2016's Ultimate Guide to Web Panels: Plesk

Plesk is a leading control panel in the US that also captures roughly 75 to 80 percent of the European market. Featuring support for a breadth of Linux versions, as well as Windows compatibility, the panel comes in several editions, each tailored for specific hosting use cases.

The user interface is regarded as a bit cleaner than cPanel, but in terms of features, Plesk and cPanel don’t differ much. Both are in use by big hosting companies (often in a branded form) and many other customers.

Recently, Plesk became an independent company, and they’re passionately focused on keeping up with the ever-evolving Web. The panel’s creators target both hosting newbies and hardcore developers by making server management easy and efficient. The company is also investing heavily on the educational end of things — with content marketing to teach web professionals best practices for running a business online, marketing, and even storytelling.

Features

1. Host/OS Agnostic: Plesk can be installed on a wide variety of operating systems and is virtually host agnostic. If you are running any form of a popular Linux version (CentOS, Ubuntu, CloudLinux, etc) or even Windows, you can run Plesk. As an added bonus, you can even run Plesk inside a Docker container found on Docker Hub. This is a strong pull factor differentiating Plesk from cPanel, which only runs on CentOS.

2. Git Integration: In response to a complaint that many web panels don’t offer support for Git, a popular version control system used to track changes and site updates, Plesk added their Gitman extension. The extension is available for Plesk 12.5 and up, with full Git support being pulled into the core in an upcoming Plesk release.

3. Docker Integration: The October 2016 release will also update Plesk’s core to include Docker support — featuring a catalog of over 200,000 Docker images. This lets you launch Docker images straight from Plesk without touching the command line.

4. 1-Click SSL Security: Even those who are new to hosting tend to understand the need for SSL security. Unfortunately, it can be a pain to set up and keep up to date. With new services like Let’s Encrypt making it easier and easier to get SSL (TLS) on your site, there is no reason to leave your pages unsecured. Plesk will automatically handle obtaining a certificate and configuring database files to accommodate https-only access for you, so both your web panel and all sites you’re hosting on your server are secured. This will also include niceties like renewing your certificate, running HTTP2, or providing you with security details when your server is under attack.

5. 1-Click WordPress Hardening: An upcoming extension release will allow WordPress hosting customers to entrust their security management to Plesk with one click. Plesk will then manage plugin updates, bug fixes, and security patches for you.

➧ Demo

➧ Pricing

For the more dev savvy, the panel features support for numerous PHP versions out of the box, with Ruby, Python, and NodeJS support available via Phusion (or out of the box with Plesk Onyx release). Among the popular Linux distros supported are Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Debian, and CloudLinux, with upgrade support for Ubuntu and Debian.