All the New Plesk Obsidian Features

Plesk’s evolution is an ongoing process since the dynamic hosting industry continues to change proactively. Cloud technologies keep revolutionizing the industry and IT professionals need help managing multiple environments and services more efficiently. Productivity, security and usability are key here and Plesk Obsidian is the timely solution. To help you better understand the level of improvements of the new Plesk version, here’s an overall view of new and updated Plesk Obsidian features. On Sep 25th 2019, Obsidian became RTM.

Advanced Monitoring & Grafana Extensions

Advanced Monitoring helps you stay in the loop regarding server and site availability. So you can get to the heart of any issues.

Since availability is key in the Obsidian release, usage is important because you want to react quick when resources become overstretched. Hence, you can now enable alerts to tell you if things like CPU, RAM, and Disk IO are becoming overburdened.

The new Grafana extension works hand in hand with Advanced Monitoring to chart info and stats in order to make them more understandable. The new Grafana charts supersede the old HealthMonitoring tool.

Moving Domains Between Subscriptions

For better security, it makes sense to separate your sites – but it’s also helpful to keep your staging and production sites apart. Now, Plesk Obsidian’s UI and CLI give anyone you choose the freedom to move domains between subscriptions. Just make sure that the target subscription has enough headroom to handle the added load, and you’re good to go.

Composer V2.0 – PHP Dependency Manager

Here are all the things you can do, or don’t need to do, with the new PHP dependency manager.

SSH access no longer needed for PHP composer

You can now run the full range of convenient PHP Composer actions, even without SSH access. It’s possible to set up environment variables, modify your composer.json and execute the Install and Update commands.

Dependencies – Just click to install and update

You can perform tests, run dependencies, or create a classmap. But what you won’t need to do is memorize all the commands and options to install them. Plesk Obsidian can handle this heavy load for you now.

Soon you won’t even need to stress about partially-updated dependencies taking down your production site. Test the latest updates until you’re sure dependencies are safe before pushing your site live.

Update dependencies when everything looks safe

Updating dependencies is a double-edged sword. It’s something you need to do to stay on top of security risks. But you also know it’s something that can break your website. Though minor updates pose less of a risk, major ones can bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

So you’d be happy to know that you can now assess the potential risks right from the Obsidian interface. As they say – Forewarned is forearmed!

Get the correct PHP version automatically

Now your site will use the PHP version that composer.json specifies – automatically. Composer will run using the right PHP handler instead of the system default. Hence, the one the individual website uses. (There are plans to have Plesk be able to choose the appropriate PHP version and handler). Log in using SSH and type in the “php” command.

Improved File Manager UX

Now File Manager makes you even more productive thanks to mass upload and file search. You can upload and extract RAR, TAR, TAR.GZ, and TGZ archives.

Repair Kit: Self-repair Tool

Plesk Obsidian Repair Kit is a powerful self-repair tool, automatically detecting and resolving issues with Plesk or its related services. It lets you view a list of processes currently running on the server and filter them by domains and disable them. You can also see the total RAM, CPU, and Disk usage for all processes running on the server or for individual processes.

Soon it will be possible to use a list of MySQL queries and processes to discover why MySQL consumes excessive resources and which domain is to blame.

Server-side restrictions for Plesk Admins

Restricted Access mode lets you control which administrators get access to which server administration tools and settings. You’ll find it under the “Administration Tools” tab in both Power User and Service Provider views.

Control which tools, services, resources and settings your admins access while in Power User view, with Restricted Mode active. Just look under the “Hosting Tools” tab.

Essentially, you’re allowing your customers to have Plesk administrator access, without worrying about them wreaking havoc on critical and sensitive settings.

SSL It!

Make sure you keep your server protected around the clock via SSL/TLS certificates from leading, trusted certificate authorities, like Let’s Encrypt and DigiCert.

We’ll be adding support for more of these in future. In the meantime, here’s what you can use SSL It! for.

