If you’re involved in managing servers for web hosting then you’ll appreciate the importance of having a simple, yet highly effective method of monitoring and looking after your hosting infrastructure. The most effective way of managing all the processes related to routine tasks of hosting infrastructure is to use a web hosting control panel.
Plesk vs cPanel – two hosting control panels compared
Which VPS Control Panel is right for you?
We’ve firmly established the VPS control panel (Virtual Private Server) as an important component in the web hosting landscape. For web hosting admins and end-users, it’s been a blessing to centrally manage every website on their server. This simplified account management helps avoid the tedium of performing the same essential tasks on different systems every day.
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But as with any good idea, everyone wants in on the action. Same happened here. Competition has given rise to a rapid increase in the number of control panels on the market. With some even beginning to specialize in particular hosting environments.
To help you find the solution that’s right for you, let’s take a look at HSPcomplete, Plesk, and cPanel. These are the 3 control panels users most often go for in Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting.
Plesk Onyx
Award-winning Plesk garnered its accomplishments from exemplary abilities in VPS and shared hosting environments. Plesk’s superior VPS control panel can install and handle all the systems and applications you might need to host on a single VPS server. With its great versatility and scalability, Plesk users can even expand and manage anything up to thousands of virtual hosts on one server. It’s customizable to meet customer requirements and truly offers users an impressive VPS control panel.
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HSPcomplete
HSPcomplete is a lightweight piece of software that provides a single UI to help users manage their VPS hosting account. Its main selling point is that it’s simple to use. But it does also offer a comprehensive array of useful features. Overall, HSPcomplete is a competent VPS control panel offering great reliability. The let down is having less functionality than you need to successfully manage reseller accounts.
cPanel/WHM
cPanel has also received award recognition for its performance as a leading VPS control panel. It trails Plesk in second place, although quite a lot of web hosts and users have adopted it due to its clean interface and rich variety of features. The UI is simple to use, allowing even beginners to get up and running relatively quickly. However, there’s a disadvantage to its icon-based approach compared to the templates used in the control panels above. Because it tends to be resource-hungry and place greater demands on disk space.
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It can be challenging to find a clear winner when auditioning for the ideal VPS panel solution, so let’s try and make it simpler.
The cPanel/WHM (Web Host Manager) will always be a good choice thanks to its simplicity, but its weighty footprint and icon-heavy interface design slow it down compared to the other VPS control panels. cPanel is certainly adequate on a VPS front, but it might not offer the same high level of performance that a VPS control panel like Plesk Onyx can give.
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In the end, the right control panel is the one that best suits the individual, and individual choice is of course very subjective. The best way to manage your virtualized environment or typical hosting arrangement is to try out the solutions and see which one you like most. You should be to able to find live demos of all these packages to give them a test drive.
CPanel to Plesk Migration Guide
All web hosting companies need to do server migrations – an essential and routine task in our line of work. When it comes to migrating servers and accounts, you need to do so with proper planning and perfect execution. Otherwise, it can cause website downtime and complications. Hence, we created this cPanel to Plesk migration guide to smoothen the process.
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You may need a server migration for a variety of reasons, but in most cases, it’s either because of security improvements or business growth and expansion. Millions of hosting servers use Plesk and cPanel as their control panels. And that’s why a cPanel to Plesk migration is one of the most common tasks tech support employees do.
Preparation steps for cPanel to Plesk migration
Failing your cPanel to Plesk migration can lose you a lot of time. So ensure your Plesk migration process is seamless with these necessary preparation steps. And make sure you prepare both servers for the process. These are the essential steps that you need to follow to prepare the migration in a proper way.
- Make sure that you have enough disk space on both cPanel and Plesk servers. The space available within the source needs to be at least the same as the amount of data transferred. And the destination should have at least 5 GBs more than that.
- Use you migration manager to make sure that the versions of Plesk and cPanel you have are compatible for the transfer.
- Install the Plesk transfer and migration manager on the destination.
- In order to make sure there are no IP issues, add one or more shared IP addresses. Meanwhile, follow up with the exact number of dedicated IP addresses within both servers.
- If you have mailing lists in the source, install the Mailman mailing list manager in the destination server. And that way, you can handle them properly.
- To connect the destination server to the source server, allow the IP of the Plesk server within the cPanel firewall. Also, configure the source server to allow SSH connections.
- Make sure that SELinux is disabled on your Plesk server while the process is ongoing.
Plesk and cPanel store virtual hosts in different paths. If you’re transferring to a new server, change its virtual host location to ‘/home’ for a smooth transfer.
How to execute cPanel to Plesk migration
Migrations need different time frames, depending on the size of the data and your network speed. But do schedule the execution for quiet hours so that the transfer can go faster. Configure your “Transfer and Migration Manager” with Plesk’s interface. Then change the source server details including password, IP address, upload path, data that needs to be transferred, and add some custom rules just in case some conflicts occur while the migration takes place.
One of the important things you need to do is IP address mapping. So remember to map all the dedicated and shared IPs within the source server to all of the corresponding IPs which are in the destination server. When the process is finished, make sure to look at the report to ensure that everything was transferred correctly.
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How to overcome Migration Agent downsides
Although you can use the migration agent for a more automatized migration, you may run into some bumps.
1. Your FTP account passwords don’t get migrated and you generate new ones. Your solution is to track the passwords and update your users.
2. You will not manage to migrate DNS zones. So you have to edit your domain DNS records post-migration to configure them properly.
3. You won’t transfer data such as SSL certificates, PHP extensions, Apache modules, Domain keys and IP blacklists. So you’ll have to configure them manually in your destination server.
4. Often, the migration agent splits user accounts with multiple databases that are under one domain into several user accounts. So, you need to find the database dump within the source server. Then copy all of it to the destination server manually.