The Comfortable Advantages of the Hosting Control Panel

Hosting control panel Plesk

Let’s be honest. We all have enough to think about without constant security worries, micro-managing customers, and recovering lost versions of work.

But as a web admin, a lot of time and effort goes into these repetitive tasks every single day. Decades of complex back-ends have left end customers dependent on expert coverage for their sites, leaving necessary but mundane responsibilities to the IT crowd. 

Well, web admins and developers rejoice! The web and server landscape is rapidly transforming to allow automated management. 

Let’s say you need multiple new websites, and they have to be secured. Let’s say you need them backed up regularly, maybe when you’re not even at your desk. Some old sites need to be migrated and your SEO rank is tanking. That’s a lot to handle, right? 

Enter: The Control Panel. Web and server management, taken care of in a few clicks. *Breathe a sigh of relief*. 

So what can you expect from Plesk Hosting Control Panel? Read on.

 

Ease

What you need is a functioning system. But what you want is simplicity. 

With a single interface that organises multiple sites, giving you clear updates on security, back-ups and running efficiency, you can have both. Instead of juggling tools and manually monitoring each and every site’s health, the control panel takes care of complex tasks in moments.

Features like one-click deployment, mail server support, and automated health alerts allow quick streamlining of multiple tasks. On potentially unlimited domains, wherever you are.

Service provider view Plesk

Multiple customer management. Easy monitoring. Backup and security tasks lined up neatly. You’re welcome.

Security

Security is the #1 priority of any online business. Without it, customers won’t even be able to access your page. For that reason, web admins and hosters spend sleepless nights ensuring that their servers and customers are protected.

Under a web manager, you can sleep easy. Besides the necessities like SSL certificates, managed packages compile firewalls, encryptions, antivirus and more, holding the fort for you and your customers.

And guess what? Even your data is backed up and protected in the event of downtime or tricky updates, with a helpful advisor that keeps an eye on that status of your server at all times.

 

Advisor control panel Plesk

Speed

Unboxing any new feature for your site, or indeed setting up the server and domain for the site itself, can be time and soul-consuming tasks. However, web managers – or control panels – are set up with a catalog of extensions that can be installed and launched in minutes, and certain features can become active in one. Single. Click.

Heaven.

Not to mention the inbuilt performance monitor to show how fast your site is running and flagging any issues. So it keeps up the speed for your website visitors too. 

Want to automate your speed optimization? The Speed Kit is just a click away.

 

Speed Kit Plesk baqend

Efficiency

So you’re able to work fast, in total security, with ease. And it’s available on desktop and mobile for full control on-the-go. Just in case you needed further convincing. 

What else could you want?

Well there’s even more on offer if you leave traditional single-track hosting and web management behind:

 

Extensions efficiency Plesk

🚀 SEO Toolkit to put your website on the map,

🚀 G Suite integration because, well, who doesn’t use G Suite, 

🚀 Ultra-streamlined Premium Email with calendar and task lists,

and many more practical tools for WordPress, file and server management, all in one place. In fact, enjoy +100 add-ons beside what the Plesk interface already has built-in. Just, you know, for luck.

 

The future of web management has never been so clear. Customers are no longer content with sourcing each element of the online process in separate locations. They need just one, managed, safe place to work on what they love. 

Conclusion? Hosting control panels are good for the soul.

Ready to take the leap? See options for building and managing your web here. 

 

Footer coffee break Elvis Plesky Plesk Blog

Control your servers and businesses on the go with Plesk Mobile

Want to make changes to your customers’ accounts while sitting in a bubble bath listening to jazz playing in the background? Urgently need to reboot the server at 2 am, but you’re at the club with a margarita in hand? The CSS on your website is a bit off, but you’re chilling in Jamaica and only have your tablet on you?

In case you ever find yourself in such situations again, you no longer need to jump into your car and head back to the office. With our newly launched Plesk Mobile for iOS, your Plesk servers and hosting business will always be at your fingertips. 

Okay, how do I get started?

It couldn’t be easier:

  1. Install the application on your device
  2. Enter your Plesk server’s IP address or hostname and Plesk admin credentials to access it

For your convenience, we’ve added the ability for you to give your servers Plesk Mobile a human-understandable name, so you no longer need to remember “172.16.254.1” or “somehostname.somewhere”, but just “WP box”. Plesk Mobile stores the data for all your servers and lets you switch between them in two clicks. Neat, huh?

Plesk Mobile App  Plesk Mobile App - Adding Account  Plesk Mobile App - Accounts

What’s next?

Let’s go back to the example with CSS styles editing.

Say you run a website and you need to make quick changes on the go. Here’s what you need to do: Run Plesk Mobile, open the file, edit the file using the built-in editor. Easy as pie!

Or if you need more control? You can access Plesk right from the app and configure your website using additional tools, such as Ruby or Node.js applications.