  • Buying, installing, and renewing certificates from a variety of CAs.
  • Securing your domain, webmail, the “www” subdomain, and as many aliases as you want. Get a clear view of what’s secured and what isn’t.
  • Automatically issuing, installing and renewing Let’s Encrypt certificates for domains secured with invalid certificates (self-signed, expired, or issued by a non-trusted CA.)
  • Managing HSTS, OCSP Stapling, and HTTP to HTTPS redirect.
  • Seeing the SSL/TLS status of the domain, subdomains, and domain aliases at a glance.
  • Getting an A+ rating from ssllabs.
  • Easily viewing SSL/TLS status via a small indicator on the Domain page.
  • Use the most up to date TLS versions and ciphers.

SNI for Mail Services

Keep your email conversations private, because you never know who may be spying in. You can simply secure SMTP, IMAP, and POP connections to your mail server with an SSL/TLS Certificate.

However, if you offer mail services for more than one domain, your users may have trouble with their mail clients. But you can fix this by using individual SSL/TLS certificates for each domain. Thanks to Plesk Obsidian and the SNI support provided by Postfix and MailEnable.

Personalized HTML Notifications

HTML-based email notifications help improve user experience. But they also keep you in control of your server and sites when you’re not logged into Plesk. You can read these HTML-formatted messages more easily than plain text.

Plus, the shared design makes messages more attractive and sets them apart visually from other correspondence. Use the Plesk default HTML templates or customize the look of your notifications with HTML formatting. There’s bold and italics, headers, numbered and bulleted lists, and more.

Backup Optimizations

We’ve reduced the free server disk space needed to back-up to Google, Amazon S3, FTP, and One Drive cloud storage. Now, restoring a subscription from a full server backup requires only additional free disk space equal to the subscription space. Instead of the full server backup.

Meanwhile, backing up the server to cloud storage only requires additional free disk space equal to that of two subscriptions. Rather than the entire server’s disk space. Hopefully, this has made operations faster on backups that are stored remotely. For example, you can now remove backups stored in the cloud four times quicker than before.

Revised Plesk UI and More Key Improvements

We’ve modernized the overall Plesk UI to address some of the UX shortfalls our users reported. Notice that the Plesk interface now looks more like plesk.com. There’s more to come – but for now we’ve improved the appearance and behavior of individual Plesk elements, colors and font sizes. Then, aligned all elements to a grid.

There have also been some key additions: 

  1. Precompiled PageSpeed:
    The PageSpeed module is now precompiled with NGINX.
  2. Automatic Restarts:
    Plesk services that crash on systemd-based Linux OSes (CentOS7, RHEL 7, Ubuntu 16.04/18.04, Debian 8/9) will now restart automatically. Apache graceful restart is now strong enough to be set as the default to reduce downtime for websites.
  3. Immediate Default Security:
    Secured by default: mod_security and fail2ban v0.10 are active straight away.
  4. Easier Plesk Access:
    Plesk entry point has been optimized for Clouds like Amazon and Digital Ocean. Access Plesk via https://<host-name-or-IP> without specifying the TCP port 8443.
  5. Default HTTP to HTTPS:
    Newly created websites have an SEO-friendly HTTP to HTTPS redirect enabled by default.
  6. PHP-FPM & Apache Tweaks:
    Services improvements will give you more reliability with restarts. PHP engines supplied with Plesk contain popular PHP extensions like sodium, exif, and fileinfo.

It is worth mentioning that, starting with Plesk Obsidian, Plesk is announcing a monthly release cycle in order to always deliver value through secure and stable software to our Partners and Customers. Once you upgraded to Plesk Obsidian and allowed automatic updates through Plesk Server settings, you will always and automatically be on the latest version of the software. See below a complete comparison between Onyx and Obsidian – the complete list of arguments about why to upgrade:

Plesk Onyx vs Plesk Obsidian

Plesk Onyx vs Plesk Obsidian INFOGRAPHIC

Check more podcasts

Listen more

HTTP to HTTPS – Here’s What to Do

HTTP to HTTPS

HTTP to HTTPS is the key to making your customers feel safe from the bad guys out to steal their data. Here’s how to secure your site and your business.

