The Parallels Plesk Panel (ex: Parallels Plesk Control Panel, Plesk Server Administrator, PSA, or just Plesk) software package is a commercial web hosting automation program. Originally released under the U.S. company Plesk Inc. and designed in Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk

Novosibirsk is the third-largest city in Russia, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and the largest city of Siberia, with a population of 1,473,737 . It is the administrative center of Novosibirsk Oblast as well as of the Siberian Federal District...

, Russia, Plesk was acquired by SWSoft

SWsoft

SWsoft was a privately held server automation and virtualization software company and the parent company of Parallels, Inc. SWsoft developed software for running data centers, particularly for web-hosting services companies, application service providers, and managed service providers...

 in July 2003. SWSoft renamed themselves under the Parallels

Parallels, Inc.

Parallels, Inc. is a privately held virtualization technology company with offices in the USA, Germany, UK, France, Japan, China, Russia and Ukraine. Parallels' US offices are in Renton, WA.The company has more than 700 employees as of 2010....

 name (a brand which had been acquired by SWSoft) in 2008.

Overview

Parallels Plesk Panel allows a server administrator

System administrator

A system administrator, IT systems administrator, systems administrator, or sysadmin is a person employed to maintain and operate a computer system and/or network...

 to set up new website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

s, reseller

Reseller

A reseller is a company or individual that purchases goods or services with the intention of reselling them rather than consuming or using them. This is usually done for profit...

 accounts, e-mail

E-mail

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

 accounts, and DNS

Domain name system

The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...

 entries through a web

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

-based interface. The administrator can create client and site templates, which predetermine resource-allocation parameters for the domains and/or clients.

Parallels Plesk Panel for Linux/UNIX

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 supports multiple POSIX

POSIX

POSIX , an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

 platforms, including Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

, Fedora

Fedora (operating system)

Fedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...

, FreeBSD

FreeBSD

FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...

, Red Hat Linux

Red Hat Linux

Red Hat Linux, assembled by the company Red Hat, was a popular Linux based operating system until its discontinuation in 2004.Red Hat Linux 1.0 was released on November 3, 1994...

, SUSE

SUSE Linux distributions

SUSE Linux is a computer operating system. It is built on top of the open source Linux kernel and is distributed with system and application software from other open source projects. SUSE Linux is of German origin and mainly developed in Europe. The first version appeared in early 1994, making...

 and Ubuntu

Ubuntu (operating system)

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...

. Parallels Plesk Panel for Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 supports Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003

Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft, introduced on 24 April 2003. An updated version, Windows Server 2003 R2, was released to manufacturing on 6 December 2005...

 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems.

Parallels Plesk Panel installs custom versions of or manages versions of MySQL

MySQL

MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

 and PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL, often simply Postgres, is an object-relational database management system available for many platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, MS Windows and Mac OS X. It is released under the PostgreSQL License, which is an MIT-style license, and is thus free and open source software...

 databases (Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database server, developed by Microsoft: It is a software product whose primary function is to store and retrieve data as requested by other software applications, be it those on the same computer or those running on another computer across a network...

 and Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine

MSDE

Microsoft SQL Server Data Engine is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. It is a scaled-down version of Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 or 2000 which is free for non-commercial use as well as certain limited commercial use...

 under Windows), Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat is an open source web server and servlet container developed by the Apache Software Foundation...

 Java platform server, ColdFusion

ColdFusion

In computing, ColdFusion is the name of a commercial rapid application development platform invented by Jeremy and JJ Allaire in 1995. ColdFusion was originally designed to make it easier to connect simple HTML pages to a database, by version 2 it had...

 server, as well as CounterStrike

Counterstrike

Counterstrike may refer to:* Counterattack, a defensive military tactic.* Counterstrike * Counterstrike , a 1969 BBC science-fiction series* Counterstrike...

and Battlefield 1942

Battlefield 1942

Battlefield 1942 is a 3D World War II first-person shooter computer game developed by Swedish company Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh . The game can be played in singleplayer mode against the computer game AI or in multiplayer mode...

game servers.

