Can’t curl domain on Plesk: connect to 203.0.113.2 port 443 failed: Connection refused

Symptoms

• curl fails to fetch a website hosted on Plesk when run from inside the server, but works from other locations

  curl https://example.com
  curl: (7) Failed to connect to example.com port 443: Connection refused

• This domain points to an IP address in /etc/hosts

  127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
  203.0.113.2 example.com

• The IP address assigned to this domain in Domains > example.com > Hosting is different

Cause

The entry in /etc/hosts is routing requests to the wrong IP address.

Resolution

1. Connect to the server over SSH

2. Edit /etc/hosts

   # vi /etc/hosts

3. Remove the domain's entry from /etc/hosts