Easy Plesk Access Tricks

Plesk is a popular web hosting control panel used by many of our clients. On servers with Plesk, the control panel is located at:

https://yourdomain.com:8443

There are several problems with this URL:

1. It’s hard for users to remember the 8443 on the end and the https on the beginning of the URL.

2. Plesk by default uses a self signed SSL certificate that causes warning to be displayed in the user’s web browser.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put Plesk on a friendly URL like https://plesk.yourdomain.com?

Also lets have:

http://plesk.yourdomain.com

automatically redirect to:

https://plesk.yourdomain.com.

Now the your users don’t have to remember the https part either.

Now lets get really fancy. Suppose your customer has a domain named acme.com hosted on your server. It would be nice to have the URL:

http://acme.com/plesk

redirect to:

http://plesk.yourdomain.com.

Guess what – it can all be done! Here’s how:

1. Get an SSL certificate for plesk.yourdomain.com. A $29 cert from GoDaddy will work just fine. Place the SSL key in:

/etc/pki/tls/private/plesk.yourdomain.com.key

and the SSL certificate in:

/etc/pki/tls/certs/plesk.yourdomain.com.crt

2. Next, create /etc/httpd/conf.d/plesk_proxy.conf with the following contents:

Now just restart Apache and you’re ready to go.

Couple of issues to note:

1. You’ll need to add the hostname plesk.yourdomain.com to DNS.
2. Depending on your server config, you may need to place plesk.yourdomain.com on a dedicated IP address since each IP address can host only a single SSL site.