Ionos customers fume at mid-contract Plesk hike Hosting biz Ionos is hiking the price of its server instances, blaming an increase in Plesk license costs. Customers have a month to accept the increase or else disable Plesk on their account. The German business recently sent an email to customers of its virtual private server (VPS) service, notifying them that an extra fee …
Yeah, no. You can't simply disable Plesk like that.
I made the mistake of ordering a Plesk-based Linux virtual server thinking it was simply an additional- and optional- way of administering it.
But it soon became clear that Plesk was pretty much "baked in" to the setup and that I shouldn't be going "behind its back" and modifying files the regular way.
Similarly, I assume that anything I'd set up via Plesk would break if it was disabled, and I realised why their tech support had told me it couldn't simply be disabled later without moving to a new server.
Fortunately I realised my error quickly and was able to move to a new Plesk-less server before I'd wasted much time.
That's not to say Plesk is bad- it struck me as oriented towards managing larger, more complicated setups than ours. But it's definitely an "either or" and anyone invested in a Plesk-based setup isn't be able to simply move away.
Plesk spent decades buying up every bit of competition there was - and when they basically wiped everyone else out - then the license pricing started going up.
Plesk used to be 10.99 per server. Now it's 52.99 USD... (FOR THE SAME LICENSE).
Yes, it is VERY capable software - IF you host websites according to how PLESK says you should. But it leaves no room for variation - and they tend to concentrate on the wrong areas of improvement.
If there was anything else, we'd be using it...
Considering how cheap Ionos VPS servers are, it's kinda impressive it was free for as long as it has been. I've never used Plesk myself but I assume it's a GUI for web developer types that don't want to get their hands dirty with shell-based system admin. Which is fair enough if you just want to get a site set up without much hassle, especially if you can pass the costs on to someone else.
> "I assume it's a GUI for web developer types that don't want to get their hands dirty with shell-based system admin."
Original AC here. You seem to be thinking of it as a control panel type thing for making convenient changes to a LAMP setup, i.e. broadly what I assumed it was. But, having used it, I don't think so.
From what I vaguely remember, Plesk wasn't actually that simple- it seems to be more of a management tool for more complicated setups, another tool you had to know.
The problem was that it inserted itself deeply in the system- as I noted, the host setting up my VPS didn't offer the option to simply disable it later on if I changed my mind, and it was only once I started using it that I saw why. (I note that its Wikipedia article states that the recommended method of using it is a complete reinstall of the OS(!!)).
It was less the assistant I'd assumed than a middleman that seemed to expect everything to be done through itself, which I wasn't happy with at all.
So IIRC you can't pick and choose whether you want to alter the configuration manually without risking Plesk being unaware of and/or overwriting that change. (Don't quote me on that, though, it's a few years since I used it).
I'm not sure if the server/system would continue working if you disabled the Plesk license, but I'm sure it would be difficult to maintain.
Bearing in mind all the above, though, I can only assume it has a high level of lock-in for existing users.
Your memory of how it behaves/functions and how deeply embedded into a server it is are absolutely accurate - for Plesk "then" and Plesk "now".
One of our clients is a developer/marketing company and they lease several managed servers from us. Plesk gives us the ability to let him manage his own hosting resources (within reason) without having to worry about him breaking stuff - so it definitely has it's benefits - but it's a monster to deal with sometimes...
-- and yes, it has lots of attention directed at managing entire fleets of Plesk servers - regardless of the underlying OS.
-- and yes, whatever shortcomings it has, if you have to implement your own solution, you have to always worry about when (not if) Plesk will undo/break it.
As much as I love to hate it, it's a very functional product as long as you're willing to live within the walled garden and pay lots of money.
cPanel works the same as Plesk, both in terms of general admin and in terms of binding its self deeply into the OS. I looked at both many years ago and went down the cPanel route. It definitely makes admin quicker and easier and lowers the bar for people that might not want to get involved in proper system administration.
I used it as it was part of the hosting packages and made it easy to keep some customers happy on wanting to do some activities themselves - but invariably in many cases, they ended up not using it and phoning me instead.
When cPanel increased their licence costs, I briefly re-evaluated both against each other, then re-evaluated the features I actually NEEDED, rather than just found useful. I was surprised by how little of the product was in use or that I couldn't simply replace with a bit more CLI usage or just installing the packages directly onto the box (Webalyzer reports, etc). This also happened to coincide with some of the customers moving on, being swallowed up by larger companies or simply retiring, so the hosting need reduced.
I dumped the control panels and went native. Yes there was some temporary impact on having to re-build new servers and migrate services, but that also allowed me to upgrade OS's and packages and content management systems / carts to later versions, so overall, its well worth the short term pain.
So, if you are in the same situation, don't pay the price hike, you will save yourself quite a bit from the hosting costs.
