Plesk

This article describes how to configure Dropbox backups in Plesk. You can do manual Dropbox backups, or you can configure automatic daily backups. CONFIGURING DROPBOX BACKUPS To configure Dropbox backups for your account, follow these steps: Log in to Plesk. In the right sidebar, click Dropbox Backup: At the Dropbox login page, type your Dropbox e-mail and password. At the folder access page, click Allow: The Plesk Websites & Domains page appears: To create a backup immediately, click Back up Now. To view any tasks that are currently running, click the Current Tasks tab. To change Dropbox settings, click the Settings tab. To enable a scheduled backup, select the Enable Scheduled Backup check box, and then in the Scheduled Time (daily at) text box, type the time when you want the backup to run. Click OK.

This article describes how to use Plesk to protect specific directories with a password. Visitors to password-protected directories must enter a username and password to view the directory’s contents ADDING PASSWORD PROTECTION TO A DIRECTORY When you add password protection to a directory, site visitors are prompted for a username and password when they try to access it. They can only view the directory contents after typing a valid username and password. To add password protection to a directory, follow these steps: Log in to Plesk. In the left sidebar, click Websites & Domains: Click the Password-Protected Directories icon. Under Tools, click Add Protected Directory. Under Settings, in the Directory name text box, type the name of the directory you want to protect. In the Title of the protected area text box, you can optionally type a name for the protected directory. Click OK. Under Protected directories, click the name of the directory you specified in step 5. Under Tools, click Add a User. Under Protected directory user, in the Username text box, type a name for the user. In the New Password and Confirm Password text boxes, type the user’s password. Click OK. Password protection is now enabled for the directory. REMOVING PASSWORD PROTECTION FROM A DIRECTORY You can remove password protection from a directory if you no longer want to protect it with a password. To do this, follow these steps: Log in to Plesk Locate the directory for which you want to remove password protection, and then select the check box to the left of the directory name. Click Remove Protection. On the Removal Confirmation page, select the Confirm removal check box. Click OK. Plesk removes password protection for the directory.

What is an incremental backup? Plesk supports two types of backup: Full. Each time you create a backup, the backup includes all data regardless of the time when the data was last updated. Incremental. An incremental backup contains only the data that has changed since the time of the last backup. Using incremental backups significantly reduces the duration of a backup operation, CPU load, and the disk space occupied by backup files, and, therefore, improves the backup performance. Plesk includes the following data in incremental backups: Web hosting data changed since the time of the last backup (full and incremental). Mail data changed since the time of the last backup (full and incremental). Full backup of database data. Note that incremental backups contain whole files created on a subscription, not their parts. Plesk determines whether the data has been changed based on whole files. For this purpose, Plesk uses an index file that is created for each backup at the time of backup creation. The index file lists all files that existed in a subscription, and information about them, such as size, modification date, permissions or owner. A full backup lists all files, while an incremental one may list just a few files that have changed. The listed files are those included into a backup. How Plesk determines whether to include a file into a backup: The file was absent in the index for previous backups (full and incremental). The file’s size or modification time are different from those in the index for the previous backup. The file’s permissions or owner are different. How to create an incremental backup To create a backup, go to the Backup Manager page (of the server, user account, or subscription, correspondingly) and click the Back Up button. Then you can select a type of a backup: Full or Incremental. When you back up your data for the first time, it is always a full backup no matter what type of backup is selected. If you create a subsequent backup of the Incremental type, only the web hosting data and mail data that has changed since the last backup is saved. As a result, you can have a full backup and a sequence of several incremental backups. Incremental backups are listed on the Backup Manager page with the Incremental label. Note: If an incremental backup is lost or corrupted, the subsequent incremental backups will be marked with the yellow exclamation mark icon. Trying to restore such backup will produce a warning message that will tell you about the name of the missing incremental backups. If you remove an incremental backup, all subsequent backups in the chain will be removed as well. It is recommended to do a full back up of your data from time to time, for example, once a week or once a month (it depends on how often your web content or mail data change). If you use scheduled backups and select the Use incremental backup option, you will have to select a period for performing full backups as well. How to restore an incremental backup When you restore an incremental backup, you are actually restoring all the unchanged data from the last full backup and the changed data from all previous incremental backups (created after the full backup). Therefore, the restoration performance shows no noticeable change in comparison to a full backup. The Restore the Backup dialog displays all backups that form the data to be restored: the selected incremental backup, the sum of previous incremental backups and the initial full backup. You can download all these backups.

