TOP 3 bug fixes/feature requests for Plesk! Please Read!

[Scy]

Hello!

I have been seeing that there are some features that have been asked to fixed many times, but despite the Parallels has been pushing out new versions of Plesk, they have not been so far fixed in Plesk 9.x branch.

I shall one more time try to list the most important things that I personally (and I hope many others) would gladly see to be fixed and implemented in Plesk 9.5. However, I have seen the Plesk 9.5's ETA and it still doesn't seem to fix these.

Please include these fixes in the immediate future releases of Plesk. Please I beg you, Parallels! These are I.M.P.O.R.T.A.N.T! IgorG, could you please one more time check these trough and inform the developers of Plesk for immediate fixes?

1. Behaviour fix for Plesk Overuse Policy

Plesk gives admin only options to:
- Overuse is not allowed
(Overuse policy tells Parallels Plesk Panel what to do when resources are overused)
-Overuse is allowed
(Do not block the overuse of resources, allowing the domain to use more resources than initially provided. Actual resource usage can exceed the initial resource allocation)

Explanation of the behaviour:

The first option - by the way - simply means that client or domain is just suspended, if the bandwith or disk space is overused, other resources cannot be overused, which of latter is basically a good thing as no admin does not want users to be freely able to create more maiboxes or databases than set in the template resources when creating web hosting packages. However simply suspending the domain is not a good thing as no client will be happy for their sites to go offline. This is not good!

The second option fixes the problem so that admin and/or domain account won't be suspended due the overusage of bandwith or disk space, but at the same time this option allows clients to create freely as many as other resources they want to, without paying for them (as they don't need to upgrade the web hosting package at all, but are able to create as many as mailboxes and databases they want despite the set limits) So this is not good either!

So fixing this would be very important as neither of the options is suitable for professional web site hosting, as Plesk should be able.

(And yes, I know that the problem can be avoided by selecting "overusage is not allowed" but defining "unlimited" in the disk space and bandwith, and define so called "soft limits" in parts "nofify uporn reaching" - which is basically the only way to configure Plesk at the moment. However, this has a downside: no statistics work properly in Plesk GUI after that configuration has been made, as every limit compared is always "Unlimited". So this is not a good either, but so far the only working option!)

I suggest fixing this with one of the following suggestions:

1. Change the behaviour of selection "Overuse is allowed" so that it allows overusage of bandwith and disk space, but won't allow client to create more any other resources as defined in the templates/resources page. (Nobody needs the feature that would allow users to create more mailboxes or databases than defined in the template/resources page! And if they need, they can set their corresponding limits to "unlimited") This would be the most easy way to fix this problem and revert the behaviour of Plesk 8.x in this matter when using "overuse is allowed".

OR.

2. If you would like to make things even better than in Plesk 8.x you could implement more choises in "Overuse policy" - there could be like:

- Overuse is allowed in disk space and bandwith but not on other resources
- Overuse is not allowed and if the limits are reached do the following:
subselection: * Do nothing (but send the e-mail notifications)
subselection: * Redirect the domain to following location: http://...
subselection: * Suspend the domain

But I would be very happy to have even the fix mentioned in the first suggestion!


2. Behaviour fix for Interface Management template settings:

Explanation of the problematic behaviour:

The problem is that no admin wants to allow clients to do anything freely in control panel in client account. There are some features in Plesk (like suspending and unsuspending the domain) that should not be set by client (as the clients doesn't seem to understand the meaning of some settings.)

However, admin cannot disable some features from clients withouth disabling them from the admin account too. For example if I go with admin account to modify the "Default Domain Owner Home Page" in Interface management and disable the "Domain Information" -> "Status" feature, which disables clients to shut down their domains, at the same time I disable it from my admin account on which it is not visible any more. This is not a good thing!

I suggest fixing this with one of the following suggestions:

1. Override all template settings so that no features is disabled from admin account wether what selections have been made in "Default Domain Owner Home Page", "Default Client Home Page" or "Default Reseller Home Page". These should not never apply to admin account!

(In my opinion there is a design flaw in Plesk 9.x related to this where these templates are targeted to different pages instead of different user levels, but this should be enought to keep us Plesk admins happy and it's an easy and fast fix!)

