FAQ for Plesk Obsidian

General Questions

What’s new in Plesk Obsidian?

Our top priority is to ensure a smooth and seamless customer journey inside Plesk Obsidian. We plan to significantly improve the on-boarding process, update our web stack (MariaDB, PHP Composer, improve Docker integration), enhance overall UX in Plesk, and much more. We are going to frequently add changes and updates. To stay tuned, follow our release notes.

Which operating systems does Plesk Obsidian support?
Do I have to buy a new license when upgrading to Plesk Obsidian?

No, you don't. But depending on the type of Plesk license you have, you may need to take additional actions.

I have a lease Plesk license.

Hooray! All the following types of lease licenses are compatible with Plesk Obsidian:

  • Web Admin Edition, Web Pro Edition, and Web Host Edition.
  • Licenses for Plesk on cloud platforms (for example, AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, and others).
  • Domain-based Plesk licenses for Plesk 10.x/11.x and later.

I have a perpetual (purchased) Plesk license for Onyx.

As long as SUS on your license is active, your license will be automatically upgraded during a Plesk upgrade. If SUS is expired, you need to reinstate it to use your license with Plesk Obsidian. If you are a Plesk partner, you can reinstate SUS using your Key Administrator or Partner Central account, or via your sales representative. If you are a retail customer, you can order SUS reinstatement here.

I have a perpetual (purchased) Plesk license for a version earlier than Onyx.

You must upgrade your Plesk 12.x license to Plesk Onyx before upgrading to Plesk Obsidian. If you have a Plesk 10.x/11.x license, upgrade it to Plesk 12.x first.

Does Plesk Obsidian support Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22?

Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 are supported. Ubuntu 22.04 is supported only for Plesk Obsidian version 18.44 and higher.

What OSes are supported by the integrated Repair Kit?

Repair Kit works fine on all supported OSes.

Are there any deprecated features in Plesk Obsidian?

Yes, there are. You can see them here.

Can I install Plesk on an ARM-based Server?

Yes! Starting with Plesk Obsidian 18.0.41, you can install Plesk on Ubuntu 20 servers running on ARM-based platforms (Ubuntu 22 support was added in Plesk Obsidian 18.0.46). Note that at the moment there are a number of limitations:

  • Dr.Web and Kaspersky Antivirus are not available.
  • Certain extensions are not available and will not be installed with the recommended preset.
  • Nginx is built without the Pagespeed module, as it is not available for the 64-bit extension of the ARM architecture.

Plesk and GDPR

What is GDPR?

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the new EU data protection law, which replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/EC and applicable local data protection laws. GDPR is intended to protect the EU citizens' personal data. It regulates how organizations process, store, and erase the data when it's no longer needed or when individuals request to delete it. GDPR came into effect in May 2018.

Is Plesk GDPR compliant?
When does Plesk collect personal data?

Plesk collects personal data only when you do one of the following:

  • Request a trial license.
  • Subscribe to the Plesk newsletter.
  • Send a technical report to Plesk.

Composer

Is it possible to run composer with using chroot?

No.

Move domains

I do not see the 'Move' button for my domain. Why?

The possible reasons are:

  • You don't have the necessary permissions for the subscription ("Domains management", "Subdomains management" for a domain with subdomains, or "Domain aliases management" for a domain with aliases).
  • It is a subdomain (it's not possible at the moment to move a subdomain separately from its domain).
  • It is a domain alias.
I see no target subscriptions available to move the domain to. Why?

The possible reasons are:

  • You don't have the necessary permissions for target subscriptions ("Domains management", "Subdomains management" for a domain with subdomains, or "Domain aliases management" for a domain with aliases).
  • There are no subscriptions with enough resources available (for example, domains, subdomains, domain aliases, or mailnames).
I can't choose the "Create a new subscription" option to move a domain to. Why?

You may not have the necessary permissions to create subscriptions.

Restriction of server-side operations for Plesk Admins

How can I configure Restricted mode?

