A special topic for chatter about Plesk in the Clouds.

[IgorG]

Dear Pleskians,

I know that some of you use Plesk in cloud services. In particular, in the Amazon Cloud. I created this attached thread specifically for chatter on this topic. We are interested in absolutely everything that you think about this. Write here all your opinions, how it is conveniently done for you, whether you really need it, what is missing and so on.

Thank you for participating!
And write, do not hesitate!

 

[lvalics]

I will try PLESK in Hetzner Beta Cloud in the next 2-3 days.

 

[trialotto]

Plesk on Amazon is a poor choice, in every sense.

We are using Plesk in the Azure Cloud, for a long time now and in all flavours: Windows, Linux, Docker containers, hybrid infrastructures, cluster and HA setups.

All is possible, there actually is no need for the Plesk Multi Server Extension and some other beneficial aspects are present when working on Azure Cloud.

Amazon is just not the right choice, for many reasons.

Kind regards..........

 

[IgorG]

Amazon is just not the right choice, for many reasons.

Can we know more about these reasons?

 

[AYamshanov]

Hi trialotto,

We are using Plesk in the Azure Cloud, for a long time now and in all flavours: Windows, Linux, Docker containers, hybrid infrastructures, cluster and HA setups.

Could you tell in more detail how are you use Plesk in Azure in hybrid infrastructures, cluster and HA setups? What Azure services do you use?

 

[trialotto]

Can we know more about these reasons?

Amongst others, Amazon

- is less user friendly, in comparison to Azure: this makes Amazon a little bit more error-prone,
- is less advanced when it comes to integration and/or compatibility with common software and/or software used by an average user on their PC,
- is a little bit slow in development of the cloud platform itself (note: I have to admit that Amazon often comes with some specific new cloud function or cloud service, but these types of re-invention of the cloud often are associated with other cloud providers offering the same, with Azure often offering an identical but improved functionality)

and one point of concern is the cost of Amazon: even though the prices are very similar of even identical amongst cloud providers, Microsoft has the strategy of offering a "big bang for the buck" and this often means a competitive edge in service AND price (that is, at least during a specific period of time, after which the whole cycle repeats).

In my humble opinion, the biggest problem with Amazon is that one does not really know what one gets.

And that is a huge problem, in the sense that one cannot afford to be a hosting provider choosing for Amazon and a specific type and size of cloud service, whilst having to conclude after some time that the type and size does not suffice for the original objectives, hence making it (one the one hand) rather troublesome to migrate to another cloud provider and (on the other hand) very costly, when being forced to stay at Amazon with increased sizes of the cloud services originally chosen.

This is a reality: there is a (relatively) huge migration from Amazon to Azure nowadays and most of those migrations are motivated by the argument "we started small and the costs have risen to several thousands per month".

Sure, I have to be honest and say that every company (one the hand) has a personal bias and preference when choosing a cloud provider and (on the other hand) will end up with the subjective perceptive that cloud based services are more expensive than expected.

But in general, the numbers are crystal clear: Azure's market share is going through the roof, at the cost of Amazon's market share........not without reason.

Regards........

 

[trialotto]

Hi trialotto,
Could you tell in more detail how are you use Plesk in Azure in hybrid infrastructures, cluster and HA setups? What Azure services do you use?

@AYamshanov

Yes, I can, but that is more appropriate in a personal conversation.

The brief summary of that conversation would be: using all existing functionality of Azure AND tweaking some minor default config of Plesk.

In essence, Plesk is build as a "one server instance installation" and making optimal use of all imaginable cloud services would require some tweaking, with the tweaking being primarily intended to "distribute" Plesk's default components across various VMs (or Docker containers) in an internal or hybrid (off- and on-premise) network.

The endresult is that one gets a set of VMs (or Docker containers) that essentially are dedicated to a specific function that would normally be done by a Plesk component that is, together will all other default components, hosted on one (and the same) server.

