What's New in Plesk Obsidian
More up to date, more reliable and powerful Available
- AlmaLinux OS support. Plesk has prepared for the CentOS 8 end-of-life scheduled for the end of 2021 and added AlmaLinux OS support. We recommend it as a replacement for CentOS.
- Brotli support for nginx. Brotli is a modern and stable technology that improves website ranking and increases page load speed. Brotli compression is enabled by default starting from Plesk Obsidian 18.0.33.
- CentOS 8 and CloudLinux 8 support. Highly demanded support for these popular new operating systems has been added to Plesk Obsidian.
- Support for MariaDB versions 10.4 and 10.5.
- The support for the latest versions of this community-developed, commercially supported fork of MySQL has been added to Plesk Obsidian. If you are using an earlier version of MariaDB, we strongly recommend upgrading. We also recommend upgrading if you are running MySQL 5.1 in Plesk for Linux.
- PHP 8.0 support. PHP 8.0 contains numerous optimizations and new features, and is available in Plesk Obsidian right now.
DNS Helper Available
DNS Helper assists users with putting their websites online by checking if the user's domain name resolves to the Plesk server IP address. If it does not, DNS Helper provides detailed instructions on how to configure and manage DNS records of a domain on the domain registrar side. Instructions for more than 30 registrars are available.
New Look & Feel Available
We overhauled the Plesk UI to modernize it and address several UX issues reported by interviewed users. We paid special attention to the appearance and behavior of individual Plesk elements, streamlined colors and font sizes, and aligned all elements to grid.
- Left Menu can be minified for more efficiency.
- Global search provides spotlight experience.
- Overall the interface is more lightweight now and easier to view.
- Websites & Domains redesigned:
- Re-use of WordPress Toolkit experience.
- At-a-glance overview.
- Structured function access.
- Best of both worlds: detailed view and overview of all sites at the same time.
SSL It! Available
Keep your server secured at all times with SSL/TLS certificates from the leading and trusted certificate authorities (CAs), such as Let's Encrypt and DigiCert (Symantec, GeoTrust, Thawte, and RapidSSL brands). We plan to add support for more CAs in the future. It’s essential functionality starting from Plesk Obsidian, i.e. will be pre-installed with every clean installation and will be installed on upgrade.
Use SSL It! to do all of the following:
- Purchase, install, and renew certificates from various CAs.
- Secure your domain, webmail, the "www" subdomain, and any number of aliases. Clearly see what is secured and what is not.
- Automatically issue, install, and renew Let’s Encrypt certificates for domains secured with invalid certificates (self-signed, expired, or issued by an untrustworthy CA).
- Manage HSTS, OCSP Stapling, and HTTP > HTTPS redirect.
- See the SSL/TLS status of the domain, subdomains, and domain aliases in one place.
- Understand the SSL/TLS status at a glance with the help of a small indicator on the Domain page.
- Use the latest TLS versions and ciphers.
- Get A+ rating from ssllabs.
Repair Kit Available
Automatically detect and resolve issues with Plesk and Plesk services using Repair Kit, a powerful self-repair tool.
- See the list of processes running on the server. Filter the processes related to domains. Kill processes.
- See the total RAM, CPU, and Disk usage of all processes running on the server or of individual processes.
- Find out why MySQL consumes a lot of resources and what domain is to blame with the help of the list of MySQL queries and processes.
- See Network I/O for a process.
Advanced Monitoring Available
Keep informed about server and site availability. Learn about the root cause of issues:
- Replaces the existing HealthMonitoring tool with new Grafana charts.
- Configure alerts that notify server and website owners of issues related to resource consumption (CPU, RAM, Disk IO) via email.
- "Advanced" means that it will talk in terms of conversions, not just from technical perspective like CPU, RAM, Disk IO.
- Track server and website availability via email.
More secure, More robust, More useful and Faster out of the box Available
- By default, Plesk is now automatically secured with an SSL/TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt.
- Accidentally removed SSL/TLS certificates are now automatically restored from the Plesk database when a domain's hosting settings are changed.
- On systemd based Linux OSes (CentOS 7*/8*, RHEL 7, Ubuntu 16.04/18.04*/20*, and Debian 8/9*/10*) crashed services now restart automatically.
- Several improvements to PHP-FPM and Apache services to make restarting them more reliable.
- Apache graceful restart is now robust enough to set it by default to minimize websites' downtime.
- Secured by default: mod_security and fail2ban v0.10 are active out of the box.
- Newly created websites have SEO-friendly HTTP > HTTPS redirect enabled by default.
- PHP engines shipped with Plesk contain popular PHP extensions (sodium, exif, fileinfo, and so on).
- The PageSpeed module is now precompiled with NGINX.
- Plesk entry point was optimized for being used in Clouds (Amazon, Digital Ocean, and so on). Access Plesk via https://<host-name-or-IP> without specifying the TCP port 8443.