However, we strongly advise against editing the code directly on the production server. Consider yourself warned! It’s better to use the new “cloning & staging” feature of the Plesk WordPress Toolkit in order to test your changes in a test environment before rolling them out to production.

Plesk Mobile - Files Management Plesk Mobile App - Editing The File  Plesk Mobile - Websites and Domains

Finally, to improve security, configure two-factor authentication by installing an additional passcode which you will need to enter every time you open the application.

Server management without borders

Let’s go further. Now, imagine that you are the administrator of one or more Plesk servers. Your boss calls at two o’clock in the morning and says that the corporate website shows a 503 error (Service Temporarily Unavailable), but you are miles from home, or a computer. 

  1. Enter access information for the affected server. This gives you the ability to manage all websites it hosts via the Domains tab.
  2. However, to access the rest of the functionality, you need to install Plesk Mobile Center, a supplementary application that enables Plesk Mobile to communicate with Plesk servers via API. Just click Install, and the application will be installed on the server in a few seconds.
  3. Next, open the Services tab and restart the Apache Web Server.

The corporate website is available again. You’ve saved the day once again. Go back to sleep dreaming of a well-deserved raise.

Plesk Mobile - Multi-server environment  Plesk Mobile - Accounts  Plesk Mobile - Account Services

Finally, you can go back to that margarita

Wait a minute, but what was the reason behind that failure?

  • At the very least, you can check the resources of your server and try to look for errors in the logs.

Plesk Mobile - data transfer statistics and cpu load average  Plesk Mobile - Memory       Plesk Mobile - Error log

  • In addition, you can configure push notifications to always be aware of what is happening on your servers.

Plesk Mobile App on iPhone  Plesk Mobile - Events  Plesk Mobile - Event Notification

But there’s more! 

Okay, now for the ultimate nightmare scenario: you are the owner of a hosting business and enraged customers are rioting on your porch. They are demanding access to new features and improved security of their hosting, but the bubble bath you’re taking is just too cozy. How do you fix the situation? Easy! 

Run Plesk Mobile, head to the Extension Catalog, select any extension you want, and install it on the server.

That’s all! The feature is already available to customers, and the bath hasn’t gone cold yet.

For example, you can protect websites via integration with ServerShield by CloudFlare, issue free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt, use WordPress and do a whole bunch of other cool stuff.

Plesk Mobile - Extensions Management    Installing ServerShield  Plesk Mobile - Extensions

And that’s all?

Of course not!

Now, all these delights are available on the iPad as well!

Plesk Mobile - Files management   

Summing up:

  • Bubble baths are comfy.
  • Margaritas are delicious.
  • Jamaica is chill.
  • Plesk Mobile saves nerves, improves your quality of life, and enables you to manage your Plesk servers from anywhere, anytime.

Best of all, it’s free! Give it a spin and let us know what you think!

Migrate to Plesk on AWS from Plesk, cPanel or DirectAdmin

Why migrate to Plesk on AWS?

Amazon Web Services is the cloud computing platform by Amazon.com, offering over 90 key infrastructure services such as computing power, storage options, networking, and databases, delivered as on-demand resources with pay-as-you-go pricing.

As part of the hyperscale cloud revolution, increasing numbers of web professionals are now running their instances on AWS, and many Plesk hosting partners have chosen AWS to run their managed-services business. Running your instances, hosting or managed business with Plesk on AWS provides many significant benefits over the traditional hosting infrastructure:

  • Scales better than traditional shared or VPS hosting: Plesk on AWS is based on AWS’ latest innovations and integrates smoothly with the Route53 service of AWS. Support for new AWS services are constantly being added as Plesk Extensions to take advantage of the automation and customization features of the Plesk platform. Pass on the value to your website and app customers by including AWS services to their portfolio.
  • Improved innovation: Deploy from websites and apps anywhere to everywhere. Tune, secure and optimize images that can be scaled horizontally (for high traffic sites) with ease-of-use through AWS.
  • Improved infrastructure: Quick and cost-effective spin up of dedicated multi-server environments.
  • Increased security: Intelligent Security Advisor, free SSL with Let’s Encrypt, Fail2ban, configurable firewall, ServerShield by CloudFlare, Security Core w/ ModSecurity by Atomicorp, Patchman (Patches Vulnerabilities in CMS), Datagrid reliability & vulnerability scanner, and much more
  • Proven workflow: Deploy a Domain, DNS, SSL and simple PHP application in just a few minutes…or a multi-services multi-stack application in as much time. Improved CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!) and eCommerce (WooCommerce, Prestashop, others,..) workflows to ensure better development velocity.
  • Increased productivity: Move from a release cycle every quarter to deploying changes on a minute-by-minute basis
  • Increased agility: Fully integrated deployment capabilities to deploy code more frequently
  • Global AWS Infrastructure: Plesk instances through the AWS marketplace are immediately available on any of Amazon’s many data center locations.

To learn more about Plesk on AWS, as well as our plug-and-play Plesk WordPress Server Solution and Plesk Business Server Solution, go to our Plesk on AWS page.