Hope the above explains a bit of the concept behind this.

Regards.........

 

[bestazy]

Hello,
I have an Ubuntu 14.04 server running in EC2
I installed Plesk in AWS so I can resell Hosting
But... when Plesk creates a new user, this user cannot connect, FTP or anything. I need to somehow add them to tyhe users of the server as they sign up.
Best regards, bestazy

 

[virtubox]

Hello,
I have an Ubuntu 14.04 server running in EC2
I installed Plesk in AWS so I can resell Hosting
But... when Plesk creates a new user, this user cannot connect, FTP or anything. I need to somehow add them to tyhe users of the server as they sign up.
Best regards, bestazy

Hello, with AWS instance, plain text password authentication is most of time fully disabled. You also need to make sure port 21 is open via the AWS firewall

 

[AYamshanov]

Hi,

I have an Ubuntu 14.04 server running in EC2

Are you install Plesk to Ubuntu by self? I suggest you use Plesk image on Ubuntu from AWS Marketplace with recommended security-group.

Did you see Installing Plesk on Amazon EC2 and Configuring the Passive FTP Mode on an Amazon EC2 Instance ?

If these links do not help, could you paste a log from your FTP client like FileZilla?

 

[Peter Carlsson]

Any one tried Alibabacloud/Plesk?

I dont understand their pricing, is the fee just for alibabacloud and then the Plex license on top of that?

What will i gain with Alibabacloud/Plesk vs running my own DO VPS?

 

[Peter Carlsson]

cloud.google.com looks nice, any advice against running Plesk on cloud.google.com?

Found one thing i don't like: In DO one could create snapshots and if messing up i could just restore to get rid of problem.

In GCP i can take snapshots but i cant restore them. I have to create an new instance from a snapshot and reconfigure new ip and some other stuff. A lot of complains on this so hopefully Google will fix this.

Otherwise i really like all the GCP features and i will leave DO for now.

I will choose to pay my license directly to Plesk.

All my other problems with Lets Encrypt and customer ssh access worked out of the box when launching Plesk in GCP Cloud Launcher.

 

[bulent]

cloud.google.com looks nice, any advice against running Plesk on cloud.google.com?

Found one thing i don't like: In DO one could create snapshots and if messing up i could just restore to get rid of problem.

In GCP i can take snapshots but i cant restore them. I have to create an new instance from a snapshot and reconfigure new ip and some other stuff. A lot of complains on this so hopefully Google will fix this.

Otherwise i really like all the GCP features and i will leave DO for now.

I will choose to pay my license directly to Plesk.

All my other problems with Lets Encrypt and customer ssh access worked out of the box when launching Plesk in GCP Cloud Launcher.

How did you manage the mail part?
I can't make GCP with Plesk to send emails.

Regards

 

[Peter Carlsson]

Do you mean like in code or from Plesk it self?

I hope this isn't an issue cause i have decided to use these two now.

 

[Nilbud]

Google Cloud shuts off all the email ports. I have a Gsuite account. All I want to do is relay to my gsuite using external SMTP. The ports are all blocked.
I do this using the GMailAPI in the SMTP Post plugin in WordPress. It must be easy for someone who knows to write some kind of bridgeimabob to get round the portlessness.

 

[Nilbud]

Google Cloud shuts off all the email ports. I have a Gsuite account. All I want to do is relay to my gsuite using external SMTP. The ports are all blocked.
I do this using the GMailAPI in the SMTP Post plugin in WordPress. It must be easy for someone who knows to write some kind of bridgeimabob to get round the portlessness.

Of course one second later I read that ports 465 and 587 are open if you're using gsuite.

 

[IgorG]

Plesk in Google Cloud details Issue - DNS blackhole lists not working on Google Cloud Server

 

[G J Piper]

Plesk in Google Cloud details Issue - DNS blackhole lists not working on Google Cloud Server

As for the RBL issue:
I did get the RBLs working on the Google Compute Engine with CentOS 7 and Plesk... however, Spamhaus RBLs are still not working because they have Google's DNS blocked from query usage. So, for now I'm just using Barracuda's service and it seems to be working well.