Add-ons

Parallels Plesk Panel has several software packs that are not part of the main Parallels Plesk Panel code base. These add-ons are designed to fully interact with Parallels Plesk Panel. These Parallels Plesk Panel software packs include functionality for billing, website building, and multiple server support.

They include:

• Parallels Plesk Customer & Business Manager (formerly Plesk Billing)
• Parallels Plesk Sitebuilder
• Parallels Plesk Expand

Version history

Version	Released
Parallels Plesk Panel 10.4	2011-11-08
Parallels Plesk Panel 10.3.1	2011-07-27
Parallels Plesk Panel 10.2	2011-04-07
Parallels Plesk Panel 10.1.1	2011-01-28
Parallels Plesk Panel 10.0.1	2010-11-03
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.5.1	2010-04-14
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.3.0	2009-12-23
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.2.3	2009-10-20
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.2.2	2009-07-28
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.2.1	2009-04-28
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0.1	2009-01-30
Parallels Plesk Panel 9.0	2008-12-09
Parallels Plesk Control Panel 8.6	2008-07-28
Parallels Plesk Control Panel 8.4	2008-05-07
Plesk 8.3	2007-12-26
Plesk 8.2.1	2007-09-19
Plesk 8.1.1	2007-03-27
Plesk 8.0.1	2006-09-20
Plesk 7.6.1 (Windows only)	2006-07-25
Plesk 7.5.4	2005-11-15
Plesk 7	2004-02-10
Plesk 6.5	2003-11-20
Plesk 6	2003-06-26

Security

Attackers routinely attack the Plesk interfaces to obtain root/admin access since Plesk does not enforce strong passwords by default. This makes them an easy and lucrative target for malicious users attempting to compromise Internet hosts. Plesk also runs many services on external interfaces by default (e.g. mysql), which means that they are generally exploited very quickly by attackers.

Some users have complained that Plesk is not secure in the sense of multihosting security since all virtual hosts are run under the same Apache user and share the same configuration. However, in Plesk 7.5.6 for Windows and onward, all virtual hosts can run under their own worker process group, secured using their own respective IIS user. In Plesk for Linux, one could use the apache2-mpm-itk (Multi-Processing Module) or the alternative suEXEC

SuEXEC

Apache suEXEC is a feature of the Apache Web server. It allows users to run CGI and SSI applications as a different user - normally, all web server processes run as the default web server user...

+FastCGI

FastCGI

FastCGI is a protocol for interfacing interactive programs with a web server. FastCGI is a variation on the earlier Common Gateway Interface ; FastCGI's main aim is to reduce the overhead associated with interfacing the web server and CGI programs, allowing a server to handle more web page...

+PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

 solution - both of which are not directly related to plesk itself. Plesk also defaults to port 8443 for HTTPS applications, this clashes with both Microsoft ISA servers and Microsoft Small Business Servers, which disallow non-standard ports for HTTPS.

Plesk offers users the possibility to install web applications with just a few mouse clicks using the Application Packaging Standard

Application Packaging Standard

The "Application Packaging Standard" is a standard to allow controlled provisioning and management of simple web applications in a shared hosting environment...

. On the downside, it's not always possible to upgrade these applications as easily to fix security problems, which might lead to vulnerable servers.

Interface

The Plesk control panel uses a SSL

Transport Layer Security

Transport Layer Security and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer , are cryptographic protocols that provide communication security over the Internet...

-enabled web based GUI

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

, using frames

Framing (World Wide Web)

When using web browsers, the terms frames or frameset refer to the display of two or more web pages or media elements displayed side-by-side within the same browser window...

.

Backup and restore

One shortcoming in Plesk's data backup and restore functionality is the mechanism by which Plesk stores backup files, using server disk space before uploading files to a separate FTP server. Because Plesk backup files can be quite large, this mechanism effectively limits the usable server storage space, forcing administrators to choose between not backing up data or leaving large amounts of storage unused.