Let’s start the migration to AWS

Here’s what we’ll cover in this tutorial:

  1. Prepare your Plesk (or cPanel/DirectAdmin) source server
  2. Install Plesk on AWS as a target server + configure public IP
  3. Install Plesk Route53 Extension on Plesk on AWS + configure the extension.
  4. Install Plesk Migrator Extension on Plesk on AWS
  5. Migrate all the data (Plesk to Plesk), domains will be created in route53 also on this step.
  6. Use the Plesk feature “Switch DNS” – so that the source server stays a Slave until all domains are switched on the Route53 side (actually on the domain registrar’s), website stay functional during the switching time of 24-48 hours that Route53 needs for DNS sync.
  7. After that, you need to contact your registrar to delegate your domains to Route53 DNS.

1. Preparing your existing Plesk or cPanel/DirectAdmin server (source)

Note: there are some limitations in case you plan from Linux to a Windows Server and vice versa! In general, we recommend only to migrate from Linux to Linux or Windows to Windows.

To ensure that the migration is successful, a number of TCP and UDP ports need to be opened on the source and destination servers.

Plesk offers a nice Firewall component that needs to be installed in case you don’t want to do this over command line. If you can’t find the firewall in Tools & Settings -> Firewall, then you need to install the component first (click here). Then you can access it over Tools & Settings -> Firewall. More details on the firewall for Linux here and Windows here.

For Unix servers, open the following ports (In case you are migrating form Plesk using the Plesk Firewall Extension, these ports are all configured correctly for you by default!):

  • TCP port 22 for SSH connections on source server.
  • TCP port 8443 for access to Plesk XML API on the target server and on the source servers, if migrating from Plesk.
  • TCP ports 110, 143 for POP3 and IMAP, on the source and target server. These are used for post-migration checks.

For Windows servers, open the following ports:

  • TCP ports 135, 139, 445 and UDP ports 137, 138. Be sure to open these ports on the source and on the target server.
  • TCP port 1433 for MS SQL, if it is used as the default instance.
  • UDP port 1434 and all (or manually selected) TCP ports for MS SQL, if it is used as a named instance.
  • TCP port 10155 for a custom Plesk Migrator service performing miscellaneous tasks.
  • TCP port 10156 for rsync server.
  • TCP port 8443 for access to Plesk XML API on the target server and on the source servers, if migrating from Plesk.
  • TCP ports 110, 143 for POP3 and IMAP, on source and target servers. These are used for post-migration checks.

Also, make sure that https://installer.plesk.com is accessible from the destination server.

We recommend that you install and configure all the necessary services and settings on the destination server before performing the transfer. For example, if you plan on migrating MySQL databases, make sure that the MySQL server is installed and running on the destination server, and so forth.

Make sure that Plesk on the destination server has a separate license. Otherwise, you may experience problems with the license validation during migration. The possible ways of obtaining a license are described in the Administrator Guide.

2. Preparing your AWS Plesk instance (target server)

Follow this guide to set up Plesk on AWS. Note: be absolutely sure that your AWS instance is configured running with a public IP address as described in the installation tutorial, otherwise you might have issues with the DNS parts later. 

Plesk OnyxImage: Plesk Onyx

3. Installing the Plesk Migrator Extension

To install Plesk Migrator using the Plesk interface

  1. Log in as administrator to Plesk on the target server.
  2. Go to Extensions -> Server Tools -> Plesk Migrator 
  3. Select Install on the Plesk Migrator detail page.

4. Installing the AWS Route53 Extension inside Plesk

In case you plan to use the DNS features of Plesk (what is highly recommended!), you need to make sure that you have the Route53 Extension installed.

  1. Log in as administrator to Plesk on the target server.
  2. Go to Extensions -> DNS -> Amazon Route 53
  3. Select Install on the Amazon Route53 detail page.

Just for reference – here the guide for Route53 from AWS: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigratingDNS.html

5. Initiating the migration on your AWS Plesk instance (target server)

  1. Log in to Plesk on the destination server as the Plesk administrator.
  2. Go to Server Management > Extensions > Plesk Migrator > Start a New Migration. If Plesk Migrator is unavailable, install it following the instructions here.
  1. Select the hosting panel installed on the source server from the Panel type menu.
  2. Specify the following:
    • The source server’s IP address. If migrating from a Linux server, specify the SSH port as well (22 by default).
    • (Plesk for Linux) The login and password of a root user on the source server. Alternatively, you can choose to authenticate via SSH keys. For details, refer to Authentication by SSH (Linux).
    • (Plesk for Windows) The login and password of the built-in administrator accounts on both the source and the destination servers.
    • The directory for storing temporary files on the source server (make sure there is enough free disk space available to store the dump of the largest database that will be migrated).
  3. If migrating from a Windows-based server, specify the method for installing the RPC agent (an application enabling Plesk Migrator to gather data):
    • Automatic (recommended). Plesk Migrator will try to deploy and start RPC agent on the source server using the built-in administrator account. In some cases, automatic deployment may fail (for example, due to firewall settings, or because the File and Printer Sharing or RPC services are disabled). If this happens, deploy the agent manually.
    • Manual. A link to download the RPC agent package will be provided. Download the package and install the agent on the source server manually.
  4. Click Prepare Migration to proceed to the next step. Plesk Migrator will attempt to fetch the data about the different objects (domains, subscriptions, customer/reseller accounts, and hosting plans) found on the source server. If the connection fails, double-check the source server information, make sure that the connection is not blocked by firewall, and try again.

