Plesk is reasonably easy to use, it has more data than cpanel, but everything is self-explanatory, follow this link if you have flash player,  under window shared hosting is an excellent tutorial on Plesk, hope that helps.

http://www.lunarpages.com/tutorials

Hi lunarpager,

If your shared account has been found to be utilizing a large percentage of system resources on a machine, your options are typically as follows: Lower resource usage to acceptable limits (sometimes this simply isn't possible for sites who have outgrown shared hosting), upgrade to a VPS account, or upgrade to a dedicated machine.

To address some of your concerns and questions about the VPS plan:

cPanel is a licensed product and we must pay a monthly fee to them to keep licenses active on our servers. On shared servers we have enough paying customers that we do not need to pass along any licensing fee. On dedicated or VPS accounts however, where we have only one paying customer, we do need to pass on the cost to recover some of our expense.

1. The Plesk control panel has a web/gui interface similar to cPanel. You can view demos of Plesk 8.1 for Linux (which is what our VPS plans run) at the following URL: http://www.swsoft.com/en/products/plesk/demo/ -- Remember, as a VPS or Dedicated customer running Plesk/cPanel, you'll have access to both the user and administrator areas. In other words, full control!

2. a/b) The general idea for these two items is that you'll need to transfer all your web content from the shared server to the VPS. The FTP account on the VPS will be created with your lunarpages username, so it should be the same aside from the server IP. It is not required that you ZIP the files after downloading them from your shared account and reuploading them to the VPS account, this is simply something that can save you upload time. Whether you zip the files or not, they will need to be downloaded from public_html and reuploaded to the httpdocs folder on the VPS Plesk account. httpdocs is the equivalent of public_html on cPanel. As for databases, both cPanel and Plesk have phpMyAdmin as a feature which you will be able to use to both export and import your MySQL databases. This is not a very difficult process and we can provide assistance if needed.

c) Unfortunately this will not work. Not only will it not create all the proper entries, but due to the fact that some of our machines run in the maildir format while others run in the mbox format, you may not even be able to copy inbox files/directories between the two if they differ in their mail storage format. Furthermore, Plesk does not utilize the same folder paths as cPanel for some things. Therefore if you choose Plesk we only recommend recreating the mail addresses unless you have experience working with mail systems and mail transfer agents, specifically Exim (cPanel) & QMail (Plesk).

d) Parked domains would need to be re-added through the Plesk control panel, although it as simple in Plesk as it is in cPanel. Again, we can provide assistance here if needed.

e) No other configurations should be required, although you should make sure if you have a suPHP_Config variable in your .htaccess file that you remove it as we do not utilize suPHP for Plesk.

f) The Plesk control panel does support a "site preview" option which allows you to view the site before DNS propagation. Pointing a temporary subdomain at the VPS account is also an option. The issues that can occur here are hardcoded URLs (i.e. img src=www.mydomain.com/image1.gif ) that try to load things using the domain name, which would still be directing to the shared account. Also mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess that are dependent on domain name functionality will also not function until the DNS has propagated to the VPS account. If you're unaware of what mod_rewrite rules are, you most likely have not implemented any.

Once you're confident you have transferred all content over successfully and that it is configured properly, you will need to both register your private nameservers and also replace ns1.lunarpages.com and ns2. lunarpages.com with your private nameservers. They are two different steps. You can register the private nameservers ahead of time and swap them out with the lunarpages nameservers when you are ready for the domain to begin propagating over to your VPS account. This should be seamless as for a period of 24-36 hours the domain will resolve to either the shared account or the VPS account, and both will still be active during this time.

We will keep your old shared account active until you have informed us that everything has propagated over to the VPS account and you no longer need it. If you forget to reply back to us, we will e-mail you asking us to update us on whether or not it's okay to close it out before removing it.

Thanks for your answer. Good thing I'm not alone out here


About the FTP process: public_html will be called httpdocs? What about the files outside of public_html? I have a ton of them. They'll still allow me to create directories from / ? 

This would also mean some scripts that use full path (I have a few) would need to be changed from 'public_html' to httpdocs'



Wow this would take some efforts on me and my users. What is a working process that people use to do this without disrupting their mail users?

What about the webmail interface? Will http://www.mydomain.com/webmail work?


OK. I'd imagine I won't be able to test these untill the DNS switch is made. Do I need to unbind (unpark) the parked domains from the Cpanel of the existing Shuttle account first? Or can I park them on the new server while the old ones are still working on the Shuttle account. Then when the DNS switch is made (ns1.lunarpages.com -> ns1.mydomain.com), the parked domains would automatic switch over? The reason I ask is that I'm trying to figure out the best way to minimize/elimiate service disruption to the users who use the parked domains. Is it possible?

Good to hear. What about Cron jobs? Are they stored in some sort of files? Will they be transferred over with the FTP processs, or will I have to recreate them?



I called my registrar today and they said as soon as I get the IP address, I can just call up and register the private name server. I figure I would do this before anything else. Then when I'm done testing the new server, I'd would point all the domain names's DNS entry to the newly registered private server. Do I need to 'park' them in the Plesk control panel before I change the domain names' DNS entry with my registrar? Which step should be taken first?



That's really good to know. There's a lot going on on my site and I'm also very anal on top of that. So I figure I'd need to run 20-30 comphrehensive tests before I can be sure the new server is working OK. I think I'd need at least 3 days for myself before the DNS switch.

Thanks again.

Btw, thanks for your recommendations of decicated chat and the Pleask tutorial. I'm trying on the plesk demo right now..

Hello lunarpager,

In reply to the questions you stated above:


Plesk does not allow to use the root of the home folder of the account. Although you can create the necessary folders as root and then give the user permissions to write into them. Plesk utilizes the /private folder for files which are used on the account but should be not accessible from the Internet.

If you use full paths in your scripts, you'll definitely have to change them, because Plesk uses another document root folder for web files as well as stores accounts not in the /home folder. The path to the home folder of your Plesk account will be /var/www/vhosts/<your domain>.


The main thing would be to create email accounts, forwarders, mailing lists, etc. before changing nameservers. Please ask users to download emails from your shared account if they keep there any. If it is required to transfer some emails between old and new accounts, this can be accomplished by configuring the both accounts in email client supporting IMAP and moving emails using it.

As for webmail, it is http://webmail.yourdomain.com for a domain configured in Plesk.


You don't need to delete the parked domains from old shuttle account. It will be required to change nameservers for the parked domains at the domains' Registrar as well as you will do for the primary domain. If a domain is parked, this does not mean that it copies the nameserver settings from the primary domain.


You will have to manually recreate cron jobs in Plesk. The cron files are not available for transfer by FTP.


It is recommended to have all domains created on the server before you change the domains' nameservers with the registrar. So, you will need to park the domains in Plesk before updating nameservers.


That should be not a problem. It is always good to be sure that all works at the new location before changing servers for smooth transition.

I hope this reply is helpful.