Some of the major web browsers have begun to warn users when they visit websites without SSL certificates. Firefox is one. Chrome is another. But why should that bother you? Well, because anyone who visits your site will be told that it’s unsafe, and they might want to turn back, so a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS becomes a way to make sure you don’t start losing visitors.

Why Do We Need SSL Certificates Anyway?

Information Encryption

Everything you send over the Internet goes through other computers before it gets to the one that hosts the website you’re trying to reach, so all of your private and financially sensitive stuff could be stolen by others unless it’s disguised through encryption. That’s what an HTTP to HTTPS gives you: scrambled info that can only be unscrambled by the intended recipient.

Protection from Cybercriminals

Consultancy firm Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that by 2021, cybercrime will cost the world more than $6 trillion, a figure that’s hard to imagine, but to put it into perspective, that will be more than the amount generated by the world’s entire illegal drug trade. That’s serious!

With so much money to be made, criminals are getting more and more sophisticate. They know that there are rich pickings to be had from penetrating networks. To them, it’s a crime with far fewer risks than many of the other evil schemes they might pursue, and it offers potentially greater rewards.

That’s why they’ve been making efforts to intercept your information while it’s on route—in what are called transit-based attacks—and that’s why HTTP to HTTPS have become so important.

Security = Trust in Your Brand

Trust is one of those intangibles that every brand needs and earning it means making sure that every touch point in your customer’s journey builds on that trust. Have you ever noticed the little lock icon that sometimes appears in your address bar? Or sometimes how there’s red line through the name of the website you’re visiting instead? The first one means you’re connected safely thanks to HTTP to HTTPS and you’ve got well-trusted encryption. The second one means the connection isn’t protected. From a customer’s point of view, if they see the first one then their trust in your brand will grow. If they see the second one, then you can say goodbye to them.

Legit Referral Data

Since Google Analytics is not showing HTTPS to HTTP referral data – you will loose significant part of statistical data. Imagine that someone placed a link to your website on old and reputable website with huge amount of traffic. This site resides under HTTPS, yours – under HTTP. The referrer data in this case is completely lost, the traffic from linking website will be represented as Direct inside Google Analytics and is not really useful for any further marketing analysis.  So, migrating your website to HTTPS solves this issue and after migration referral data is passed properly from any linking site – under HTTP or HTTPS.

HTTP to HTTPS – implementation how-to

The first thing you need to do is to edit .htaccess file. This is a configuration file used by Apache web server software to provide a way to make configuration changes on a per-directory basis. Apache is one of the most popular web servers in the world, developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation.

How to edit the .htaccess file

The .htaccess file contains information that tells the server what to do under various circumstances, so it has the capacity to change the functionality of your website. It does things like:

  • Redirects
  • URL Rewriting

Ways you can change an .htaccess file

  • Change the file on your machine and upload it to the server via sFTP/FTP
  • All FTP/sFTP/SCP apps have an “Edit” feature which allows remote editing of files.
  • Use a text editor and SSH to alter the file.
  • Use the file manager of Plesk Onyx or cPanel to amend the file.

 

Redirecting HTTP to HTTPS

Redirect All Web Traffic

If there’s existing code already in your .htaccess file, add the following:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R,L]

Redirect a Specific Domain Only

To redirect a specific domain to use HTTPS, add this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R,L]

Redirect a Specific Folder Only

Use this to redirect HTTP to HTTPS for a particular folder:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} yourfolder
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.yourwebsite.com/youfolder/$1 [R,L]

How To Setup HTTP to HTTPS redirection using Plesk Onyx

You can avoid manual modifications of .htaccess using the power of Plesk Onyx UI. To setup HTTP to HTTPS redirect you need valid and functioning SSL certificate on your website. The rest is about 5 easy steps:

  1. Log in to Plesk and click Websites & Domains in the left sidebar
  2. Choose the domain to configure and click Hosting Settings
  3. Select SSL/TLS support and Permanent SEO-safe 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS checkboxes under Security
  4. Select corresponding SSL certificate from the Certificate drop-down list
  5. Confirm changes by clicking OK button

From this moment your site is using a secure connection for all web page requests