    Note that from this point onwards, you can leave the Migrator interface without losing your progress – the migration will remain in progress until you finish it explicitly. To continue from where you left off, click Server Management > Extensions > Plesk Migrator and then click the corresponding migration in the list.

  5. You now find yourself on the Add subscriptions tab.

  6. Here you must select the subscriptions to be migrated (note that you cannot migrate individual domains, the fewest number of objects you can migrate is a single subscription and all its domains). You can use one of the three available filters:

    • By Subscription. If you migrate a subscription owned by a customer or a reseller, the corresponding customer/reseller account will be migrated as well (unless a custom subscription owner is specified – see below). The hosting plan the subscription is based on will also be migrated.
    • By Customer/Reseller. If you migrate a customer or reseller account, all subscriptions owned by the account will be migrated together with the hosting plans they are based on. Note that migrating a reseller account does not automatically migrate the customer accounts owned by the reseller. If you select a reseller account and one or more customer accounts owned by that reseller for migration, the reseller’s ownership of the customer accounts will be preserved on the destination server.
    • By Hosting Plan. If you migrate a hosting plan, all subscriptions based on the said plan will be migrated as well. If you migrate a hosting plan belonging to a reseller, said reseller will be migrated as well, plus all subscriptions based on the selected hosting plan together with the customers who own those subscriptions.
  7. Select what types of content (mail content, web content, and databases) will be migrated.
  8. Select a custom subscription owner. By default, whenever a subscription owned by a customer or reseller is migrated, the corresponding customer or reseller account is created on the destination server as well. If you select a different subscription owner, the ownership of all subscriptions being migrated will be assigned to that account.
  9. To change the migration settings, click Settings in the upper-right corner.

  10. Here, the following controls are available:

    • Adjust application settings. By default, during migration Plesk attempts to make changes to the configuration files of a number of popular web applications to make them operable on the destination server. Clear the checkbox if you want to make the changes manually. Leaving this option enabled will increase the migration time.
    • Apache restart interval (Plesk for Linux only). Restarting the web server on the destination server is necessary for the migrated domains to become available over the network. Make sure not to set this value too low (less than 300 seconds is not recommended), as all hosted domains become temporarily unavailable every time the web server is restarted.
    • Run post-migration checks. By default, after the migration is finished, Plesk performs a number of automated tests to identify potential issues with the migrated domains. Clear the checkbox if you do not want the tests to be run. Leaving this option enabled will increase the migration time.
  11. When you are satisfied with the list of subscriptions to migrate and the migration options, click Migrate to proceed. Plesk will run pre-migration checks to detect potential issues and display a report.

  12. We advise you to fix the detected issues (if any) before continuing with the migration. Make the necessary configuration changes, then click Refresh to re-run the tests.

  13. When the pre-migration check returns a clean result, click Start migration to begin migrating. Once a migration is underway, you can monitor its progress on the Overview tab.
  14. As subscriptions are being migrated, status reports will be displayed for every subscription for which the migration was either completed successfully or failed.
    • The icon indicates that the migration was completed successfully.
    • The icon indicates that the migration was completed with errors. Click [Details] to see the list of issues that occurred during the migration.
    • The icon indicates that the migration failed. Click [Details] to see the list of issues that occurred during the migration.
  15. If you want to perform an additional sync of a subscription’s content after the migration is finished, click [Re-sync] next to the subscription’s name.
  16. If you want to migrate additional subscriptions from the source server, return to step number seven. Otherwise, unless you plan to migrate from the same source server again in the near future, you can click Finish migration to remove it from the list of ongoing migrations.

6. Going into production: switch DNS

  • Any DNS zones (domains) will be transferred to the configured Route53 correctly when using a public IP address on your Plesk server on AWS, without any manual interventions.
  • After the migration, AWS need some time to propagate new DNS records/domains inside their infrastructure.
  • IF on source server DNS was handled by Plesk, then the migrated domains continue to work on old DNS but points to new IP’s because of “switch DNS” feature described earlier.

7. Request at your domain registrar or registries to switch DNS to route53

After your changes to Amazon Route 53 resource record sets have propagated to Amazon Route 53 DNS servers (see Step 4: Check the Status of Your Changes (API Only)), update your registrar’s name server (NS) records to refer to the Amazon Route 53 name servers.

migration with no downtime – woohoo!

