My Plesk User Experience (2): Lessons learned from testing Plesk Onyx

My Plesk user experience 2 - Plesk Onyx testing and analysis

So Plesk Onyx came along and it had implemented NGINX caching. Naturally I was curious and removed all my customizations. Then I started to compare the website performance with the inbuilt NGINX caching, other caching methods, and the Speed Kit extension that speeds up websites.

This was the variety of tests and configurations I made on the platform:

Platform Web Server Configuration Caching Engine Configuration
1 WordPress Website on Plesk Onyx 17.8.11 Proxy Mode and Smart static files processing turned ON NGINX Caching OFF
2 WordPress Website on Plesk Onyx 17.8.11 Proxy Mode and Smart static files processing turned ON NGINX Caching ON
3 WordPress Website on Plesk Onyx 17.8.11 Proxy Mode and Smart static files processing turned ON NGINX Caching OFF Redis Caching ON
4 WordPress Website on Plesk Onyx 17.8.11 Proxy Mode and Smart static files processing turned ON NGINX Caching ON Redis Caching ON
5 WordPress Website on Plesk Onyx 17.8.11 Proxy Mode and Smart static files processing turned ON NGINX Caching OFF SpeedKit Ext. ON
6 WordPress Website on WordPress.com Everything in default mode —
7 WordPress Website on Vesta CP NGINX Web Template turned ON with the WordPress2 Option selected —

I installed the Plesk server (version 17.8.11 update 25) on the Digital Ocean droplet on CentOS7 with 2 GB RAM. Next, installing the Redis server as it was. I plugged in Redis Object Cache with its default settings. And had no additional parameters in additional NGINX directives.

There was PHP version 7.2.10 with default settings and the “FPM application served by NGINX mode. And the VestaCP server installed on Digital Ocean droplet on Ubuntu 16.04.

As a test page, I used a typical blog post with lots of photos. Hosted both on the server and externally, with a small chunk of text and one comment.

Testing on the Plesk Onyx Platform

Testing on Plesk Onyx platform

For testing, I used the httperf command line tool (with the same launch parameters) and a well-known online testing system GTmetrix.com. From the GTmetrix.com reports, I chose the following parameters:

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the total amount of time spent to receive the first byte of the response once it has been requested. It is the sum of “Redirect duration” + “Connection duration” + “Backend duration“. This metric is one of the key indicators of web performance.

Once the connection is complete and the request is made, the server needs to generate a response for the page. The time it takes to generate the response is known as the Backend duration.

    • Fully Loaded Time: RUM Speed Index is a page load performance metric indicating how fast the page fully appears. The lower the score, the better.
    • PageSpeed Score
    • YSlow Score

The httperf utility was launched with the following parameters:

httperf –hog –server jam.pavuk.su –uri=/index.php/2018/10/03/kgd/ –port=443 –wsess=100000,5,2 — rate 1000 –timeout 5

The creation of 100,000 sessions (5 calls each 2 seconds) with speed 1,000. And here, the following markers received with httperf were the most interesting:

  • Connection rate – the real speed of creating new connections. It showed the server ability to process connections.
  • Request rate – the speed of processing requests, in other words a number of requests a server can execute per second. It showed web app responsiveness.
  • Reply rate – an average number of server replies per second.

Plesk Onyx Test Results

Plesk test results

Clearly, there’s an ocean of tools and solutions to test website performance. Some more complete and respected than others. But even the tools I used allowed me to come to pretty objective conclusions. The test results are summarized in the table below with the green buts highlighting the best values of the parameter, and the red – the worst.

Plesk Onyx test results table

And so, after analyzing the received data, we can conclude the following:

  1. Unchanged PageSpeed and YSlow Scores
    PageSpeed and YSlow Score metrics in Plesk remain absolutely the same, no matter the configuration. Therefore, they don’t depend on caching or other server settings like for code optimization, image size, gzip compression and CDN usage.
  2. Caching is essential for speed
    No caching on Plesk at all gives the worst time metrics. Fully Loaded Time and TTFB dramatically increase. Websites with the turned off caching are significantly slower.
  3. NGINX and Redis are a successful combo
    Comparing caching methods, NGINX caching used in Plesk seems better than Redis Cache. It’s possible the default Redis Cache configuration doesn’t let us achieve a higher performance. It’s not quite clear how the used combination of both caching tools works, but it gives quite alright TTFB и Backend duration metrics.
  4. WordPress performance suffers
    WordPress.com shows the worst performance results. However, by default, it doesn’t actually offer bad optimization for the PageSpeed Score.
  5. Vesta and NGINX mean extremely fast page load
    Using the lightweight Vesta control panel with the turned on NGINX Web Template + php-fpm (wordpress2) designed for WordPress hosting gives great speed results. Even more, for WordPress hosting, VestaCP has custom NGINX web templates including NGINX caching support.

