f you asked me a few years ago about SWsoft’s Plesk, I would have said “run”. “Run very fast to another control panel.” But Serguei has worked hard on quality assurance since taking the helm and the efforts clearly show. We recently upgraded all of our management clients to Plesk 8.2. Yes, I know it has been out for awhile, but we wait for others to do the testing so we know when we upgrade it will work as advertised. During this process we did find a few issues.
MySQL 4.1 on RHEL 3
We had several RHEL 3 boxes with MySQL 4.1. Several of these had issues because either the MySQL 4.1 permissions were not correct or there was an index missing on a table. Re-running the mysql permission upgrade tool and adding the index got us by these errors.
Zend Optimizer
On a couple of systems, we had php.ini become corrupted after the upgrade. On both systems, the latest version of Zend Optimizer had been installed. We were able to recover the php.ini from a backup, but now we always make a copy before doing the upgrades.
Mail Settings
We had a few servers lose their rcpthosts in qmail. I think this is tied to the MySQL 4.1 updates but using the mchk tool you can quickly recover.
The Good
The good thing is that most of our systems upgraded without issue. This is a major change from the Plesk 2.5 – 5.0 days. Since 7.5, SWsoft has really focused on QA and it is showing.
The ease of management and easy upgrade paths is the number one reason why we recommend Plesk over Ensim and Cpanel. Plesk is a coherent, well-tested product. If future updates continue this smoothly, we will be happy when all of our clients are moved over to Plesk.