What Is Plesk?
Plesk is one of the widely used web hosting control panels in the web hosting business. It offers simple server and website management solutions with single-click mechanisms. Plesk consists of webserver suite (LAMP), Mail server, FTP Server, Name Server applications etc.
Plesk is a an enterprise hosting control panel and it requires license to work effectively. They also offers 15 day trial license which is intended for testing purposes.
One amazing advantage of Plesk is that it can be installed in both Windows and Linux.
Installing Plesk On A Centos Server
In this tutorial, we will go through how Plesk can be installed in a CentOS server. It is is actually a simple process with just three steps.
Step 1) Remove all the existing instances of Apache, PHP, Cyrus and MySQL and disable SELinux
Before proceeding with the installation steps, we need to remove the existing instances of Apache, MySQL, Cyrus and PHP.
Open the terminal and run the following commands.
yum remove http*
yum remove php*
yum remove cyrus*
yum remove mysql*
To disable SELinux, run the folowing command
setenforce 0
This is the pre-requisites that is required for installing Plesk.
Step 2) Download the Plesk one click Installer script and run the script
Change the working directory to the installation directory.
cd /usr/local/src
Download the ons click installer script with wget command and execute it.
wget -O – http://autoinstall.plesk.com/one-click-installer | sh
This will install all the packages that comes along with Plesk.
Step 3) Run the Installation/Configuration wizard from browser
Access the the URL: http://hostname_or _IPAddress:8443 in the browser (eg: https://pickaweb2.testserver.com:8443/) and login to the control panel as root user.
This will fetch the License agreement page and check the tick box to agree the terms and conditions and proceed to the next page.
Then comes the Settings page. Here you need to enter the admin panel login credentials with which you can login to the Plesk control panel.
You can also set the default IP address of the server here in this page.
Next is the View Selector page. In this page you can choose the appearance of the panel as per your requirement.
Next is the Administrator information page. You just need to fill in the information asked and proceed to the next page.
Then comes the Licence key install page. You can order, retrieve and install the License key from this page. Since I have already purchased a trial license key for this example installation, I’m proceeding with installing the license key.
Upload the license key file you received from Odin or Parallels when you purchased the key and Click OK. In the next page you can add the first domain or website in the Plesk admin panel.
I have added a test domain with the Hostname, you may replace it with the actual domain name.
Add the information and click OK. In the above screenshot I’ve used example domain, and set the user name as ‘admin’. You may change it to the desired user name as ‘admin’ would be the administrator user name.
Plesk installation process is complete and you may play around with the unlimited options it provides to get familiarise yourself with the control panel.