OR

2. If you want to make this work very good, I suggest to interface management so that there should be different templates for each user levels. This is specifically crucial in "Default Domain Owner Home Page" and "Default Client Home page" which is not shown only for domain owners/clients, but is also the default GUI in admin account too when setting any domain/client properties.

Using the current Plesk template logic, the best way to handle this problem (and I guess it would be even easier to implemet) would be just adding a templates in Interface management - meaning more than the current four:

- Default Administrator Home Page
- Default Reseller Home Page
- Default Client Home Page
- Default Domain Owner Home Page

These should be like as follows:

- Default Administrator Home Page
- Default Reseller Home Page for reseller
- Default Reseller Home Page for admin
- Default Client Home Page for client
- Default Client Home Page for reseller
- Default Client Home Page for admin
- Default Domain Owner Home Page for domain owner
- Default Domain Owner Home Page for client
- Default Domain Owner Home Page for reseller
- Default Domain Owner Home Page for admin

Using these 10 templates instead of 4 is the easiest solution for fixing this properly, as there would be a proper template in each case - not only depending on the page - but also what is the type of user account on the page. This would be the most viable solution allowing admin to set every single detail (showing or not showing) for each user level.

This way we Plesk admins could easily define which of the options are allowed for different levels of users, not only to allow or disallow them from all.

Also, it should be possible to set more precisely which of the features are allowed and which are not. For example in Plesk 9.x no subpages in Plesk GUI cannot be disabled from clients, as they were able to disable in Plesk 8.x. (For e.g. I personally would allow my clients to be able to take "Backups" but not be able to go to "Scheduled Backup Settings", which causes more trouble than benefit to my clients. This is not possibled anymore in Plesk 9.x, it's only possible to allow or dissallow all the backup features.

3. Bug fix for Scheduled Backuping

Explanation of the problematic behaviour:

If client sets scheduled backup and doesn't notice to unclick the selection "Suspend domains until backup task is completed" in "Scheduled Backup Settings" and activate the task, Plesk disables the domain during the backup and some cases won't enable it back online and/or some cases enables the domain but the e-mail doesn't work anymore.
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=100144

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These are my TOP 3 bug fixes / feature request for current branch of Plesk 9.x. I hope somebody in Parallels would take these in notice and could convince the developers of Plesk how crucially important it is to have at least these fixed as soon as possible.

These very same flaws have been running since Plesk 9.0 (some even from Plesk 8.x, like the scheduled backup bug). Please fix these at last!

I know that Parallels isn't actively reading this forum but I haven't had opportunity to tell these things by no other means. (I guess IgorG from Parallels is reading some, IgorG please comment something on this if you see my message!)

I am also frustrated that these features (1 and 2) have been requested over 2 years now (from the beginning of Plesk 9.0) but despite it Parallels have been not able to fix these, even though these have been reported to developement team by IgorG many times before.

I myself have a lot of expectations in forcoming Plesk 9.5, but I happened to see it's ETA on the web for a short time and these bugs / feature flaws wasn't mentioned to be fixed in Plesk 9.5 either (though it seemed that some of the important fixes, like new versions for Horde and PhpMyAdmin as well as the IE8 compatibility were applied, which for I didn't wrote those on this thread.)

Please, please Parallels! Hear the requests of your humble customers! Fix these. It's very important that the Plesk panel should work properly! I also encourage everybody who reads this thread to support my requests by replying to this thread. So if you aggree with me that these are the most important fixes that should be applied immediately, support my request by saying something or replying by your own feature requests!

 

[IgorG]

Scy,

Well. I have read it carefully. First of all - thank you very much for your detailed description and clarifications. It is really very important for us - to receive feedback from our clients. But I should say that it is forum and initially it is place for discussions and feedback but not place for bugreports and for support helpdesk. I help you and you help me. I can forward your message to responsible persons immediately but it is not right way.
With all my respect to you, it is only your opinion, and unfortunately it isn't enough. For serious convincing discussion of these questions is necessary for us. We need opinion and substantiation from other users.
Therefore let's start discussion of your suggestions here.
I will review these questions again and comment it later. I hope that other forum users will comment it too.

