Unattended Installation of Plesk in DigitalOcean

Unattended Installation of Plesk in DigitalOcean

Why in the World Would I Need This?

I spend a lot of time developing and testing all kinds of cool stuff for web hosting, and I’m using VMs with Plesk for my experiments. As you can imagine, installing and configuring a new Plesk installation every time you need one can be a bit of a bore. When tinkering, I am using DigitalOcean cloud services, and pre-configured system image is a major time saver. Yes, you heard it right! Plesk handles server cloning really well.

Even if you do not do testing, but are in the managed hosting business, use DigitalOcean, and are sick and tired of installing Plesk manually, this article may be of use for you.

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About Plesk URL or Telling Customers the Right Address to Go to

Introduction

A long time ago Plesk had one good little feature: when typing the panel address in your browser address bar, if you specified the port (8443), but omitted the encryption method (https), Plesk would redirect you to the address https://<server_hostname>:8443. In version 11.5, we replaced the lighttpd web server that served Plesk with nginx. And broke that good little feature.

Right away, our users pointed out that breaking good little features and giving nothing in return is bad. Please forgive and forget 🙂 As you can see in Plesk 12.0 preview (available through autoinstaller with –all-versions key), we returned the previous behavior.

What’s our point in telling this story? We wanted to share one interesting use-case proposed by our users and to contribute to it.Continue reading

Slave DNS and Plesk

Slave DNS +

Updated: April 2021

Preface

There are several reasons why you might need at least two DNS servers for serving your sites:

  • You purchased a domain name from a domain registrar. To delegate the domain, many registrars require the domain zone to be served by at least two name servers residing in different IP subnets.
  • You have several hosting servers, and you have not grown enough to use the products like PPA or PA, but you want to use a single set of name servers for all the domains you host.
  • You want to have your own name servers and not depend on third parties.
  • You want the WHOIS records for your domains to list your name servers.

Usually you would set up a couple of name servers in the Master/Slave mode. Then you create domain zones on both servers, but administer resource records of the domain zones only on the master server. The secondary (slave) server automatically downloads the changes from the master. Thus, you always have two active name servers with the same set of domain zones and resource records.Continue reading