Site Preview w/ Plesk
My partner Greg posted a cool tip on his blog that I wasn’t aware of, or if I was I had forgotten about. It involves previewing a domain that is a “work in progress” using the Plesk Control Panel. This is something that can come in pretty handy while developing a website as well as for client demo’s. As some of you might know, this feature is pretty easy to do in Ensim, which was our first control panel solution back in the day before migrating all of our servers and vps’s to Plesk across the board.
Since moving from an Ensim control panel to Plesk I have had trouble many times with previewing works-in-progress on sites that do not yet have the DNS pointed to them. This was not an issue in Ensim as you could use the IP address in the URL to create a direct pathway to the site as it is under construction. Plesk, unfortunately will not allow you to do this and will only allow a site preview from within the control panel. It finally dawned on me the other day that I could use the Plesk domain alias feature to solve this problem.
Set up the domain in Plesk, as you normally would. Next go to Domains > Domain Alias > Add domain alias. From this point add a subdomain against any domain you like, like project.yoursite.com. Next go to your registrar/DNS manager and point the appropriate subdomain to the IPA of the host server.
That’s it, nothing else to it.
Plesk 8.3 Released for Linux/Windows
I just got back in from the holidays and was going through all of my technical announcements, etc. and found a notice in my inbox that the awaited release of Plesk 8.3 has been released. We are currently running 8.2. I am not for sure when we are going to be doing the upgrade but I am sure it will be once it has been out for a little while. By doing this it enables us to make sure we don’t deliver any third party products to our clients that might be buggy, (not that SWSoft ever releases anything buggy, usually their stuff is well tested!). Here’s a list of the top 10 new features in the Plesk Control Panel.
Windows 2008 Server, IIS7 and MS FTP7 Support * – Use Windows 2008 Server, IIS7, and MS FTP7 combined with Plesk for faster and more reliable hosting.
Single Sign On (SSO) SAML – Enable SSO SAML support in Plesk and integrate Plesk with any other applications providing single sign-on ability for its users.
Application Packaging Standard (APS) Licensing & Upgrade – Upgrade and license applications installed via the Application Vault on a domain level directly via the Plesk interface.
mod_bw support ** – Configure allowed connection bandwidth per domain by using mod_bw management tools in Plesk.
PHP FastCGI Support * – In addition to CGI and ISAPI modes, Plesk 8.3 for Windows now supports PHP FastCGI.
New Mail and Anti-Spam Software Support * – Support now included for:
- SmarterMail Mail Lists
- CommunigatePro Mail Lists
- Merak Spam Filter
- SmarterMail 4 Spam Filter
Kaspersky Antivirus (KAV) statistics ** – View detailed server stats, including number of e-mails scanned and filtered, collected by Kaspersky Antivirus in Plesk for Linux/Unix.
Anti-virus and Anti-spam statistics * – Receive improved reporting of anti-virus and anti-spam statistics, including numbers of emails scanned and filtered.
Cold Fusion 8 Support * – Use Plesk with the latest version of ColdFusion, an HTML-based application used to create dynamic web pages.
- Webmail per Domain * – Choose which webmail software to use on each specified domain.
SWsoft Releases Plesk 8.3 for Windows Beta
I was just looking at Web Hosting Talk and noticed that SWsoft has released Plesk 8.3 for Windows Beta. I would be interested to see what all improvements have been made to the control panel, Plesk is an awesome control panel solution. We currently utilize Virtuozzo and Plesk from SWSoft and couldn’t imagine life without either of these products in our hosting operation. Here is a link to the press release: Link to Web Hosting Talk » Industry News » SWsoft Server Virtualization Firm, Releases Plesk 8.3 for Windows Beta