 

[Scy]

IgorG, Thank you for reading my message and publishing it also. Some of my writings have been censored (possibly for a real reason because of my frustration for of these matters that nothing happens). However, I do not thinkg that I am alone with these opinions and requests, as many of the other admins on this forum have been frustrated with the very same bugs/behaviours of Plesk.

I thank you for taking these in account and hope that these will be really fixed someday in the future. Imho, unfortunatelly it could be late in some cases, as these should have been fixed earlier, before many decided to move to other control panels, like cPanel, which has no such limitation in configurating the domain.

However, I really hope your developement team could take our humble requests for real and pay some attention to paying customers. I also hope that this thread would get some replies from users that share my opinion.

 

[IgorG]

Regarding overusage policy.

I've compared the behaviour of Plesk 8.x and Plesk 9.x in this case:
In Plesk 8.x:
1. Create domain with physical hosting enabled, set disk space limit to 1MB.
2. Upload 2MB file to the domain.
3. Run statistics: /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/statistics
4. In Plesk I see that there is a warning about domain disk space is overused, but domain is not suspended.

In Plesk 9.x:
1. Create domain with physical hosting enabled, set disk space limit to 1MB, set overuse policy to 'overuse is not allowed'.
2. Upload 2MB file to the domain.
3. Run daily maintenance script: /opt/psa/bin/sw-engine-pleskrun /opt/psa/admin/plib/DailyMaintainance/script.php
4. In Plesk I see that domain disk space is overused and domain is suspended.

Do you mean that it first behaviour is more correct than second?

BTW, we have already feature request regarding overusage policy improving. I will update it with your request.

 

[Scy]

IgorG, for some reason some of my improvement suggestions were corrupted and removed in the first message posted. Please check the message through again, if you have any spare time, I fixed my suggestions that were missing between some paragraphs.

Edit: BTW, this forum has also a bug that seem to cut of some paragraphs when writing replies on the first time! I constantly need to edit my every post to add some missing information, as well as my reply below - please check it again too:

Related to your question:

Regarding overusage policy.

I've compared the behaviour of Plesk 8.x and Plesk 9.x in this case:
In Plesk 8.x:
1. Create domain with physical hosting enabled, set disk space limit to 1MB.
2. Upload 2MB file to the domain.
3. Run statistics: /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/statistics
4. In Plesk I see that there is a warning about domain disk space is overused, but domain is not suspended.

In Plesk 9.x:
1. Create domain with physical hosting enabled, set disk space limit to 1MB, set overuse policy to 'overuse is not allowed'.
2. Upload 2MB file to the domain.
3. Run daily maintenance script: /opt/psa/bin/sw-engine-pleskrun /opt/psa/admin/plib/DailyMaintainance/script.php
4. In Plesk I see that domain disk space is overused and domain is suspended.

Do you mean that it first behaviour is more correct than second?

Yes, absolutely yes! For a following reasons:

- Nobody wants domains to be suspended because of some disk space limit was overused unintensionally! (Would you like to have your commercial web site to be shut down for this reason, if your disk space was overused for 1 megabyte for some reason? That is just not logical at any means!)
- If the bandwith and/or disk space is overused, the plain e-mail notification is enough for to admin and/or client to do something about it (usually askin client "do you want to upgrade the web hosting package for $$$? And client is happy to say "yes" - or removes some files - but is never happy if the domain is suspended, even for a short time of period.)

AND if there is an option to suspend the page automatically for some reason, there should be also configurable option to:

1) Show some informative page that says that "This domain is suspended due the overusage of the resources", not just suspend the domain and shut down the nameservers for the domain, that causes client simply to think that these servers are down and the server provider is a bad quality one. The best thing would be that admin could configure this page URL in some Plesk settings where suspended domains should be forwarded.

AND ALSO:

2) If the domain is suspended due the overusage of bandwith/disk space, this suspension should be reverted when the resources are not overused any more. In the current behaviour of Plesk this does not happen, and for e.g. when the month passes to another and new monthly bandwith resources are available from the beginning of the month, Plesk does not enable the domain again.

Anyways, even these features would lack, it would be just ok if the Plesk would never disable any domains even though badwith & disk space resources are overused, but simply would send e-mail for this - just like in Plesk 8.x did.

BTW, we have already feature request regarding overusage policy improving. I will update it with your request.

