What's New in Plesk Onyx
With Plesk Onyx 17.8 release we are introducing multiple changes aimed to assist both new and existing Plesk users and improve their User Experience on many fronts. For example, the Plesk Advisor extension helps you make sure that everything, from the server itself to the hosted web apps, always stays secure, while the simplified on-boarding process helps newcomers to quickly set up and run their websites. Automatic securing of websites with free SSL/TLS certificates improves the security aspect even further, making the lives of existing users much easier. As more and more Plesk features are being delivered as extensions to ensure that business-critical functionality reaches everyone in a timely manner, the Plesk Extension Catalog was improved to provide you with a smooth and enjoyable experience. We are also continuously improving the Plesk experience for those who use Plesk in various cloud services. Read on to get a closer look at the changes in the Plesk Onyx 17.8 release.
To view the software requirements for installation and upgrade, refer to the Software Requirements section.
To view the Release Notes for Plesk 12.5, visit this page.
Plesk now offers a much more welcoming experience for new users:
- Configure Plesk in a single step.
- Simplified registration with social login.
- Experience the full power of Plesk and evaluate any Plesk feature before committing to a particular Plesk edition. A trial license is made available to you, quickly and conveniently, right after the first login.
- Follow our starting suggestions to hit the ground running. This is especially handy for users who are not familiar with Plesk.
Advisor is your server's new best friend. It gives you valuable tips about the best practices regarding security and performance of the server and hosted websites:
- Improve your server rating by following the suggestions and best practices from Plesk.
- Advisor automatically scans the server and the hosted websites, and then shows you which issues require your attention.
- Displays the actions recommended for fixing the detected issues grouped by sections (security, performance, SEO, and update).
We have significantly improved the experience of working with SSL/TLS certificates, making sure that it takes minimal effort to keep things secured:
- Each Plesk instance is now automatically secured with SSL/TLS out of the box.
- All new domains, add-on domains, and subdomains can be automatically secured with SSL/TLS certificates.
- The "Keep Secured" feature monitors your websites, making sure they're always secured with an SSL/TLS cerificate.
- You can now secure your mail server and webmail with SSL/TLS cerificates.
- Customers can now force HTTPS connections to websites hosted in Plesk.
Protecting your websites with SSL/TLS certificates not only gives visitors peace of mind – it helps your Google rating as well! Here at Plesk we run a tight ship, and enable you to do so, too.
Reduce your hosted websites' response time and server load using Nginx Caching:
- With caching, certain types of PHP pages can be served to visitors as quickly as static pages.
- System load can be significantly reduced by serving pages from cache.
- Fine-tune caching parameters right from nginx settings in Plesk.
We added lots of cool new features to WordPress Toolkit to make WordPress developers happy.
Some of the features are available in Plesk Onyx 17.8+ exclusively:
- Try the improved and better-looking interface for managing WordPress instances. Enjoy a faster and more focused WordPress Toolkit experience.
- Smart Updates: WordPress updates can be analyzed by a Machine Learning-based AI to see if installing the update is likely to break something. On top of that, it is done without affecting the production instance.
- Configure caching for WordPress instances easily - with just a click.
Other features for Plesk Onyx:
- Safe updates offer optional restore points. Make one before updating WordPress or synchronizing data between two instances to make sure you can roll back in case something goes wrong.
- Manage maintenance mode in WordPress Toolkit. Customize the maintenance mode template.
- Clone WordPress instances and synchronize selected data between two existing instances.
- Protect access to your WordPress instance with a password.
- Preinstall WordPress on subscriptions via Hosting Plans.
- Create plugin and theme sets and preinstall them with WordPress.
- Upload your own plugins and themes, add them to sets and install them on WordPress instances.
- Plugin and theme installation is now done via a nice-looking directory with advanced filtering.
- New security measure offers pingback attack protection.
Design and execute your SEO strategy, monitor your keywords rankings, and benchmark yourself against your competitors without leaving the Plesk interface.
- Analyze your websites with Site Audit to detect common SEO issues and receive optimization recommendations.
- Instantly review search engine crawler activity on your websites with Log File Analyzer.