SpamAssassin & Spam Filter Management To achieve the desired level of spam protection, Plesk lets you configure a number of SpamAssassin settings, namely:   Spam Filter Sensitivity To identify spam messages, SpamAssassin performs a number of different tests on contents and subject line of each message. As a result, each message scores a number of points. The higher the number, the more likely a message is spam. For example, a message containing the text string “BUY VIAGRA AT LOW PRICE!!!” in the Subject line and the message body scores 8.3 points. By default, the filter sensitivity is set so that all messages that score 7 or more points are classified as spam. If your users still receive spam messages with the default sensitivity, increase it by setting a lesser value, for example, 6. If SpamAssassin marks valid messages as spam, decrease the sensitivity by setting a higher value. Spam Marks At the server level, you cannot set the server-wide spam filter to automatically delete spam: you can do it only on a per-mailbox basis. So, for the server-wide policy, you can choose only marking messages as spam: X-Spam-Flag: YES and X-Spam-Status: Yes headers are added to the message source by default. If you want, the spam filter will additionally include a specific text string to the beginning of the messages’ subject line (by default, this string is *****SPAM*****). Though you cannot configure SpamAssassin to delete all spam messages, you can let each mailbox owner configure their own spam protection settings. This includes, for example, setting their spam filters to automatically delete messages marked by SpamAssassin, or setting up their personal black and white lists.  Maximum size of messages to check Analyzing a huge number of emails can heavily increase the load on your server. To avoid this, you can set the maximum size of the message that the spam filter will test. Number of SpamAssassin processes Another way to limit the server loading by SpamAssassin is defining the maximum number of SpamAssassin processes (on Linux) or threads (on Windows) running simultaneously on the server. In Plesk for Linux, the maximum number of SpamAssassin processes you can configure via the Plesk GUI is 32. If you require more SpamAssassin processes to run simultaneously, add the following lines to the panel.ini file: [mail] spamAssassin.maxChildrenLimit = 80 where the numeric value indicates the maximum number of SpamAssassin processes that can be configured in the Plesk GUI. (Plesk for Windows) Trusted languages and locales You can define the language characteristics of mail that should always pass the filter by specifying trusted languages and locales. Letters written in the specified languages and with the defined character sets will not be marked as spam. Black and white lists SpamAssassin lets you include certain senders into its black and white lists: If you want the emails from specific domains or individual senders to be always treated as spam, add the respective entries to the spam filter’s black list. SpamAssassin will add the USER_IN_BLACKLIST mark to the header of each email from the specified addresses to guarantee that this email will be processed as spam. As a result, the email will be marked as spam, deleted, or placed to the Spam folder, depending on the SpamAssassin settings specified for the whole server and for a particular mailbox. If you want to be sure that you and your users will not miss email from specific senders, add email addresses or entire domains to the spam filter’s white list.

You must take regular back-ups of your site to secure it from any sudden miss-happenings. So that you can recover and store them again easily. This article will guide you on how you can backup and restore sites in Plesk. # Steps to Backup your site : 1. Log in to Plesk. 2. In the left sidebar menu, click on Websites & Domains Or Domains. 3. In the right sidebar menu, click on Backup Manager. 4. Now on the Backup Manager page, click on Back Up. 5. Under the Backup content, in the Backup section, select the desired setting : • Domain configuration: To backup domain content. • Mail configuration and content: To backup email. • User files and database: To backup additional users and databases. • Store in: It is a file path where backups are saved. You can also choose to store in an external FTP server. • Full: A full backup of your server. • Incremental: It will backup only content that has been changed since the last backup. • Comments: For personal comments regarding your backup. • Exclude log files: Not backup log files. • Exclude specific files from the backup: To exclude a specific file path from your backup. • ….send a notification email to….: Email if an error occurs during a backup. • Suspend the domain: To suspend the domain while a backup is occurring. It may cause your site to go down temporarily. 6. After selecting your desired setting, click on OK. 7. That’s it. Wait for a few minutes to reflect it in Backup Manager. Above steps demonstrates how to take immediate backups. But, you can also schedule your backups to run at predefined intervals in the future. # Steps to Schedule backups 1. Log in to Plesk. 2. In the left sidebar menu, click on Websites & Domains. 3. In the right sidebar menu, click on Backup Manager. 4. On the Backup Manager page, click on Schedule. 5. On the Schedules Backup Settings page, under the Schedule section, select when you want to run the backup process. 6. Select the type of backup, and for how long do you want to keep the backup files. 7. Under the Backup settings, customize the backup settings as per your wants. 8. Click on OK. Plesk will configure the scheduled backup. # Steps to Restore your Site 1. Log in to Plesk. 2. In the left sidebar menu, click on Websites & Domains. 3. In the right sidebar menu, click on Backup Manager. 4. Click the backup that you want to restore. 5. Under the Backup content, next to What do you want to restore? section, select one of the following options : • Selected objects: Select this option only if you want to restore specific items. • All objects (entire system): Select this option only if you want to restore the entire site. 6. Under Restoration options, you can customize the restore settings as per your wants. 7. Click on Restore. Plesk will restore the backup.

To create an email address: Go to Mail. Click Create Email Address. Type the left part of the email address before the @ sign, and, if you have several domain names on your account, select the domain name under which the email address will be created. Leave the Mailbox checkbox selected. Clearing this checkbox makes sense only if you want to use this address as a mail forwarder, which will forward all incoming mail to another address. Specify the mailbox size or use the default size defined by the provider’s policy or your service plan. Specify a password consisting of five or more Latin characters. Click OK.

What is Plesk? Plesk is a commercial web hosting platform with a control panel that allows a server administrator to set up new websites, reseller accounts, e-mail accounts and DNS entries through a web-based interface. Originally designed in Novosibirsk, Russia, the hosting automation software was released by Plesk Inc. and went live first in 2001. In 2003, Plesk was sold to SWSoft, which became Parallels in 2008. In December 2015 Plesk became a separate business entity, which has since been acquired by Oakley Capital.