answer

Hello,

Lukas here from Plesk here - I’m not a developer :-) . Yes - I have been afraid of running VPSs as well in the past. But since a few years, I have 3 different Plesk servers running on DigitalOcean and I almost never need to contact our own support. And I’m definitely not a good sysadmin - I can do a few shell commands on bash, but that’s it. And I never needed anything more for running my WordPress websites.

**What makes me so sure about this? **

DigitalOcean DNS is integrated at one-click. If you then use ns1 and ns2.digitalocean.com as nameservers, all DNS records are kept in sync automatically, whatever you change inside Plesk.
Plesk is managing ALL operating system components and keeps them up2date
We are just about to switch to completely automated updates of the system within the next few weeks or it has already happened (we do a gradual roll-out)
Plesk is secured by default (Firewall, Fail2ban, Web Application Firewall etc. are pre-installed and pre-activated)
SSL via Let’s encrypt is one-click
WordPress security can be fully automated
If something would ever fail, you can use the free “Repair Kit” extension to check and auto-fix your configurations - that helped me in 99% of the cases
etc. etc. :)

If you run WordPress, Plesk is the way to go. It includes the WordPress toolkit also in the free edition that you can get on the marketplace for up to 3 domains: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/plesk

If you have more than 3 domains and/or need the full WordPress Toolkit functionality, you could either upgrade to a Web Pro or a Web Host edition license as mentioned here: www.plesk.com/upgrade

for further questions, please reach out!

www.plesk.com/support (first 30 days of support are free included with the free edition)

enjoy :)

Nick Wade · Answer

Hi friend,

Plesk does position their product for the kinds of needs you describe, and it’s very popular. They recently published an article on our blog that you may find interesting: https://blog.digitalocean.com/how-to-10x-your-web-wordpress-agency/

And you can get started in a few seconds with Plesk on the DigitalOcean Marketplace if you like the idea: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/

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