Plesk Introduction

Plesk is the new generation web server management tool that is widely used day-to-day by web professionals, agencies and developers to effectively manage the web sites and services.

The simplified version of the GUI and quick installation of Plesk control panel has been largely adopted by cloud professionals that run their website and services on HyperScaler providers like Amazon AWS, DigitalOcean, Alibaba Cloud and others.

If you run a web hosting services, aside from cPanel, Plesk will be best compatible options for you to offer it as an alternative control panel for your customers. With the introduction of the Plesk extensions in the marketplace, it allows you to further extend your offer and increase your ARPU.

Plesk History

Plesk has been in the market back to earlier than the year 2004 which we can observe from the following life cycle.

Plesk EditionRelease DateExtended SupportEnd Of Life
Plesk ObsidianJune 4, 2019N/AN/A
Plesk OnyxOctober 11, 2016October 11, 2020April 20, 2021
Plesk 12June 16, 2014June 16, 2018January 1, 2019
Plesk 11June 13, 2012June 13, 2016December 13, 2016
Plesk 10November 3, 2010January 31, 2015May 3, 2015
Plesk 9December 9, 2008December 9, 2012June 9, 2013
Plesk 8September 20, 2006March 1, 2012 September, 2012
Small Business PanelNovember, 2009August 1, 2011July, 2012
Plesk 7 and earlierFebruary 10, 2004 N/AJanuary 1, 2012

Plesk Edition Comparison

Plesk is offered as 10, 100, 300, and Unlimited Domains on the legacy Plesk edition of 8, 9, 10, and 11.

Starting from Plesk 12 release onwards, Plesk is shipped with 3 major editions.

Plesk Web Admin Edition

For IT Sysadmin / Administrator and Web Admin.

It is for basic management of simple websites and your domains, without the extended tools and features and all service provider overheads such as management of different customers, resellers partnership, and custom subscription plans.

Plesk Web Admin supports the creation of up to 10 domains in a single install.

Plesk Web Pro Edition

Targeted for Web Professionals who need the full flexibility to build, secure, and run highly optimized and customized websites. Get all the features, including the full WordPress Toolkit, to mass-manage and automate your projects. This group of Web Professionals usually is the group that offers design, development, and deploy their websites from zero to completion.

Plesk Web Pro edition supports the creation of up to 30 domains in a single environment.

Plesk Web Host Edition

Especially for Web Hosters to customize, provision, and manage hosting businesses. Get maximum flexibility, access to the domain management tools, and the full WordPress Toolkit to support your multi-tenant, “install anything” business model.

Plesk Web Host edition allows Unlimited domains to be hosted on a single installation.

FeaturesPlesk Web Admin EditionPlesk Web Pro EditionPlesk Web Host Edition
Service Provider Management
Reseller managementNot SupportedNot SupportedSupported
Subscription managementNot SupportedSupportedSupported
Account managementNot SupportedSupportedSupported
User Interface Description
Power user view (server + site admin)SupportedSupportedSupported
Custom view managementNot SupportedSupportedSupported
End Users Features
WordPress ToolkitSE Only (limited features)SupportedSupported
Developer packOptional with extension purchaseOptional with extension purchaseOptional with extension purchase
Plesk Premium Email by KolabOptional with extension purchaseOptional with extension purchaseOptional with extension purchase
Plesk mobile managerSupportedSupportedSupported
Security Features
Security Core with ModSecurity Rules by AtomicorpSupportedSupportedSupported
Let’s EncryptSupportedSupportedSupported
Plesk Email SecuritySupported (Optional to upgrade to Pro)Supported (Optional to upgrade to Pro)Supported (Optional to upgrade to Pro)
No. of Domains SupportedMax 10 DomainsMax 30 DomainsUnlimited Domains

Plesk Licensing

There’s no Free Edition available but if you are looking out to explore Plesk, you can try out the Plesk for 14 days free trial and subscribe for a commercial edition from just $6/mo (vs Plesk retail $10/mo) after the 14 days without the need to reinstall to continue to use Plesk.

Plesk is shipped with either monthly or yearly subscription. The lifetime perpetual license which offered back then has been retired. You can’t find this license anymore.

Do not attempt to look for any Plesk crack license key as you may fall into any of the 6 risks that you may not know.

Choose Your Platform Environment
VPS / Cloud VM
Dedicated Server
Dedicated Server
  • VPS / Cloud VM
  • Dedicated Server
Plesk Web Admin
$8.7/moPlesk Retail : $15.5/mo
  • For website owner and server administrator.
  •        10 Domains
  •         WordPress Toolkit SE
  •         Subscription Management
  •         Account Management
  •         Reseller Management
Plesk Web Admin
$8.7/moRetail : $15.5/mo
  • For website owner and server administrator.

  •         10 Domains
  •         WordPress Toolkit SE
  •         Subscription Management
  •         Account Management
  •         Reseller Management
Best Value
Plesk Web Pro
$13.5/moPlesk Retail : $23.5/mo
  • Complete solution for web designers and developers.
  •         30 Domains
  •         WordPress Toolkit
  •         Subscription Management
  •         Account Management
  •         Reseller Management
Best Value
Plesk Web Pro
$13.5/moRetail : $23.5/mo
  • Complete solution for web designers and developers.