- Track the ranking of your keywords and adapt your SEO strategy accordingly.
- Monitor your competitors and react to ranking changes quickly and intelligently.
As more and more Plesk features are delivered via extensions, we made a number of improvements to provide a better experience when working with extensions:
- Finding the desired extensions is much easier now with faster and overall improved catalog search. Simply start typing a name, a category, or any keywords in the Extension Catalog search box to immediately see relevant results.
- Browsing the catalog is now more convenient thanks to the addition of extension categories, recommended (featured) extensions, and a separate section for recently updated extensions.
- You can now reach any extension settings using only one click.
- All installed extensions are always kept up-to-date by default, with extension updates being delivered within 24 hours of becoming available.
- We made buying extensions and upgrading extension licenses more intuitive, transparent, and convenient.
Using Plesk in Cloud Platforms is now much easier thanks to the following improvements:
- Plesk Onyx is available on the following Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, Google, and Alibaba.
- We made the user experience of deploying a server with Plesk clear and straightforward, regardless of the chosen cloud platform.
- You can quickly access Plesk after deployment on VMs without SSH access.
- Amazon Lightsail is now supported.
Easily integrate with Amazon services if you are using Plesk in AWS EC2:
- Connect powerful Amazon RDS as an external database (Aurora, MySQL, MariaDB, Postgresql, etc).
- Use Route 53 as an external DNS provider for your hosted domains.
- Use S3 storage as an external storage for your Plesk backups.
Coming soon:
- Amazon AWS Toolkit will be orchestrating all Amazon services integrations at once.
- You will be able to install and configure all desired AWS integrations in one action.
Store your Plesk backups in the cloud for extra security and redundancy. We have added the support for the most popular cloud storages:
Learn more.Meet the new self-repair tool. Its main purpose is to keep Plesk up and running:
- Repair your server from a browser window - even if Plesk itself is not accessible.
- Fix issues caused by high CPU load or by running out of free disk space, even if remote access to the server is impossible.
- Ideal for users unskilled in infrastructure and server management.
Protect yourself and your customers from junk mail with modern email validation tools. Sadly, the vast majority of email being sent over the internet is spam.
Some of it is merely annoying, but a lot of bulk mail is actually malicious, used by scammers and phishers to defraud people. To help you keep your customers safe, Plesk Onyx joins the fight with DKIM, SPF, DMARC, and SRS support.
- DKIM and SPF are modern email validation methods designed to detect email spoofing and prevent spammers from being able to pretend that their mail is sent from a specific trusted domain, when in fact it is not.
- DMARC is an email validation scheme built on top of SPF and DKIM. It allows webmasters to declare what validation method(s) must be used when checking mail purportedly sent from their domain, and what to do with mail that fails validation.
- SRS is a scheme for rewriting the envelope sender address of an email message as it is being forwarded, so that bounced mail can be delivered to the sender regardless of their SPF policy.
To make deploying your website even easier, Plesk Onyx introduces integration with Git – the most popular source code management system. This feature enables you to do the following:
- Easily deploy your website content by either pushing it to a local Git repository or by pulling from a remote one.
- Use GitHub, BitBucket, Travis, or any other software engineering service of your choice.
- Create multiple branches in a single repository – useful for separating staging and production code.
- Deploy manually for complete control or enable automatic deployment to save time.
To help you meet the evolving requirements of your customers, Plesk Onyx comes with Docker support. Here is what you can do with it:
- Have on-demand access to a wide range of modern technologies, such as redis, mongodb, memcached, and many more.
- Choose from a catalog of available images, or upload a custom image.
- Deploy and manage Docker containers straight from the Plesk interface.
- Install Docker containers locally, or to a remote node registered in Plesk.
Plesk Onyx supports the Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2016, which introduce the IIS 10 web server. This new web server from Microsoft comes with a number of important new features, such as:
- Wildcard subdomains
- HTTP/2 support
- New cipher suites
All of these are incentives to upgrade, and are supported by Plesk Onyx. For the future, we have more features planned, such as SSH and native Docker support on Windows – stay tuned for updates!