 

8. Additional tips

In case you are not ready to migrate your whole server yet, there is also an option to just migrate 1 site to a server with Plesk on AWS or one WordPress instance into Plesk’s all new WordPress Toolkit. For that, please refer to separate documentation available here.

 

Thanks to the whole AWS team for co-authoring this write-up and for providing feedback and technical insights to optimize this tutorial.

Be well, do good, and stay Plesky!

Plesk Onyx – Designed for Vultr.com

Vultr Plesk - Deploy Plesk Onyx on Vultr

Innovative cloud companies like Vultr are revolutionizing how businesses reach their customers today, digitizing painful old processes to allow more time to focus on things that actually matter. And it couldn’t have come at a better time, when the global public cloud market is expected to top $146 billion in 2017, up from $87 billion in 2015, and is growing at a 22% compound annual growth rate, as noted by Clint Boulton (Senior Writer at CIO) in his article 6 trends that will shape cloud computing in 2017.

Clint observes that while the lion’s share of this growth will come from the “mega-cloud providers” Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and IBM, these big players won’t be able to service every unique request, leaving the door open to companies like Vultr to capture their own unique slice of the pie.

Vultr was formed in 2014 and it is a child firm of Choopa, LLC. Like DigitalOcean, it uses KVM. It is relatively new to the VPS sector but its benchmarks are quite impressive and it offers certain functionalities that will prove handy to some users.

So, if you’re you looking for a global cloud hosting solution with warp-10 fast SSD VPS cloud servers with 100% KVM Virtualization?

Then check out Vultr.com.

Vultr hostingImage: Vultr

What is Vultr?

Vultr is a VPS provider built on high-performance SSD cloud servers with 14 optimized locations worldwide. It aims to create the most reliable and efficient service for developers around the globe. They achieve this by offering a standardized platform for all customers. You get 100% SSD Storage, Ultra-fast Intel CPUs and 14 low latency locations.

 

Locations

North America: Seattle, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, New Jersey, Atlanta, Miami

Europe: London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris

APAC: Tokyo, Sydney

Vultr Geo LocationsImage: Vultr

User Plans

Vultr’s pricing plans are conducted on an hourly basis, meaning you’ll only pay for what you use. With a varied selection of eight plans available, the platform is ready to cater to all needs. The most popular plan offers 1 CPU, but users can have up to 24 CPUs.

Meanwhile, the 2000 GB bandwidth and 1024 MB memory is more than enough for most. However, the largest packages sees those rates raised to 15000 GB and 65536 MB respectively.

Vultr also offers storage (VLS) and dedicated cloud (VDS) services. Again, there is a high degree of flexibility making it possible to tailor a package to suit individual needs.

 

Try Vultr, and they’ll match up to $100!

Vultr offers extremely simple and transparent pricing. Plans start at $5/month and scale up from there depending on how much storage, memory and bandwidth you need. Simply create an account at Vultr. When you fund your account Vultr will match dollar for dollar up to $100 of your Initial Funding.

This is a limited time promotion, so get off your perch and act now!

 

Benefits/Features

  • Easy to Use

    Vultr called they are cloud Hosting on the Largest Worldwide Network. You can easy to deploy your VPS on 4 Continents in 60 seconds!

  • Hourly Billing

    Pay as you go with our flexible hourly billing policy. Vultr doesn’t lock you in to a long term contact – add, remove or upgrade instances as you need them!

  • High-Speed Performance

    Vultr will create the fastest and most convenient cloud technology to help you easily and more efficiently manage your infrastructure so you can get back to coding.

And, Vultr provide all of our users with high-performance SSD Hard Drives, flexible API, and the ability to select to nearest data center location.

 

What is Plesk Onyx?

Plesk Onyx is the new benchmark in web-server management tools, used to simplify website management, application hosting, server management and much more. It includes intuitive web based interfaces for managing domain names, web apps, file management, email accounts, databases and infrastructure, to name a few, to build, secure and run websites and applications in the Cloud!

Plesk Onyx supports multiple Windows and Linux distributions, for example Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and many more – meaning you have even less to worry about if you have a customized network setup or if you are unsure about compatibility, and achieve continuous delivery and superior version control by deploying with Git.

 

Why choose Plesk Onyx?

Invest in apps, not ops. Plesk Onyx manage your infrastructure and security – patching and upgrading, 24/7 ops and security, failovers and more – so you stay focussed on bulding great apps!

  • Ready to Code

    Plesk helps in building web apps with its ready to use code environment. It supports a multitude of servers and accounts. Thus, helping resellers to easily distribute bandwidth, space, and file permissions using same login panel they use to manage their own website’s files and databases.

  • 24/7 Security

    Plesk provides complete security to your OS, network, website and applications, something that is always amiss. Plesk will handle all security protocols and take necessary measures for you, automatically.

  • Run -Focus on your business

    Focus on your business, not on infrastructure management. Save tremendous time by automating all server related tasks and components to run and scale your web applications and websites.