Yes and I thank you for that. But that was over a year ago and there have been several Plesk releases since. This feature has not yet been still fixed, which is the reason for me to start this thread whatsoever.

 

[CSN-Carl]

I'd like to see all these changes implemented too.

Although I don't think our suggestions/feedback will make much difference, as no one at Parallels seems to listen to what customers actually want. However it is good to see IgorG being proactive on the forums.

 

[IgorG]

I have updated existing Feature requests regarding 1 and 3 points and created new regarding 2 point.
All these problems are known for developers but your detailed explanation is very valuable. So, I'm not product manager and I can't guarantee you any ETA, etc... I can only forward it to development and management and provide your feedback to them.

 

[Scy]

I'd like to see all these changes implemented too.

Dear IgorG, as you can see from this comment, I am not alone with these toughts. I also encourage everybody who thinks that these features are important to fix asap to comment something on this thread.

Although I don't think our suggestions/feedback will make much difference, as no one at Parallels seems to listen to what customers actually want. However it is good to see IgorG being proactive on the forums.

IgorG, I also would like to point out, that this image "Parallels doesn't care what their customers want" is not only my thoughts, as you can see as well. It's not a very good image to have in a long run for Parallels.

Parallels should really start to listen to its customers and implement the features that are requested, many many times - because if it doesn't there are a lot of competitors that do. I really would like to continue using Parallels' products but what I am irritated is that in my views the Plesk product developement is not going to way its paying customers would like to have, but instead of what "some bloke in the engineering department has thought is good for everybody withouth thinking the feature trough properly". This is an attitude that should be fixed and Parallels should think about ways to start to listen its paying customers. Anything! Make up an competition like "suggest the best new feature for Plesk" and the 5 best would be implemented after some poll or something..

I have updated existing Feature requests regarding 1 and 3 points and created new regarding 2 point.
All these problems are known for developers but your detailed explanation is very valuable. So, I'm not product manager and I can't guarantee you any ETA, etc... I can only forward it to development and management and provide your feedback to them

I thank your pro-activity as well, but as we have seen, so far making only feature requests has shown no results in the past few years. Would it be possible that you could take this as your personal mission as Parallels employee, that - not only these features would be implemented - but also the atmoshpere and "listening about what customers want" attitude would be pushed forward in Parallels values? I personally really think everybody would benefit in this (including your own career). Is there any ways you could think of actively suggesting this forward?

Also In the meantime, I fixed the request of 2. Behaviour fix for Interface Management template - the second solution - to be more viable considering the current Plesk templates. Could you please update that in the suggested sollution in feature requests, as I believe that my current suggestion is the more realistic way to implement this than the one I wrote before.

 

[Markus_Eyrich]

Well, Point 2 scy mentioned is a design flaw from the very first minute Plesk 9 came out. Did you read it carefully? It can't be wanted that if i remove something from "Default Domain Owner Home Page" also the Admin can't see this anymore ?! Those interface customisations should ONLY apply to the correspong user level (client, reseller, domain owner etc) and NOT the admin ...admin login should always see everything in the Interface. I made SEVERAL ticket's for this but one single support engineer got the idea what i was talking about....do you guys test your software before release ?

However...it would be very very nice if this could be fixed in the nearest future, since right now, my clients could practically do everything they want and i can't restrict 'em the way i want to ...

 

[Shazan]

I agree that suspending an account for being overquota is a wrong behaviour in a hosting environment.

IMO, when overusage is not allowed, Plesk should:
1. suspend account that exceed bandwidth
2. block the user to go overquota *before* that happens, but never suspending the account for that

 

[Scy]

I agree that suspending an account for being overquota is a wrong behaviour in a hosting environment.

IMO, when overusage is not allowed, Plesk should:
1. suspend account that exceed bandwidth
2. block the user to go overquota *before* that happens, but never suspending the account for that

This is something you can already set in "Web hosting settings", if you have quota support in your server installed. You can set lower quota limit compared to limit values in resources page to prevent user go overquota and suspended (however this doesn't seem to always work, as the plesk calculates used space little bit different than quota system.)

