As we come to the end of another year of growth and innovations, it’s time to discuss the main features implemented in Plesk in 2022. And we want to know your experience of Plesk Obsidian this year, so keep scrolling to take part in a quick survey.
Let’s dive in!
.NET websites on Plesk for Linux
To save time for what matters most, we have developed .NET Toolkit, a Plesk extension that makes hosting .NET applications a breeze. So, what can it do, you ask?
- Manage installed versions of the ASP.NET Core Runtime.
- Create a website running on ASP.NET Core with just a few clicks.
- Manage environment variables.
- View logs of ASP.NET Core applications.
- Restart the application.
And what is more important, you can easily host and manage .NET applications on Plesk for Linux servers now.
Have we caught your interest? Read more in this dedicated blog article.
Laravel Toolkit
This year, especially at Laravel Developers’ request, we came up with the Laravel Toolkit, a Plesk extension that makes hosting Laravel applications feel just like the native application, but automated on Plesk. So, what can it do?
- Create a simple Laravel application with just a few clicks.
- No need to install anything else. Get required PHP versions, Composer, Artisan, npm, MySQL database, and Git with one click.
- No SSH access? No problem! Manage your applications from the Plesk interface. Run Artisan, npm, and Composer commands, manage the .env file and database, review logs – it’s that easy!
- Pull updates for your Laravel applications from remote Git repositories and configure deployment options.
- Get your application up and running, hosted, and secured with SSL with no hassle – Plesk takes care of everything.
See the detailed overview in our dedicated blog article.
Improved Node.js support
If you are considering providing Node.js application hosting as a service to your customers or if you would like to use Plesk to automate hosting for Node.js applications you are developing, we’ve got good news for you. Plesk comes with a Node.js extension that allows you to install and manage apps quickly and easily. Other key functions include:
- Using the latest releases of Node.js (LTS and Current),
- Choice of package manager: NPM or Yarn,
- Viewing application logs in Plesk web interface using Log Browser,
- Plesk users granted shell access (even chrooted) can now execute certain Node.js commands (like nvm use or npm install) straight from the shell,
- Very simple web interface for other related management functions
Read in detail how to work with Node.js apps on Plesk in this article.
Revamped Git integration
In 2022, the Git extension completely overhauled its UI to make a modern and more convenient UX, and even added a lot of new features, such as:
- On Plesk for Linux servers, Git added the ability to specify login and password for remote HTTPS repositories.
- The extension now deploys files to production websites asynchronously if the deployment was triggered by a webhook.
- The async-deploy method to the CLI and XML API was added. The method invokes the asynchronous deployment of files to the production website.
- Support for multiple deploy keys for each domain.
- Upcoming: multiple user support for a push to Git repository.
Server-wide Log Browser
Have you ever had an issue with a server or a service? Or maybe you are having some trouble with a server or a service on the server right now? Do you know the shortest way to find out what is the root cause of the issue? To send you in the right direction, it’s a good idea to start troubleshooting with reading log files!
Our Server-wide Log Browser can simplify a Plesk admin’s life on a few real use-cases like:
- Investigate services’ logs and statuses,
- Search for errors and warnings in journald logs,
- Filter content out of the Plesk panel.log file,
- Investigate what happened with emails,
Review the detailed use-cases in this separate blog article.
Website Log Check
If your website has availability issues, the starting point to troubleshoot them is to look at the web server logs. However, detecting, analyzing, and resolving the issues is a complex task. You need to know how the web server works, where the logs are located, how to analyze the logs, and more. The new Plesk feature “Website Log Check” can save you time and effort. The Website Log Check scans the web server logs for common issues, shows how often a specific issue occurs, and suggests ways to resolve the issue.
Read more information on what Plesk automatically detects in this guide on the topic.
Monitoring
There are two possible ways to monitor your websites: local monitoring (on the same server as the website) or external monitoring located outside of the server.
The local monitoring usually is included in the web hosting price, but external costs additional money. If a server where a website is hosted has an issue, the local monitoring can be non-informative because it also could be affected by the server’s issue.
The external monitoring is the best option in such cases because even the whole server is not available, you will be informed about the issue at the same time and with a guarantee. It allows you to decrease the time when the website or server is out of service.
For this purpose, we offer 360 Monitoring, which is already integrated with Plesk and provides a complete full-functional monitoring solution for websites and servers.
Want to connect monitoring to your websites? Read our step-by-step article.
ARM servers support
This year, Plesk announced official support for ARM architecture.
Our new reality is affected by the electricity crisis – most European providers were forced to announce price increases in 2022, as a result of the increased electricity prices. One of the main advantages of using ARM architecture is cost efficiency, as less power is consumed.
You can have the following advantages of using Plesk on ARM servers:
- You can save more than 40% on server resource costs while maintaining the same performance.
- It is a climate-friendly technology. Using ARM processors can help to reduce your carbon footprint.
- You can run Plesk on Raspberry Pi. Although we do not recommend this configuration for production, you can use it for entertainment and educational purposes.
- You have ARM as an additional choice if you are not satisfied with Intel/AMD (because of quality, costs, or competition).
Since the release of Plesk Obsidian 18.0.46, the Plesk Panel is available and can be installed on Ubuntu 22 with ARM architecture. You can get a VPS with Plesk Panel on Graviton2 processors with one click, using Plesk AWS AMI image or an Oracle Cloud Marketplace. By deploying the Plesk Panel on VPSes with ARM CPUs, you can reduce server resource costs while maintaining high performance.
Read detailed overviews of ARM architecture on Plesk here and here.
Up-to-date, performant, and stable Plesk
- Support of new OSes: AlmaLinux 8 & 9, RockyLinux 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, Debian 11, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS are supported.
- Fine-tuned the password strength validator in Plesk to make it better at accurately evaluating strength of passwords generated by third-party applications and services. Read more about this feature.
- NGINX shipped with Plesk is compiled with ngx_http_geoip2_module out of the box. This makes it possible to use MaxMind Geo IP databases to detect visitor’s geographical location by their IP address. This, in turn, makes it possible to limit access to websites to visitors from certain countries, or to automatically redirect them to country-specific URLs. Read more in this guide.
- The console works using a domain’s PHP version instead of the system PHP. Customers can now run artisan, composer, and other commands without specifying the whole path.
- The Plesk administrator can now install PECL extensions for Plesk and system PHP handlers via Plesk GUI and CLI.
- Plesk administrators can now specify a custom email address to be used as a mail relay (the address will be used as the sender address for all Plesk email notifications found in “Tools & Settings” > “Notifications”). Using an email address with a properly configured domain (DKIM, SPF records, etc.) would ensure that the notifications would not be treated as spam. To do so, add the following lines to the panel.ini file:
[notification]
senderAddress=<custom email address> - Cgroups Manager is now a free-to-use feature, and a welcome addition to the Plesk Web Pro and Web Host editions. Read more about this feature.
- Plesk Panel performance has been significantly improved during the 2022 year.
Of course, we delivered many more improvements than mentioned in the article! You can find past releases and stay up to date with the latest updates in our changelog.
How was your experience of Plesk this year? Take 5 minutes to help Plesk become even better in 2023 by taking this short survey:
with
One comment
Need varnish support in plesk 😉