Introduction to Plesk

Plesk consists of the following main components:

Services Managed by Plesk

Plesk uses standard packages for the following services:

IIS as a set of Internet services including HTTP, FTP, and others.

FTP servers - ServU, Gene-6, used as alternative FTP servers.

Mail servers - MailEnable, IceWarp (Merak), CommuniGate Pro, or SmarterMail.

BIND or MS DNS - used as the domain name server.

MySQL used to store the Plesk's database called psa that is used for administrative purposes

MSSQL or MySQL - used as a database server by Plesk users.

Tomcat - used as an infrastructure for servlet and JSP-based applications shipped in the *.war format.

JDK (j2sdk) - used as a library for java applications.

SpamAssassin - used as protection against spam email messages.

Plesk Premium Antivirus, Kaspersky Antivirus, or IceWarp Antivirus - used as email antivirus tools.

Files and Directories Used by Plesk Installations

Plesk and its components are installed by default in the directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Parallels\Plesk\ on a physical server, or C:\Program Files\Plesk\ in the Virtuozzo containers environment. The default installation directory is referred to as %plesk_dir% in the following list. Some of the subdirectories with corresponding components are listed below.

%plesk_dir%\admin\ - The core components used by the Plesk GUI.

%plesk_dir%\admin\plib\ - Plesk's PHP files.

%plesk_dir%\admin\bin\ - Binary utilities.

%plesk_dir%\bin\ - Binary utilities.

%plesk_dir%\etc\ - Configuration files.

%plesk_dir%\MailServer\ - Mail servers.

%plesk_dir%\backup\ - Backup files.

%plesk_dir%\dns\ - BIND name server files.

%plesk_dir%\MySql\ - Plesk's MySQL database server.

%plesk_dir%\Databases\ - Database servers for serving user data.

In this chapter:

Installation and Upgrade Overview

Ports Used by Plesk

Licensing