But IMHO the real problem in this matter that suspending the user account and/or domain by DISABLING NAMESERVERS is just insane! If domain is set "inactive" because of overused resources, it should be always done by redirecting the domain to another location - not by simply stop hosting the whole DNS and closing the account. It's very rude behaviour for customers! And also causes a lot of inconvenience and bad image for the hosting company (because most of the users simply think that the servers are down (which they're not!) as their domain doesn't work.)

And as I said, the selection of what to do - to suspend or not the suspend the domain should be left for admin and admin only - not the be set in Plesk code.

To me it is very weird that Plesk has these few design flaws that Parallels doesn't want to fix. Why? Plesk has a lot of features, even overwhelming, but some of the simplest things like these two top features mentioned in this thread is just missing. It's just unbearable and I don't understand why these cannot be fixed?

 

[IgorG]

2. Behaviour fix for Interface Management template settings:

We have already two submitted requests to developers regarding controls customization in Plesk 9.x and home pages customization improvements in Plesk 9.x. But I haven't any ETA when it will be implemented.

 

[Scy]

We have already two submitted requests to developers regarding controls customization in Plesk 9.x and home pages customization improvements in Plesk 9.x. But I haven't any ETA when it will be implemented.

Yes, great, however I recall that in a month or two you said in another thread that these will be probably fixed in Plesk 9.5, when I complained that why these wasn't fixed in Plesk 9.3.

However, Plesk 9.5.1 has been already published for Linux and still they lack the same requested features / bugfixes.

Sorry, but to me it seems that even though you submit these requests to Plesk developing team, nobody actually reads them or wants to hear requests of the Parallels customers. New versions come, but none of these important features/bugs are fixed.

Why is that? Why nothing happens despite of many requests? How many times these requests needs to be submitted? So what can we do now (except hoping, praying or swithing to another control panel like cPanel)?

Anyways, despite this, I shall submit here a TOP4 bugfix to report (or actually this should be TOP1 in priority):

- On some cases, if client has an active database, Plesk's backup for database fails. If client tries to restore this backup, it overwrites existing database with empty content thus deleting all database data.

- This bug occures at least in Plesk 9.2.2, but I am not sure is it even still fixed in Plesk 9.5.1. Can you concur is it fixed or not? You can read many other similar reports from this forum customers complaining the same thing with various versions of Plesk.

It is very problematic thing to offer our clients ability to take backups and restore them if the restoration process fails and mysql database is not backed up at all. This causes more harm than non-existing backup feature, so we are going to disable the backup feature complitely from our Plesk installations, as it cannot be trusted 100%.

Could you please submit this one too to developers? I really hope Plesk 9.6 could fix at least some of these Top4 bugs, othewise there is just no need to upgrade at all. That is the reason I have been staying in Plesk 9.2.2 because newer versions have nothing to offer related to these features reported here.

 

[IgorG]

I understand that everyone wants, that those problems that seem to them as most important should be fixed first.
Did you read a list of new features and bugfixes in 9.5.1 Release Notes?
And please believe that all your requests and suggestions will be forwarded to managers and development team.

 

[Scy]

I try to reply, though it seems that my last post was not published, so discussing this matter publicly seems kind of hard or impossible as you seem to censor any critict (even gentile and correct) related to Plesk development.

(Edit: Sorry for my mistake, the post was published afterwards or after some automatic delay.)

I understand that everyone wants, that those problems that seem to them as most important should be fixed first.

Naturally yes. However, IMHO, I haven't seen any important problems fixed in last Plesk ETA's from versions 9.2.3 to current 9.5.1, nor implementing new features, that everybody wants, except - of course - some security vulnerabilities fixes, that are important.

Did you read a list of new features and bugfixes in 9.5.1 Release Notes?

Yes I did. There was one sigle new feature: "Support for new hypervizor virtualization solutions: the Panel operates in environments created with KVM and Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal.". I don't even understand what this means (which tells very clearly that most of us web hosting providers don't even need such feature), but imho existing core features (and lacks in them) should be fixed first to work properly, than implementing new ones.

Besides, I believe very great amount of Plesk users are small hosting companies like us, so instead of concentrating to some virtualization and cloud server development, IMHO, Plesk should concentrate on it's root: improving web hosting package features, as requested in this thread and many others. We're the paying customers, hello!

And please believe that all your requests and suggestions will be forwarded to managers and development team.

