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?
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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/
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 :)
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