Moving to a new DigitalOcean Droplet

Plesk on Digital Ocean droplet - install - now a one-click app

I deployed Plesk to the new DigitalOcean droplet using Web Installer as it doesn’t require me to go to the server via SSH and do all the stuff in web interface. This recent migration from my VPS to a new DigitalOcean droplet gave me new data for my last Plesk experience. All in all, the migration was successful with minor warnings, which in most cases I resolved using migration wizard suggestions.. The bottom line is that Plesk with turned on key features and settings gives very good results for your website.

Also, I strongly recommend you turn on NGINX caching with your Plesk if you’re seeking a simple and reliable way to speed up your website. You won’t need to set up any difficult configurations. And web pros can make the most of Plesk by fine-tuning as they see fit. That’s what it’s made for. their right.

Finally, my story was aimed at people without professional knowledge who simply want to use built-in Plesk features. So I hope that this story will be good reason for you to login to Plesk and take a fresh look.

My Plesk User Experience (1): Easy Starts and Common Issues

Plesk User Experience While Testing Plesk Onyx

Plesk first crossed my path when it came packaged with web hosting acquired from a Russian provider. At the time it was version 12.0, but I never paid any attention to it until I discovered that part of its service was domain names registration.

Starting Off with Plesk

It couldn’t hurt to register a couple of domains for myself, and so I did. I added them to Plesk, and configured the DNS records. Now these websites loaded default web pages. Then, as I already had websites hosted in Plesk, I thought “Why not use mailboxes registered on my own domains?”. So I went and created a couple of mailboxes and configured Roundcube webmail.

But it was all just personal use until I occasionally started to use this complete infrastructure as a sort of a test server. Why? In order to solve tasks related with questions from forum users. And so, my Plesk server operated like this for a while without any use cases development. That is, until the start of 2017 – when I spontaneously took a closer look at something I had available, but which was laying there unused this whole time.

Easy Building on the Plesk Platform

Building on Plesk Platform

I realized that I could now use my own platform for my personal blog. It didn’t take me long to choose WordPress as I had previous experience with it. What’s more, the new Plesk Onyx had integrated its WordPress Toolkit, which looked promising. After getting a license with additional extensions, I started building – themes, plugins, you name it, before publishing my first posts.

Plesk is also built for multiple domains. So when my famous, American Instagrammer friend needed a website to develop her “Travelling with kids” idea, I offered my hosting platform.

Within Plesk, I created a personal account for her and subscriptions with two domains. One was used to host her website, and the other to host her personal mail.

She quickly learned how to use the WordPress admin dashboard and Plesk. She created mailboxes and installed WordPress plugins and themes. Then created posts and moderated comments. Which I believe says a lot about how easy Plesk’s interface is.

As thousands of subscribers were actively visiting both our blogs, it was time to pay more attention to Plesk server maintenance. And later, to server optimization, creating regular work in the Plesk interface and even more in the Linux command line. But more on that later. Before that, there were common issues of all sorts that I had started to face.

Issues uncovered and solved by using Plesk

Issues solved by using Plesk
  • Service downtime
    Various services like httpd and MySQL stopped every now and then. I managed to solve this by turning on and configuring Watchdog.
  • Memory usage
    Then Health Monitor started to constantly notify that MySQL consumes RAM.
  • Basic MySQL settings
    I had optimized operation modes of MySQL via CLI and thought it would benefit to have at least some basic settings of MySQL optimization in the Plesk interface. Eventually, RAM for VPS was increased from 1 to 2 GB, solving the issue.
  • Frequent updates
    Email notifications about new WordPress plugins made me login to Plesk often. I am one of “update-it-all” types and very meticulous when it comes to installing the latest software versions. The Smart Updates feature in WordPress Toolkit solved this task.
  • Extensions accessibility
    I used to find accessing my installed extensions inconvenient. So it was great when WordPress Toolkit had installed extension icons in the left menu.

Speeding up and hardening the WordPress Website

Speed Up WordPress Website

During an internal contest for the best WordPress website hosted in Plesk, I focused on two goals. I wanted to make my WordPress website the fastest and the most secured.

To achieve the A+ note on ssllabs.com, special NGINX parameters became necessary. They were installed via Additional nginx directives and the /etc/nginx/conf.d /ssl.conf file. An attempt to maximize the speed of my website powered by NGINX was a special matter.

At that time, NGINX caching wasn’t yet implemented in Plesk. So I tried various caching solutions, such as redis, memcached, and the very same NGINX caching. All via the CLI, of course, but with the help of customized settings.

It didn’t take long to realize the NGINX version shipped with Plesk was not suitable to use with trendy acceleration technologies. Ones like caching, the brotli compression method, PageSpeed Module, or TLS1.3. Even the Plesk Forum also raised this issue as it seemed to occupy the minds of advanced users.

The result was publishing different ways how to compile the latest NGINX versions. Thus, supporting modern technologies, and substituting the NGINX version shipped with Plesk for a custom one. I also joined forum users in compiling and optimizing NGINX builds for my Plesk server, all during the contest.

In the end, I got the speedy WordPress site I wanted powered by customized NGINX with Redis caching. All was well until Plesk Onyx was released. See what happened next in part 2 of my Plesk experience story tomorrow.