Thank you for that, but unfortunatelly I could bet my hat that none of these features will be fixed neither in Plesk 9.6 nor Plesk 10, despite how many times you submit the requests to developing team. I really hope to be proved wrong, but I have requested these so many times and seen nothing to happen, so it naturally frustrates. I am sorry that I have lost faith in Plesk..

 

[divisionx]

We had the same problems but given past experience it seemed pointless to post anything here. In this case I want to support a fellow Plesk user and add my voice to Scy's asking for the same fixes. I would suggest however that there should be a soft and a hard limit. Soft limit would inform the client and admin they are reaching or exceeding their limits and that if they exceed the hard limit their accont will be suspended. Hard limit could suspend the domain (as an option) and it would not be a disaster like it is now since we can set the hard limit to say 20 times the user's allocation. What happens now is an All or Nothing scenario that either allows the client to fill the disc or suspends their domain for going 1Mb over. This is obviously completely wrong and was not thought out before it was implemented.

I would like to thank IgorG for at least listening to user comments and trying to do something about it. You are single-handedly making it worthwhile communicating with Parallels and your efforts are much appreciated. This was not the case before, and I am sure many alienated users just gave up and left or simply do not upgrade since we are all sick and tired of having a disaster on our hands after EVERY major upgrade.

 

[David Bakker]

I'm sith Scy on this as well. The way overusage is dealt with makes absolutely no sense from a service perspective. What's a client do to if someone sends a rather large email to his email account pushing the account over it's disk space limit when he's been diligent to download all email via outlook. Suspension for disk space overusage is almost a crime.

Neither does the complete suspension of the account for disk overusage. - so not only does the client not have access to alleviate the overusage, they have no idea why their website is down in the first place because they can't login.

A suspension notice should be posted on the website and full control panel access should still be granted.

As a side note...what happened to the "report" button in Plesk 8.X - it actually provided information as to where your disk space usage was being used up. Now it's a guess, is it your website, email, database, logs/webstats.
Could we also add the ability to see how much space each email account is currently using? This would be immensely helpful to clients trying to stay within their disk space limit.

It worries me that this overusage issue has been ongoing since the release of 9.0 with no resolution - not even a work around. Scy has found something that works for the time being but is not a solution especially from a billing/record point of view and a client perspective. It still suspends for disk overusage - NOT GOOD.

 

[Carl Swart]

I support the request.

Hi,

I would just like to add my voice to support Scy's requests.

Our support staff complains about the Plesk 9 interface and the overuse functionality regularly.

We initially used the "Do not allow" overuse policy, but so many clients complained and it gave the company a bad image with our clients, that we changed the overuse policy to "Allow and notify".

Now the clients' sites are no longer suspended, but the clients now use features that are not supported by their hosting options. The effect is that the clients receives emails about them exceeding their usage, because they could add a feature which they were not suppose to be able to add in the first place.

These notifications are now leading to an extra work load for our support agents that needs to explain to clients why they are receiving the notifications.

I too would ask that Parallels URGENTLY address this issue.

If Parallels can not address the issue by assigning developers to the problem, then at least let Parallels provide us with an unencoded version of the daily maintenance script so that each of us can change the behaviour according to our needs.

--
Regards,
-Carl

BTW: We have been using Plesk since version 6.0. I have many a time felt that SW-Soft (now Parallels) were sometimes out of touch with their customers. Many times we were forced to change our business processes due to the lack of flexibility in the Parallels Plesk Control Panel.

 

[IgorG]

We have added a checkbox Suspend on reaching traffic or disk space limit under Do not allow overuse. Now, if people want behaviour as in Plesk 8.6, they need to forbid overuse and make sure that this checkbox is NOT selected.

 

[Scy]

We have added a checkbox Suspend on reaching traffic or disk space limit under Do not allow overuse. Now, if people want behaviour as in Plesk 8.6, they need to forbid overuse and make sure that this checkbox is NOT selected.

I already noticed Plesk 10 new list of features and was happy to see that this was finally implemented. We shall upgrade Plesk 10 later.

Great news! I am happy to hear that this problem is finally being solved, after long quest with Plesk 9 allowing not to do that. Thank you for listening your customers in this matter!

Howabout the other features? Any change getting them implemented in forcoming Plesk 10 branch?