When it comes to choosing the right control panel for your hosting, two options stand out from the rest in terms of ease of use and functionality: cPanel and Plesk. While both have seen significant improvements in recent years, Plesk’s biggest leap was to make it usable with both Windows and Linux servers – a move that has made it almost universally attractive. This shift in direction means more website owners are beginning to use Plesk and as a result, its developers have begun to introduce more site management features. In this post, we explore what these are.
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Intuitive user interface
While perhaps not a site management feature per se, Plesk’s user interface does make site management much easier. The dashboard is clearly presented, making it simple to navigate and find the tools and features you want to use. One of its advantages is that you can actually customise the layout by rearranging the tools and features so that those you use the most often are the first that you see – making site management even quicker to carry out.
Aside from ease of use, Plesk Obsidian also gives you total control of your hosting, you can manage your websites, email accounts, databases and servers all from within the dashboard. The control panel enables you to manage multiple sites, enabling you to switch between them to carry out your admin and other tasks, like updating content, modifying server settings, installing applications or monitoring performance.
Security
Ensuring your website is secure is a critical part of today’s site management and Plesk Obsidian includes a range of features to help with this. The control panel comes with ModSecurity, a web application firewall that defends your website and other online apps from a range of external threats. Through Plesk, you can choose various settings for your firewall and even upload your own customised firewall rules. Plesk also comes with the cPGuard tool, which carries out a wide range of security tasks, including real-time antivirus, malware scanning and infected file cleaning.
Another important security feature of Plesk is that new websites are automatically secured with SSL certificates via the free provider, Let’s Encrypt. This means that from the outset, you’ll be able to use the secure ‘https’ website address and that data sent between your users’ browsers and your server will be encrypted. It also means browsers will label your website as secure, giving visitors more reason to trust your site.
Keep up-to-date with security, read: Web Hosting Security Threats 2024 – How to Keep Your Website Protected
Website backups
Website backups go hand in hand with security. With backups in place, it means that if you lose your website data, whether through cybercrime, hardware failure, software corruption or human error, you’ll have a backup version that you can use to restore it. This can save a significant amount of time and money in rebuilding your website and potentially prevent businesses from going under.
Plesk comes with its own Backup Manager that enables you to set up and configure your backups. You can decide what you want to back up and where you want it to be stored, schedule automatic backups so you don’t have to make them manually and set your own restore points. With automatic backups in place, you can then let the Backup Manager do the work for you going forward.
For more information, read: Website and Data Backups – A Practical Guide
One-click installation
Instead of getting bogged down with complicated software setups, Plesk Obsidian has a one-click installation feature that lets you do it simply and in seconds. You can use this feature to install popular CMS website platforms, like WordPress, Magento, Joomla and Drupal as well as to install the many useful plugins, add-ons and extensions that extend website functionality. For instance, in just one click, you can install WooCommerce on WordPress to turn your site into an online store.
File and database management
Plesk has features that make it easy to manage your files and databases. With the File Manager, you can quickly upload, remove and organise all your website files, as well as create new files and directories. Crucially, Plesk also lets you set permissions, reducing the chance of human error or hacked user accounts being used to access information. To safeguard your storage, you can also set maximum file upload sizes, which can be useful if you let users upload images or videos to your site.
You can also manage your databases in Plesk. Here you can create new ones, delete old ones, add or remove users, change passwords and set privileges based on user roles.
Email management
Though not strictly ‘site management,’ email hosting is included with web hosting plans, and it makes sense to be able to manage this in the same control panel as your website hosting. With Plesk Obsidian’s Mail Settings, you can create and delete email accounts for any of your domains, change passwords, check usage (storage) stats, create aliases, and set up auto-forwarders and responders. The new Empty Mailbox feature now lets you delete all mail, inbound and outbound, from mailboxes with a single click.
Plesk also comes with a configurable spam and virus filtering tool to prevent spam, malware and phishing emails from getting through to your inboxes. Additionally, you can use the Mail Settings to configure whether you want to use IMAP or POP3 protocols (IMAP is necessary if you want to sync your emails across multiple devices or clients). Plesk’s email configuration helper, meanwhile, makes it easy to set up and access your email through clients like Outlook.
Web-development features
Plesk Obsidian has been designed to help developers build websites more efficiently. One of its most recent features, for those that use containers, is Docker Integration. The latest version of Plesk Obsidian comes with an updated Docker interface that makes it easier to manage your Docker containers. Developers can now deploy multi-container applications from within Plesk without having to manually configure each of them and your Docker configurations can now be included in your backups. Additionally, Plesk’s Git integration capabilities now let you pull code stored in Git repositories.
Get the right solution, read: Why Cloud Storage is Essential for Web Developers
Monitoring and analytics
Monitoring your server resources and website analytics are both vital parts of site management. Plesk’s built-in performance monitoring tools will let you see your CPU, RAM and disk usage data, which is vital to understanding whether your websites have the resources they need to handle their traffic. If your usage is high and your traffic is growing, it could indicate a need to upgrade to a bigger hosting solution before your site’s performance is affected.
Aside from letting you know how much traffic your site is getting; Plesk’s traffic analysis tools will also provide helpful information about where your visitors are coming from and their behaviour on your site. This can be highly informative when it comes to making website improvements.
Conclusion
Whether you use Linux or Windows, Plesk is an industry-leading control panel that offers a huge range of features and tools that make it quicker and easier to manage all aspects of your website and hosting. Indeed, the features mentioned in this article are just a few of the many that Plesk Obsidian has to offer.
Looking to take advantage of Plesk? Plesk is included in all our Windows shared and Windows VPS hosting plans and is an available option for both our dedicated servers and cloud solutions. For more information about our full range of hosting solutions visit our homepage.
