There might be cases when a Plesk server is located in a private network and it has only one internal IP address. In such cases, website visitors can access the hosted sites via the NAT technology. NAT translates public IP addresses into internal IP addresses and encapsulates this information in network packets.
Plesk uses one and the same IP address for various purposes. For example, an IP address is used for web hosting (Apache + nginx configuration files) and for DNS zone definitions. And here is a problem. In the former case, an internal IP address should be used, and in the latter case, an external IP address. Plesk UI shows only one IP address, but it does not let you configure the mapping (translation) of IP addresses.
In Plesk 12, there is an option to define both private and public IP addresses. The option is not present in the UI, only in API-RPC. To provide users with an interface for managing NAT, a new extension, called NAT Manager, was created by means of Plesk Extensions SDK. You can download it either from
https://www.plesk.com/extensions/nat-manager/
or from a Plesk 12 installation (Administrator’s panel > Extensions > Extensions Catalog).
Here is a brief instruction on how to use this extension. Let’s assume your internal IP address is 10.0.0.1 and external IP is 8.8.8.8. You need to go to Extensions > NAT Manager, select the required IP address (10.0.0.1 in our example), and then specify a public IP address in the corresponding field.
If you already have domains, then you need to apply the changes to existing DNS zones. To do this, go to Administrator’s panel > Tools & Settings > DNS Template > Apply DNS Template Changes.
Alternatively, you can apply changes only to specific domain DNS zones. To do this, go to Hosting Panel > Websites & Domains > DNS Settings > Apply DNS Template Changes.
After that, DNS zones will have A records that will point at external IP addresses. At the same time, internal IP addresses will still be used for web hosting.
All newly created domains will use internal IP for web hosting purposes and external IP for DNS zones.