Managing Hosting

Using Plesk you can select any of three different types of hosting services, as listed below: Physical hosting: the most common type of hosting service, creating a virtual host (disk space on the local server) for the client. The client controls and publishes his own web site without having to purchase a server and dedicated communication lines.

Standard forwarding: With this type of forwarding, all requests to the domain are forwarded by your server to another Internet address (no virtual server is created). When an end user searches the Internet for the client’s domain, he is routed to another URL, and the address in his browser window changes to the new URL.

Frame forwarding: all requests to this domain are forwarded to another Internet address (no virtual server is created). But with this type of forwarding, the end user sees the client’s domain name in his browser, not the forwarding address. Plesk uses frames to ‘trick’ the browser into displaying the correct domain name. The problem with this type of forwarding is that some search engines do not index these frame pages and some browsers do not support frames.

Setting Up a Domain User Account

If you wish to allow a domain owner to use Plesk control panel for managing his/her domain, you should create a domain user account in Plesk. When a user is logged in to a domain user account, his/her control panel environment comprises the specific Domain’s administration page, and access to the domain management capabilities is limited in accordance with the permissions you define.

For accessing the domain user account, a user should specify his/her domain name as the control panel login name.

Managing Web Users

A web user is a user account within a web server. It is used to define locations for personalized web pages with individual FTP access. The result of creating a web user is a subdirectory within your domain (e.g. domain.com/~webuser).

Managing Anonymous FTP Access

Within Plesk the Administrator, or Client(given domain creation capabilities), can set up Anonymous FTP capabilities for a given virtual host. Anonymous FTP is used to allow an open, yet controlled, environment for visitors to the domain to download and/or upload files to and from the domain account.

Users will be able to log into ftp.’domain name’ with the standard anonymous user name and any password. Plesk allows the setup and limitation of incoming file space, number of connected users, and bandwidth usage throttling. NOTE : You can set up anonymous FTP only for domains that have physical hosting configured on exclusive IP.

Using File Manager

The File Manager functions become available after you have configured physical hosting for a domain. File Manager is designed for working with files (e.g. web pages, text files, images etc) on a domain and its subdomains. Using File Manager, you can easily upload, create and delete files as well as organize them in folders and change file timestamps and permissions.

Accessing Microsoft FrontPage Web Administrator

You can access the Microsoft FrontPage Web Administrator directly from the Control Panel, using the FP Webadmin icon, or FP-SSL Webadmin if you wish to access it over secure SSL connection. These icons are located at the bottom of the Domain Administration page, provided that hosting is set up for the domain, and Microsoft FrontPage is available. FrontPage Web Admin software should be installed and configured properly for this function to work, and the FrontPage and FrontPage over SSL support should be enabled within Plesk.

About the author: Prashanth K is a B.Tech CSE and has worked on the Windows System administration for over a year in Poornam. His expertise lies primarily on Plesk Windows administration.