PLESK Control Panel Software
Every web hosting service comes with some type of control panel software to make managing the account easier. Some hosting companies have chosen to build their own control panel software from scratch like iPowerweb and the vDeck panel. But, most hosting companies use one of the big 3 control panel software solutions PLESK, cPanel or Helm. I have used all of them and really don’t have a favorite. That’s right, they are all very good at what they do. It really comes down to personal preference or simply going with what you know. Learning a new control panel does take time as there is a bit of a learning curve.
Lately I have been using PLESK on my new dedicated server. The more I dig in and discover features I didn’t even know were there, the more I like it. One of the latest discoveries is the custom firewall settings on the server level. PLESK makes it easy to keep port-scanners and hackers from poking around. I can even block pings from unrecognized IP addresses. Security becomes more important as your site grows in popularity.
PLESK is really set up nicely for reseller hosting. You can get a 100 user license for pretty cheap and I can see it working well for the smaller resellers like web designers and virtually anyone with less than 100 clients to support. You can create clients on the server as well as managing everything at the domain name level. I setup a client for my Father who runs a few sites for his art gallery business. That way I can keep his domains seperate from mine and still give him the server access that he needs. I’m not a hosting reseller but I still find the tools useful for managing lots of domains and websites.
cPanel is probably a bit more widely used than PLESK, especially in regards to shared hosting, but for now I am very pleased with PLESK 8.3 on my dedicated server.
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