Plesk

I'm using Plesk starting from 10.4 - it was not so great honestly. But things changed. Starting from 12.0 Plesk became very stable and Plesk Onyx is a WOW: Docker, Git, fail2ban, Let's Encrypt - all this staff helps me a lot to simplify server administration tasks.

Thank you Plesk for such a good job!

I've worked as a webmaster for such a long time, it's more than 15 years. I've used shared hosting, VPSs and also dedicated servers.

The control panels I used is: cPanel (Very nice, easy to find everything. Downside is that when you have lots of domains hosted on one box (more than ~1000 domains or so). Things might get slow. When bypassing cPanel, things worked fine so it was cPanel that caused the performance issue.

Direct Admin (A bit basic, UI could improve but it does the job.

Webmin (It's not that user friendly but once you get the hang of it, it just works.)

Plesk... Then we have Plesk. It's probably the control panel that might look user friendly on the screenshots but my god... When you actually start to look around for features and clicking expecting to find them you'll instead have to look inside categories that doesn't even fit the feature you're looking for. I ended up canceling this server. It's complete crap! I had ordered a pretty expensice but and 100 extra IPs which wasn't easy for the host to pull up. I just cancel it all and they were maaad. All caused by Plesk, the worst controlpanel on the planet.

It's good-looking and can be the heart of your server, but their management is going on the wrong direction by not listening to the community and is also increasing their prices regularly even to existing customers, causing a lot of headaches for everybody.

Sadly, Plesk is by far the best alternative to cPanel/WHM, And it's sad because Plesk looks amazing but is a mess to navigate, for example, you want to change something on the mail service, well, get ready to change it in like 4 unrelated places. Not to mention that it lacks basic features like admin autologin for emails accounts, autodiscover settings for emails clients or even a delivery reports for email! Also, adding an user is really confusing, because you need to create a service plan, subscription, user and a domain and link it all together later. I truly hate to be "that guy" but in WHM for example when you are creating an user, in ONE form you are setting their domain, package(service plan on plesk), their username/password and that's amazing because why in the hell would you create an user and not link it automatically to a domain? IT has to be all done in ONE step. Come on.. And little stuff like that are all around plesk and for me is too much tbh. With the new 2019 cPanel pricing i'm spending like 400$ more annually but sadly Plesk is not ready to be a full remplacement of WHM/cPanel for me. YET. I will however still try newer releases of plesk hoping some improvement and i will still recommend this if you want to try, maybe it does work for what you need and not to mention that the pricing of plesk is amazing!

[Edited by rolosoftpy, August 04]

I've been bored over the holidays and downloaded a free trial of Plesk Onyx. My expectations were low as control panels aren't the most exciting piece of software in the world. They do the job and make the life of an admin much easier but apart from that? I hate to say that I was totally wrong. Installation was easy and I liked the user navigation. Browsing the left hand side nav bar I landed on the extensions catalogue and here's where Plesk blew me away. The amount of extensions was already impressive and it allowed me to do so many different things, to customise the whole application, use all the cool dev tools, apply state-of-the art security settings and more. Honestly, folks.... after a couple of hours playing I got told off by the family to come back to the living room and could hardly believe I was really playing with a control panel. My absolute favourite is the 'Order Your Pizza' extension - engineering excellence combined with a good sense of humour is all we need to get our job done! Congratulations Plesk and keep up the good work. You have one new customer now.

Reselling Hosting in addition to web design to our customers is really straight-forward with plesk. Safes a lot of time now.

[Edited by felixfelizizz, November 28]

The panel is very reliable in my opinion, I never needed any other features than what it has now. It has nice styling and a good user interface. Nice monitoring tools like "Health Monitor" that will show you what is happening on the server and what might slow it down. You will see CPU and memory usage separated by services (MySQL, Apache, etc). Price seems to be much lower than cPanel, at least at my host and this is for Dedicated server, for VPS it is usually even lower.