  •         30 Domains
  •         WordPress Toolkit
  •         Subscription Management
  •         Account Management
  •         Reseller Management
Plesk Web Host
$23.5/moPlesk Retail : $40.5/mo
  • Ultimate solution to grow your web agency business.
  •         Unlimited Domains
  •         WordPress Toolkit
  •         Subscription Management
  •         Account Management
  •         Reseller Management
Plesk Web Host
$39.0/moRetail : $67.0/mo
  • Ultimate solution to grow your web agency business.

  •         Unlimited Domains
  •         WordPress Toolkit
  •         Subscription Management
  •         Account Management
  •         Reseller Management

Supported Platform Environment

Starting from Plesk version 12 onwards, Plesk is shipped that support on 2 different platforms with 3 different editions – Plesk Web Admin, Plesk Web Pro, and Plesk Web Host.

You can install Plesk on 2 platform environments :

VPS / Cloud VM – Any of the virtualization platforms including VPS (KVM/Xen/OpenVZ), Parallels Virtuozzo Containers (4.6 above), VMWare, Hyper-V, Virtuozzo 6 & 7 for Linux and LXC (Docker).

Example providers – Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean, Alibaba Cloud, Vultr, Linode and any VPS plans offered by your hosting providers.

Dedicated Server – any bare metal physical dedicated server.

Example providers – any hosting providers you have leased a single dedicated server. If you run your own physical server on-premise, this is supported as well. Usually, this is the environment that you fully own all the resources on the server without sharing it with other users. The cost of running on this environment is also higher vs running on VPS/VM Cloud environment.

Plesk Operating System and Hardware Requirements

Plesk Hardware requirements

Aside from the platforms supported, Plesk best runs on the following software and hardware requirements for the best optimum performance.

Minimum Hardware Requirement.

  • The minimum amount of RAM required for installing and running Plesk on Linux is 512 MB + 1 GB swap. On Windows – 2 GB of RAM.
  • The minimum amount of free disk space required for installing and running Plesk is 10 GB on Linux and 30 GB on Windows

Recommended Hardware Requirement.

For an ordinary shared hosting environment, Plesk recommends that you have at least 1GB of RAM per 40 – 50 websites. So, 200 websites would imply Plesk hardware requirements of a minimum of 4GB. The recommendation is based on the following assumptions:

  • On average, shared hosting servers see that about 10% of websites are active, in other words 10% of websites have a persistent level of traffic week in, week out
  • 128MB of RAM will handle most websites. For example:
    • 64MB for WordPress
    • 64MB for Joomla
    • 128MB for Drupal
    • 128MB for Symfony
  • A maximum of 1 to 3 simultaneous visitors for each website, with no more than 500 unique visitors per website on any given day

Websites with higher traffic (for example, 5 to 10 concurrent visitors and a total of 1,000 to 30,000 visitors per day) will require more RAM, in the range of 500MB to 1GB for each website. Also, note that Plesk hardware requirements mean that you need enough disk space for memory swapping.

The above are just assumption of requirements. Each implementation is different as the environment are different as the usages are different. It is always recommended for you to look into the growth of your websites traffic and customers in 6-12 months time so you can plan ahead for best optimization of your cost and ensure a smooth experience for your websites.

Plesk Supported Operating System

The following are list of Operating System supported by Plesk. We recommend going for the OS which is 1 version behind from the latest release – ie for Centos, you can go for Centos 7 as the OS is much more stable.

Operating SystemOperating End of Life Support
Debian 8 64-bitJune 30, 2020
Debian 9 64-bit (Plesk Onyx 17.8 and later)June 17, 2022
Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit April 21, 2021
Ubuntu 18.04 64-bit (Plesk Onyx 17.8 and later)April 26, 2023
CentOS 6.x 64-bitNovember 30, 2020
CentOS 7.x 64-bitJune 30, 2024
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x 64-bit *June 30, 2024
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x 64-bit *June 30, 2024 (end of production phase)
CloudLinux 6.x 64-bitNovember 30, 2020
CloudLinux 7.x 64-bitJune 30, 2024
Virtuozzo Linux 7 64-bit June 30, 2023
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (64-bit, Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter editions, and Windows Web Server), including Server Core installationsJanuary 14, 2020
Windows Server 2012 (64-bit, Standard, Foundation, and Datacenter editions), including Server Core installationsJanuary 10, 2023
Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit, Standard, Datacenter, and Essentials editions), including Server Core installationsJanuary 10, 2023
Windows Server 2016 (64-bit, Standard and Datacenter editions), including Server Core installationsTo be announced by Microsoft
Windows Server 2019To be announced by Microsoft

Which Plesk Edition Should I Use

Here are some few guidelines to ask yourself when evaluating which Plesk edition should you choose.

  1. How many domains will you be managing? For your own or for your customers?
  2. If you are offering web design and hosting services, will you be providing each of your customers their individual access to manage their website in Plesk?
  3. Do you need to create different kind of services and subscription plan with different features for your clients?
  4. Are you managing websites that runs on WordPress?

Answering these questions is useful for you to understand which edition to go with. If you are in doubt, you can always start with Plesk Web Admin Edition and upgrade to Web Pro or Web Host along the way. Upgrading does not need any reinstallation of your Plesk server or involve any migration. Same goes if you are downgrading to lower edition – example from Plesk Web Host to Web Pro.

Our client portal allows you to easily upgrade or downgrade your Plesk edition with the pro-rate on your bill. If you are migrating to the new server, you can also move the same license key to the new server by changing to the new IP address.

Feel free to reach out to us if you need a looking for a full plan to launch your offering with Plesk. We offer a free consultation to ensure you have the right tools and Plesk edition to support your growth.

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