 

Mass Management

The new Plesk Onyx also includes a tightly integrated set of mass-management and security tools that can be used to protect and automate WordPress. All Plesk-powered systems come with built-in server-to-site security, promising more reliable infrastructure and reduced support costs.

Plesk Onyx - Featured ApplicationsImage: Plesk Onyx

 

Now that you’re familiar with Vultr and Plesk you’re ready to take the next steps. There’s no better way of finding out about the powerful capabilities of Vultr than by trying out the platform.

 

Getting started with Plesk and Vultr

Note: Review the Software Requirements for Plesk to find what Linux or Windows distributions are supported by Plesk Onyx.

 

Quick Start Guide: Create a new instance

After creating an account and navigating to Servers, click on Deploy new instance.

1. Leave the server type on Vultr Cloud Compute (VC2) and choose a location:

Vultr VPS - New Instance DeploymentImage: Vultr

2. Next select the Server Type (operating system) from the list available. I have selected Ubuntu 16.04 x64, because it’s a very popular, reliable, and well supported distribution.

Vultr hosting - server typeImage: Vultr
3.For the Server Size you can pick a size that is appropriate for you but Plesk Onyx will run great on any of them. In this tutorial, we’ll use the 1 CPU, 1GB memory option, 2000GB Bandwith, 20GB SSD that is currently priced at $10/month.

 

Select additional features

4. Each of the following features has to be turned on manually.

  • Enable IPv6: For no additional cost, Vultr will give your instance an IPv6 IP address. This means your instance can communicate via IPv6.
  • Enable Private Network: Add an internal IP to your VM
  • Enable Auto Backups: Vultr offers automatic backup as an option on compute instances. Backups are extremely important for mission critical systems and the Vultr backup system adds data-protection with one easy-to-manage feature.
  • Enable DDOS Protection: Add an additional layer of protection to keep your hosting infrastructure online and operating optimally even when they are the target of attacks. Currently available in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, NY/NJ, Silicon Valley, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London.

5. The Startup Scripts feature allows you to configure your newly deployed server by running customizeable scripts on the very first boot of your virtual private server (no login required!). Add software, install SSH keys, and more – the possibilities are endless!

Vultr cloud hosting - additional featuresImage: Vultr

SSH Keys

6. Now that you’ve set your features, it’s come time to set up SSH access. If you already have your SSH key setup, great. Otherwise, the information about creation of SSH keys can be found here.

7. The last step in getting your instance create is to give them a simple Server Label to identify the server. We’ll use plesk. Then click Deploy Now to create and install the server.

Your new instance will deploy in a couple of minutes. Once your VPS instance is deployed, it will be automatically started. To find out the Public IP address of the instance, Username, and Password, click on Manage.

Vultr server informationImage: Vultr
Now it’s time to install Plesk and build something with your new server!

Connecting the instance via SSH

1. Open up your favorite SSH client application and connect to the instance utilizing the public IP address assigned to the instance.

  • Username: The default admin user is root
  • Password: The initial root password to your server can be found in your Server Information page.

Vultr server - ssh access

2. Install Plesk using One-Click installer or run through Plesk Installation and Upgrade Wizard to deploy custom installation:

One-Click installer

Run the following command:

# sh ‹(curl https://autoinstall.plesk.com/one-click-installer || wget -O - https://autoinstall.plesk.com/one-click-installer)

Install Plesk Onyx on Vultr cloud server

3. Generate a one-time login for logging in to Plesk Onyx

Run the following command:

# sudo plesk login

Login into Plesk Onyx on Vultr server

4. Replace the hostname with your IP address to log in to Plesk.

Note: You cannot use the hostname based on the droplet name the first time you log in because Plesk has not passed the initial configuration and the full hostname has not been created yet.

Running the Installation/Configuration wizard

1. When you log into Plesk Onyx, you will see the View Selector page. On this page, you can choose the appearance of the panel as per your requirements.

Plesk Onyx - View Selector PageImage: Plesk Onyx

Once your purpose has been identified, a second drop-down menu will emerge asking you select your preferred layout. This can be changed later.

2. Then comes the Settings page. Here you need to fill in your hostname, IP configuration, and admin password.

  • New hostname: Fill in your primary domain (i.e. testdomain.com).
  • Default IP Address: Leave the IP as default.
  • New password: Change the default administrator password.

Setting up Plesk Onyx on Vultr hosting Image: Plesk Onyx

3. Next is the Administrator information page. Just fill in the information asked and proceed to the next page.

4. After that comes the license key install page. You can order, retrieve and install a 14-day full-featured trial license from this page. Since you have already purchased a license key, proceed with installing the license key.

5. On the Create your Webspace page you can specify the domain name of your first subscription, and system user account username and password that you will use to manage it. This will create a subscription for hosting multiple sites.