Plesk Onyx provides server administrators with an easy-to-use tool for keeping their servers up to date. You can update any system packages present on the server either manually or automatically without having to open the console. The tool uses OS package managers (yum and apt) to perform updates, which makes the procedure of updating as robust as if it were done through native OS tools.
The tool provides extra flexibility if you don't want to update certain packages. It is possible to prevent packages from being updated by locking them via two clicks in UI.
Plesk ships a variety of components that were modified or built by Plesk team itself (for example, PHP version packages). You can also use this tool to monitor and update these packages at any time you want without waiting for Plesk updates.
Learn more.The Log Browser tool added in Plesk 12.5 has been updated in Plesk Onyx. It is now possible for all hosting users to open any arbitrary log file located on their virtual host in Log Browser for easier monitoring. Users can save any opened log file in the list of logs for accessing it in the future. If the log is not required anymore, it can be removed from the list.
Note that only plain text log files can be opened by Log Browser, binary log files are not supported. This functionality is especially useful for those who install and use various frameworks like Yii, Symfony, and so on.
Another improvement of the Log Browser tool is the highlighting of various files mentioned in logs. This can happen, for example, if there's an error in a particular file. The highlighted files can be opened in the embedded editor by clicking them, which makes debugging websites even faster.
Learn more.Limiting the usage of system resources is a big pain point for every shared hoster. Plesk Onyx aims to solve this issue by introducing the ability to limit the amount of system resources that can be used by a particular subscription. This should greatly help to prevent server abuse caused by malicious or poorly written scripts and applications.
The following system resources can be limited by this feature:
- CPU
- RAM
- Disk I/O
This ability is based on CGroups (Control Groups) feature of Linux kernel, so it's available only on OSes with systemd (for example: Centos 7, Debian 8 and Ubuntu 16.4).
Learn moreThe DNSSEC acronym stands for Domain Name System Security Extensions. It is a set of DNS protocol extensions that were introduced by IETF with the goal of signing DNS data to secure the domain name resolving process.
DNSSEC was made to help make the Internet a safer and more secure place. Since we are committed to providing the best in security to our clients, Plesk Onyx offers the support for DNSSEC, allowing users to protect the DNS data of hosted domains with DNSSEC extension. The extension gives users the ability to do the following:
- Configure the settings used for key generation and rollover
- Sign and unsign domain zones according to the DNSSEC specifications
- Receive notifications related to DNSSEC records and keys
- View and copy DS resource records and DNSKEY resource record sets
Ruby is a popular programming language among web developers. Plesk Onyx introduces proper Ruby language support as a Plesk extension.
The Ruby extension available in Plesk Onyx allows users to quickly and easily deploy Ruby apps on their domains. Both Ruby on Rails and Sinatra frameworks are supported. With this extension you can:
- Enable Ruby support on any given virtual host
- Choose which Ruby version should be used on a domain. Both UI and CLI calls use rbenv utility to achieve maximum conformity
- Install gem file dependencies via UI using Bundler tool
- Specify custom environment variables
- Edit configuration files
It is strongly suggested to install the Tools required for building Ruby gems component in order to facilitate quick and painless Ruby gem installation. With this component you can sit back, forget about gem dependency hell and enjoy painless gem file installation since most dependencies will be resolved for you automatically by our tools.
Learn more.Multi-server support for distributed virtual environments.
- Automatically distribute webspaces or subscriptions on connected service nodes.
- Both admin and customers can log into to all your servers from one.
- Centralized account management from across multiple Plesk instances
- Subscriptions distributed across service nodes
Plesk Multi Server is currently not supported in Plesk Onyx 17.8. Learn more.
An open-source, cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side Web applications, Node.js has been around for just a few years, but has already garnered no small amount of popularity and support. Using the widely used JavaScript language, it helps web developers write lightning-fast applications. Node.js support in Plesk enables you to:
- Add Node.js applications to your websites with just a few clicks.
- Easily manage the application from Plesk (start/stop/restart the application, install NPM packages, run scripts, edit the configuration files – Plesk does it all).
- Have multiple Node.js versions installed on the server (Plesk for Linux only)