PHP Composer (Dependency Manager for PHP) support, v2.0 Available
Use PHP Composer without SSH access.
Execute most useful Composer actions via the UI even with no SSH access.
- Set up environment variables
- Edit your composer.json
- Run the Install and Update commands
Install and update dependencies with one click.
No need to remember the commands and options you have to run to install dependencies,
generate classmap, or execute tests. Plesk takes care of it with a click of a button.
Review the installed dependencies and decide if updating them makes sense.
Updating dependencies is vital for security but
can lead to a broken website. Handy UI indicators clearly show you if updating is likely to cause trouble (major updates are riskier than minor ones).
- Your website will automatically use the PHP version specified in composer.json.
- Composer is run using the correct PHP handler (not the system default, but the one that is used by the particular website).
Move domains between subscriptions Available
Reorganize your business, keep certain sites away from the others for security reasons, or separate staging sites from production ones by moving domains between subscriptions. Plesk administrators, customers, and resellers now have this long-awaited feature. Just make sure that the target subscription has enough resources available!
Restriction of server-side operations for Plesk Admins Available
Have a greater degree of control over what operations Plesk users can and cannot perform with the new Restricted Access mode (previously known as 'Custom view'). It can be applied both to the Plesk administrator and additional administrators and allows to fine-tune the following:
- Which server administration tools and settings are available to the administrator when Restricted Mode is enabled (the "Administration Tools" tab) in both Power User view and Service Provider view.
- Which web hosting administration tools and settings are available to the administrator in Power User view when Restricted Mode is enabled (the "Hosting Tools" tab).
- Which services and resources of subscriptions are available to the administrator in Power User view when Restricted Mode is enabled.
This way you can now give your customer administrator access to Plesk instead of reseller or customer access while still controlling access to potentially risky operations like management of updates, reboot, shutdown, and so on.
Notifications Available
Improve the user experience and stay in control of your server and websites both when you are not logged in and when working in Plesk UI with these improvements.
Mail notifications are now well-formatted
HTML-formatted messages are easier to read than plain text, and the shared design makes messages more pleasing to the eye and helps them stand out from the rest of the correspondence.
Use the default HTML templates shipped with Plesk or personalize the appearance of your notifications using HTML formatting (bold and italics, headers, numbered and bulleted lists, and so on).
Panel notifications are now available
Important messages are now shown directly in Plesk user interface. Ensure that critical issues become known and take steps to resolve them without losing precious time.
Mail improvements Available
- SNI for mail services: mail for a domain can now be secured with an individual SSL/TLS certificate. Learn more.
- Mail settings auto-discovery: users' Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Thunderbird mail clients can now be automatically configured based on entered emails.Learn more.
- Mail users now receive email notifications when more than 95% of their mailbox disk space is occupied. Learn more.
- The Plesk mail server and webmail are now available via HTTPS by default: they are secured with the default SSL/TLS certificate that secures Plesk itself. Learn more.
- The Plesk administrator can now change passwords of customers, resellers, and additional users by automatically sending them an email with a password reset link. Learn more.
- Mail users and additional users can now reset their password even if they lose access to their primary email address by specifying an external email address. A password reset email will be sent to that email address if needed. Learn more.
Plesk Backup Optimizations Available
- Minimum free space to backup and restore remotely:
- Free server disk space required for creating and restoring backups in cloud storage (Google Drive, Amazon S3, FTP, Microsoft One Drive, and so on).
- To restore a single subscription from a full server backup, you now need additional free disk space equal to space occupied by this particular subscription rather than the full server backup.
- To back up the server to cloud storage, you now need additional free disk space equal to space occupied by two subscriptions rather than the whole server.
- Sped up operations on backups stored remotely:
- For example, backups stored in cloud storage can now be removed four times faster than earlier.
Resolvable temporary hostnames provided by Plesk Available
If a new Plesk server does not have a resolvable hostname, it cannot be secured with a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate. This leaves the Plesk server unprotected, and anyone logging in to Plesk sees an untrusted connection warning.
To prevent this from happening, if the specified server hostname is non-resolvable, Plesk generates a temporary server hostname based on the server's IP address (for example, purple-bear.1-2-3-4.plesk.page). Plesk is then secured with a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate using the temporary server hostname.
Coming soon: Plesk will also provide a temporary resolvable domain name for your website if you haven't got one yet.
What is the Preview build?
The Preview build is the latest publicly available Plesk build. It contains new features and improvements not yet available in the latest officially released Plesk version. To see the list of available changes you can check Change Log
To install the Preview build on your Linux server, run the following command:
sh <(curl http://autoinstall.plesk.com/one-click-installer || wget -O - http://autoinstall.plesk.com/one-click-installer) --tier testing
To install the Preview build on your Windows server, follow these steps:
- Download Plesk Installer to your server
- Run
plesk-installer.exe --all-versions