6. Woohoo! Plesk is now configured!

Plesk Onyx on Vultr serverImage: Plesk Onyx

Vultr - Dave Aninowsky, CEO

Thank you to David Aninowsky, Founder and CEO of Vultr for co-authoring to this write-up and for providing feedback and technical insights on vultr.com.

Be well, do good, and stay Plesky!

How to deploy Plesk Onyx on Amazon EC2

Plesk on AWS

In the latest Magic Quadrant report for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Worldwide, for the 6th straight year, Gartner placed Amazon Web Services in the “Leaders” quadrant and named AWS as having both the furthest completeness of vision and the highest ability to execute. Today, AWS provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world.

What is AWS?

Amazon web services is the cloud computing platform by Amazon.com. Building and running your business starts with computing, whether you are building mobile apps, or running massive clusters to sequence the human genome. AWS has over 70 infrastructure services, such as computing power, storage options, networking and databases, delivered as a utility: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) forms a central part of Amazon Web Services, by allowing users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an “instance”, containing any software desired.

A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the hour for active servers – hence the term “elastic”. EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy.

Amazon EC2Image: Amazon

AWS Global Infrastructure

AWS placed its data centers across 42 availability zones within 16 regions around the world: US West (Oregon, Northern California), AWS GovCloud, US East (Northern Virginia, Ohio), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, London), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai) and China (Beijing). Each availability zone has at least one data center that has redundant power for stability, networking and connectivity.

AWS regionsImage: Amazon

Throughout the next year, the AWS Global Infrastructure will expand with at least five new Availability Zones in new geographic Regions: Ningxia in China and Paris in France.

Run any application

If you need to run any application, for example a WordPress website or control and manage server or cluster level functions such as scaling and deployment, well then AWS EC2 is the best! It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

  • You provision, scale, and manage server capacity. EC2 offers a wide selection of instance configurations optimized for every use case
  • You control the server, OS, and deployment software
  • You have flexible payment options to meet your business needs, including enabling BYOL

Benefits

    • Inexpensive

Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume. See Amazon EC2 Instance Purchasing Options for a more detailed description.

  • Elastic Web-Scale Computing

    Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

  • Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services

    Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Domain Name System (Amazon Route 53), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.

    Tip: Should you decide to make the move to the cloud with the Amazon Route 53 service, we recommend that you use the Plesk Onyx extension for automated provisioning of DNS zones to Amazon Web Services.

  • Reliable

    Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and data centers. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.

  • Secure

    Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your computing resources.

Simplify Server Administration

  • Managing Infrastructure

    For all server needs – small businesses and IT Pros that want to host a few websites, web developers and designers that need to host dozens of websites, shared web hosters that can grow to serve millions of websites – Plesk Onyx on AWS is the ideal solution for simplifying server administration, while scaling to meet your specific needs.

  • Easy to Start

    Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.

AWS MarketplaceImage: Amazon

What is Plesk Onyx?

Plesk Onyx is the new benchmark in control panels, and is the only tool you ever need to build, secure and run websites and applications in the Cloud!

Plesk Onyx allows server administrators to set up new websites, manage accounts and e-mail, and oversee DNS entries and other relevant networking data and specs through an intuitive web-based interface. It is an intuitive control panel that any customer can easily use. The latest version of Plesk Onyx supports multiple Windows and Linux distributions, for example Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and many more – meaning you have even less to worry about if you have a customized network setup or if you are unsure about compatibility.

Gain time, gain freedom.

Our biggest release to date simplifies the lives of Web Professionals by fully integrating Docker and Git. Server related tasks and components are automated to run and scale web projects as well as providing one-click web server security. The ultimate answer for Web professionals who work with SMB’s (small to medium-sized businesses), we like to think of Plesk Onyx as a tool which empowers end users to easily deploy their web projects and get their MVP’s to market sooner.

What are the benefits/features?

  • Build: Plesk’s easy-to-use intuitive interface provides an environment for web professionals to code directly in. This allows developers and designers to focus on their business and develop web apps and sites that scale in the cloud.

  • Secure: It is not uncommon to have well-functioning websites that do not take security concerns into consideration. Such an approach can have huge negative consequences as your services continue to run and be exposed. An estimated 90% of web developers realize specific security concerns or loopholes in their application only after it is too late. Plesk will handle all security protocols and take necessary measures for you, automatically.

  • Run: Manage your WebOps: In the past, a team of tech specialists was needed to ensure that everything worked together throughout the running and deployment of any given web application. This meant that you had to have someone dedicated to ensuring that everything from the deployment, running, maintenance and security to the patching and repairing of your app or system, runs smoothly and successfully. However, with the progress of time, these tasks have become more and more automated, to the point where you do not need the same expensive technical resources you needed a few years ago.

Plesk Onyx also includes a tightly integrated set of mass-management and security tools that can be used to protect and automate WordPress. All Plesk-powered systems come with built-in server-to-site security, promising more reliable infrastructure and reduced support costs.

