Plesk

Plesk is a hosting control panel licensed per server, in three editions that cap a server at 10, 30 or unlimited domains, from cPanel's owner WebPros.

Plesk is a hosting control panel, licensed per server, that turns a VPS or a dedicated machine into a place where websites, mail and databases are managed from a browser. It is built for the people responsible for the server rather than for the applications running on it: site owners who would rather not work at a command line, and hosting businesses that hand accounts to their own customers. Plesk is developed by WebPros International GmbH, formerly Plesk International GmbH, and sits in the WebPros family beside cPanel and WHMCS. The panel is a licence, so the machine and its bandwidth are bought somewhere else. Inside the panel, domains, subscriptions and customer accounts are records, each with its own DNS, databases and mail accounts attached. WordPress Toolkit installs, clones, updates and hardens WordPress sites in bulk, and Sitejet Builder ships with every edition for sites built without a CMS. Let's Encrypt certificates are requested and renewed from the panel, and NGINX caching is switched on per WordPress site. Backup Manager schedules incremental backups and writes them to remote storage such as Amazon S3, Google Drive or OneDrive. Mail runs on Postfix with Roundcube and Horde webmail, Git deployment works over an SSH key, and the Extensions catalogue supplies the rest. Plesk suits web developers, designers and agencies who keep client sites on their own server, and hosting providers who resell accounts and need reseller management, subscription plans and account management in one interface. It fits teams that would rather handle application installs, certificates and backups through a panel than script each one, and administrators who need PostgreSQL or MSSQL alongside MySQL. It is bought as a per-server licence in three editions that differ mainly in how many domains each allows, direct from the Plesk Online Store, through a hosting partner or on a cloud marketplace. A Plesk server is where a domain is set up, a WordPress site is launched and kept patched, a mailbox is added for a client, a database is provisioned and a backup is restored after a bad deployment. It runs on a VPS or dedicated server from any provider and is also offered ready to run on hyperscaler marketplaces. In a hosting business it works next to billing software such as WHMCS, which provisions and invoices while Plesk runs the server. Server metrics, DNS records and extension management sit in the same interface, so a Plesk machine is administered from a browser instead of a shell.