Introducing Plesk Obsidian for VPS

Plesk Obsidian is the latest Plesk version. Plesk itself is a comprehensive and intuitive management interface for managing your Linux or Windows virtual private server (VPS).

Plesk Obsidian was initially released in 2019 and offered extensive improvements over earlier versions. In this article, we’ll look at what exactly Plesk and its latest version offers you.

What can Plesk do?

With Plesk you can manage different web hosting packages. This means that, for example, you can create and manage domains, email accounts, databases and much more with it. Plesk is an excellent web management software for web professionals, developers and system administrators, and it provides a wide range of options and tools.

As a company or a company server administrator, Plesk is very useful if, for example, you have different websites online and want to manage them through individual packages. Plesk is also useful if a standard shared web hosting plan is not enough for your online projects because of resource limitations. In this case, you can choose to set up your own VPS and manage it with Plesk.

Plesk is also ideal if, for example, you are a web designer and want to provide your customers with their own small web hosting packages. Plesk makes it easy to configure and provide the packages individually for your customers.

Rights distribution in Plesk

Plesk gives you the option to assign different login roles with different responsibilities. These roles include:

• Administrator
• Reseller
• Customer
• Domain owner
• Mail users

Plesk extensions

In addition to the basic management of web space, mail and FTP accounts as well as automatic system updates, Plesk offers a variety of extensions. These include, for example, the following extensions:

• SEO toolkit for optimising your website visibility.
• Nginx caching to reduce problems caused by long response times and high server load
• A repair kit to fix problems caused by high CPU load or lack of free disk space even when remote access to the server is unavailable.
• Git source control support.

Different editions available

As a developer, administrator, web designer or service provider in an agency, you can choose from the following three editions depending on your needs:

• Web Admin Edition – Management of up to 10 domains
• Web Pro Edition – Management of up to 30 domains
• Web Host Edition – Management of unlimited domains

What’s new in Plesk Obsidian?

Plesk Obsidian incorporates by default most of the functions required by users, and it’s particularly impressive due to the following aspects:

1. High level of security in default settings

The security tools ModSecurity and fail2ban are integrated and can be used directly. These tools were already very popular in previous Plesk versions but had to be installed separately.

Fail2ban is used to clean and block incorrect or invalid log-in data to prevent interference by hackers. ModSecurity is used to configure the firewall and protects the system from, for example, DDOS attacks.

2. Greater user-friendliness

Plesk Obsidian is significantly more usable. The file manager has been revised, as has server, application and website management. The new file manager speeds up work and, for example, archives can be integrated in large quantities. It is also possible to search for files directly in the file manager.

Plesk Obsidian also has an option to use customisable HTML notifications for design. The backup manager in Plesk Obsidian works much more dynamically and faster than in previous versions.

3. Improved performance and web monitoring

The PageSpeed module has been integrated into Plesk Obsidian, which means that websites have better performance by default. Long loading times are minimised. In addition, an analysis tool is included as standard with the Grafana Monitoring System. This allows the usage behaviour of website visitors to be analysed.

Another tool that has been integrated into Plesk Obsidian is the Server Name Indication (SNI) for sending emails. This is used to encrypt emails between the sender and recipient with an SSL certificate. In Plesk Obsidian you have the option of securing each domain with its own SSL certificate.

Other features of Plesk Obsidian include:

• Incremental backups
• Ruby & Node.js
• Self-repair tools
• SecurityCore
• Outbound antispam
• System updates tool

In contrast to previous versions, Plesk Obsidian offers many improvements in terms of security, performance and user-friendliness. The version is already available for our cloud servers and can be used by you.