Plesk Onyx Featured ApplicationsImage: Plesk Onyx

Now that you’re familiar with AWS EC2 and Plesk you’re ready to take the next steps. There’s no better way of finding out about the powerful capabilities of AWS than by trying out the platform.

Getting started with Plesk Onyx and AWS EC2

 

1. Creating an AWS Account

To access any web service AWS offers, you must first create an AWS account. An AWS account is simply an Amazon.com account that is enabled to use AWS products. You can use an existing Amazon.com account login and password when creating the AWS account.

From your AWS account you can view your AWS account activity, view usage reports, and manage your AWS Security Credentials.

To set up a new account

1. Open https://aws.amazon.com/, and then choose Create a Free Account.

2. Follow the online instructions.

3. Part of the sign-up procedure involves receiving a phone call and entering a PIN using the phone keypad.

Note: You will not be charged unless your usage exceeds the free tier limits, which is great to explore the services and even host a real app without being charged.

 

2. Go to the AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is a new way to find and buy software that runs in the AWS Cloud. In order to simplify installing on Amazon, Plesk provides a variety of AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) with the most popular configurations.

Plesk Onyx at AWS Marketplace Image: Amazon

Thus, no actual installation is required. In Amazon terminology, the user needs to launch the instance from the appropriate AMI. All available AMIs can be found at AWS Marketplace.

Note: In this How-to we use the ‘Bring Your Own License’ (BYOL) instance of Plesk Onyx CentOS 7 which allows you to use your own Plesk license. If you don’t have one yet, you can get a free trial license here.

Bring Your Own License

 

1. Click on Plesk Onyx ‘Bring Your Own License’ (CentOS 7), read the product description to make sure that it suits your needs.

2. Expand Region, and select the region you want from the list. The price is different for different regions.

3. Click the Continue button.

Plesk Onyx - Bring Your Own LicenseImage: Amazon

4. On the next site choose 1-Click Launch which uses predefined settings for Plesk Onyx.

5. Choose the configuration on the EC2 instance type. You will see the pricing information change under Pricing Details to match your selection. You can also review the Monthly Estimate in the right pane.

6. Create new Security Group based on seller settings. The Security Group created by AWS Marketplace based on recommended settings for Plesk ‘Bring Your Own License’ CentOS 7 version 17.0.17.

Plesk Onyx 'Bring Your Own License' (CentOS 7)Image: Amazon

7. Select the Key Pair to be used for connection to the instance (an existing Key Pair is required for connection to the Plesk instance). A Key Pair can be generated in the AWS Management Console.

8. Read the User End License Agreement (EULA) and AWS Customer Agreement and click Launch with 1-click button.

9. An instance of this software is now deploying on EC2. Software and AWS hourly usage fees apply when the instance is running and will appear on your monthly bill.

An instance of this software is now deploying on Amazon EC2Image: Amazon

10. Click on the AWS Management Console link in the right pane to get your instances list.

3. Connecting the instance via SSH

When Plesk is installed on an Amazon EC2 instance, the admin password is generated automatically. You need to obtain the generated password in order to access Plesk GUI for the first time.

Amazon EC2 - Connecting the instance via SSHImage: Amazon

1. Open up your favorite SSH client application and connect to the instance utilizing the public IP address assigned to the instance, that can be found in the right pane of the instances description.

2. User name: The remote user to log in as. The default admin user, or Superuser, is centos for Centos, ubuntu for Ubuntu.

Note: If you added a public SSH key to your instance when you created it, you must have the private SSH key of the key pair (and passphrase, if it has one).

3. Generate a one-time login for logging in to Plesk Onyx.

Run the following command:

 # sudo plesk login | grep -v ec2.internal

SSH into your instance

4. Copy the generated link into your browser.

4. Running the Installation/Configuration wizard

1. When you log into Plesk Onyx, you will see the View Selector page. On this page, you can choose the appearance of the panel as per your requirements.

Plesk Onyx Installation WizardImage: Plesk Onyx

Once your purpose has been identified, a second drop-down menu will emerge asking you select your preferred layout. This can be changed later.

2. Then comes the Settings page. Here you need to fill in your hostname, IP configuration, and admin password.

  • New hostname: Fill in your hostname (Public DNS).
  • Default IP Address: Select your IP address
  • New password: Change the default administrator password.

Plesk Onyx settingsImage: Plesk Onyx

3. Next is the Administrator information page. Just fill in the information asked and proceed to the next page.

4. After that comes the license key install page. You can order, retrieve and install a 14-day full-featured trial license from this page. Since you have already purchased a license key, proceed with installing the license key.

5. On the Create your Webspace page you can specify the domain name of your first subscription, and system user account username and password that you will use to manage it. This will create a subscription for hosting multiple sites.

6. Woohoo! Plesk is now configured!

Plesk Onyx Image: Plesk Onyx

Thank you to the whole Amazon team for co-authoring this write-up and for providing feedback and technical insights on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Be well, do good, and stay Plesky!