I just wanted to add, I haven’t seen a better shared hosting control panel to date. I just have a few things I think could be improved upon. I think the Parallels Plesk team is on the right path and I look forward to seeing how things progress with the product.

Things also fit logically into RHEL, so training staff is easy as well.

I think Plesk is okay, but I really don’t think it logically fits into RHEL at all. My two biggest complaints are how the Apache virtual hosts are setup through multiple levels of cascading includes and how so many things are stored in /usr/local/psa/. Well, qmail is also in there, but that’s just because it’s crazy and I believe poorly thought out from an administration/configuration standpoint. I will be glad when they move to Postfix in the next major release.

I’ve only been working with Plesk for about 4 months now at the Rack, and I would say it was one of my biggest hurdles coming in. Once you learn the secret hiddie-holes of the Plesk Way(tm), things get easier. I can’t say that more than a day or two goes by that I don’t learn a new secret Plesk has up its sleeve. Thankfully, Major’s done an amazing job documenting that sort of stuff here. Thanks, Major!

In our experience, Plesk has the lowest total cost of ownership of any shared hosting control panel. Upgrades have fewer issues, very few security problems, easy to use and few day-to-day operational problems.

From the sysadmin side, I like that it is essentially just an app, easily managed via RPMS like other packages. Things also fit logically into RHEL, so training staff is easy as well.