On the issue of Google's blocked SMTP email ports:
I am using SendGrid SMTP mail service and it seems to be working wonderfully with one caveat: If you have any customer/personal email accounts on the instance that forward to Gmail accounts, their DMARC filters are not compatible with the forwarding, and you get rejected emails from the big players like Twitter, Etsy, etc. Supposedly, Plesk's SPF/SRS is supposed to rewrite the addresses of the forwarded emails to avoid this, but it isn't working it appears if you are using an SMTP relay like SendGrid to get around Google's outgoing email port blocking.

 

[dichthuatmid]

I have try plesk service. In general all is quit good. Look for next version

 

[Paul Creedy]

My experience....

I'm familiar with Windows and working in Azure working on the Microsoft stack for many years, with just a little knowledge of Linux. However the small hosting company I run uses Siteground (mainly Wordpress) and I've outgrown it. Their upgrade plans upgrade the price but not the resources!

So I decided to take the plunge with either cpanel or plesk myself. My choice of cloud provider was determined by being in the UK, but I also went the extra step of making sure the datacentre was near me. I almost went with Amazon, but my familiarity with Azure and the datacentre being 20 miles away made the choice for me. This meant the only cloud provider available would be Azure.

I also wanted a cloud solution that allowed me to scale slowly and increase disk space as needed. I choose Ubuntu because it seemed to automatically realise that the disk space had been increased, whereas CentOS etc 'seemed' to require some jiggery pockery to tell the OS that it was now on a bigger drive. Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I'm not a Linux person!

I chose Linux over Windows despite being a Windows guy because Windows requires a bigger VM and with the licensing costs a lot more that the same on a Linux box.

I set up the network in azure, storage etc, and took the Plesk marketplace option with license included.

The actual set up was fairly straight forward apart from the wizard more or less ignoring somethings I'd set up with my own (Microsoft suggested) naming convention and doing it's 'own thing'. Resulting me having to do a clean up operation on the result.

I choose Azures, Burstable VM option which is working well because my sites go through long period of inactivity which builds up credit. Long term I may end up wishing I'd bought a reserved instance as they are cheaper, as there is no way to upgrade to a reserved instance.

The biggest hurdle so far was not realising that Azure blocks port 25 and there is absolutely no notice or indication of this anywhere in Azure, in the Marketplace instructions or in the Plesk help guide, resulting in many support requests to Plesk before the penny dropped as to what was going on.

I put a ticket into Azure to have the ports opened and didn't hear anything for ages and I was at the point of abandoning the idea completely. Then out of the blue had an email off Microsoft telling me they'd opened the ports on my subscription. Testing showed email was now working.


Things I'm having an issue with now...

I can't figure out recovery vault backups for the Plesk VM. Whilst these work with Windows because of the way Windows uses shadow copy, allowing copies to be made whilat the server is running, I'm not convinced this will work with Linux boxes - loved to have some advice here! Backing it up is not proving it can be restored without issues.

The site and/or migrator to bring sites into Plesk from other providers just doesn't work for me. The files are all in the wrong folders and in the wrong place, completely messing up the file structure and confusing the hell out of the Wordpress Toolkit.

I'd also like to know how to import email accounts from Siteground (CPanel), maintaining email folders and without knowing the password of the email account. This is probably the second (after backups) thing stopping me from migrating fully from cpanel.

As for the built in backups, it would be nice if I was able to back this up externally or to another Azure storage account. Keeping it on the same server is really not a good idea, and backing it up to the likes of Dropbox etc is completely out of the question due to data protection. Keeping it inside Azure is preferable because I don't get charged for ingress data transfer, whereas transferring data out of Azure (egress) is chargeable.