You can enable and configure Restricted Mode in Tools & Settings >Plesk > Restricted Mode Settings (under "Plesk").

  • To apply Restricted mode to an additional administrator, enable the corresponding option in the Additional Administrator profile.
  • To apply Restricted mode to the Plesk administrator, use the CLI "plesk bin poweruser --off -simple true -lock true" command. Restricted Mode will be enabled for the main and additional Plesk administrators and they cannot disable it via the Plesk interface.
Is enabling Restricted mode enough to completely isolate the Plesk administrator?

To fully isolate the Plesk administrator, we recommend that you enable Restricted Mode and additionally do the following:

  • Remove the Panel.ini Editor extension because it can be used to disable Restricted mode.
  • Do not select the “Ability to use remote API”, “Updates and Upgrades, “Scheduled tasks”, “Event Manager”, and “Backup manager” checkboxes in the Restricted mode settings.

SNI for Mail Services

Which mail servers in Plesk support this feature?

MailEnable 10.20 and Postfix 3.4 support SNI for mail.

If SNI for mail is supported now, how can I automate mail securing with the SSL It! or Let's Encrypt extensions?

Such automation is currently not supported. However you can issue a wildcard SSL/TLS certificate via SSL It! or Let's Encrypt and manually assign this certificate to mail using the "Mail Settings" tab in the subscription mail settings.

Which OSes support SNI for Mail Services?

All supported Windows OSes and all supported Linux OSes running Postfix and Dovecot.

Are there any limitations for this feature?

There are a number of limitations that we plan to fix in the future releases:

  • SAN certificates (including mail.*) are not served by additional names.
  • If the IMAP or SMTP server is replaced with one without SNI support, certificates are kept but can no longer be managed.

Mail Settings Auto-Discovery

What mail clients are supported by this feature?

Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird.

Are there any limitations for this feature?

There are a number of limitations:

  • Plesk does not support mail autodiscover for Microsoft Outlook 2019 and 0365. Earlier Outlook versions get their autodiscover queries directly from the root domain server, which is the server where the mailboxes are stored. However, Microsoft Outlook 2019 gets autodiscover configuration from Microsoft Office 365 using Microsoft cache servers as proxy servers. The Plesk Mail autodiscover feature doesn't work with the current configuration. As a workaround, you can configure a local mail client to request autodiscover configuration directly from the Plesk server.
  • Mail autodiscover does not work for domains that have no hosting or have forwarding hosting.
  • The Thunderbird mail client will not be automatically configured for wildcard subdomains.

More secure, More robust, More useful, and Faster out of the box

What features are enabled in Plesk Obsidian by default? Do I need to manually enable them after I update to Plesk Obsidian?

The following features are enabled by default for clean installations of Plesk Obsidian:

  • Apache graceful restart is now robust enough to set it by default to minimize websites' downtime.
  • SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for incoming and outgoing emails.
  • ModSecurity and Fail2Ban version 0.10 are now activated out of the box.
  • Newly created websites have the SEO-friendly HTTP > HTTPS redirect enabled by default.

If you updated your server from a previous Plesk version to Plesk Obsidian, the features above are left in the same state they were in before the update. If one ore more features from the list were not enabled before the update, you will need to enable them manually (if required)

On supported systemd based Linux distributions, crashed Plesk services now restart automatically. Is it possible to configure a restart properties in Plesk?

No.

I updated Plesk Onyx to Plesk Obsidian but still cannot log in to Plesk without specifying the 8443 TCP port. What do I do?
I want to change the domain for accessing Plesk via the 443 TCP port. How can I change it in the Plesk interface?
I enabled access to Plesk via HTTPS using the 443 TCP port. How can I turn off access to Plesk via the 8443 TCP port?

Access via the 8443 TCP port cannot be turned off in Plesk. But you can add a rule rejecting incoming connections to the 8443 TCP port to the operating system firewall.