Plesk is a commercial web hosting and server data center automation software developed for Linux and Windows-based retail hosting service providers. It was developed by Plesk International GmbH, a company with headquarters in Toronto, Canada, and Schaffhausen, Switzerland, with offices in Barcelona, Spain, Cologne, Germany, Tokyo, Japan, and in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, Russia, where it was originally created in 2000 by Dimitri Simonenko. The hosting automation software was initially released by Plesk Inc. and first went live in 2001. In 2003, Plesk was sold to SWSoft, which became Parallels in 2008. In March 2015, Parallels renamed the service provider division to Odin. In December of the same year, Plesk became a separate business entity. In 2017, British Oakley Capital Limited acquired Plesk and it has since been a part of WebPros, a global SaaS platform for server management. Currently, WebPros comprises Plesk, cPanel, WHMCS, XOVI, and SolusVM.

Licenses

Plesk, with latest version Obsidian 18.x, is available in the following license configurations: The license price also distinguishes whether a license can be used for a dedicated server or a virtualized server. Licenses for dedicated servers are usually slightly more expensive.

Pricing

Plesk sells all three licenses for a monthly or annual price directly. All three editions can also be obtained from official license resellers. In March 2018, Plesk announced its first price adjustment in 18 years of business, increasing the prices of all Plesk licenses that had versions earlier than 12. The company claimed that it was to cover the increasing cost of support and management over the past two decades. Following the announcement, Plesk created a FAQ page.

Support

Live and email support for Plesk is available in English, Russian, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and Japanese. Plesk licenses purchased directly from Plesk include full free support.

Criticisms

One criticism of Plesk is that the recommended method of removing it is a complete reinstall of the OS after backing up, which complicates the concept of trialware by binding an administrator to the product by facing considerable downtime of a server.

Version history

Timeline

Plesk University

In January 2016, Plesk launched Plesk University online. Through its university, Plesk provides courses on how to use their products and services.