Introduction

Your server’s configuration plays a crucial role in ensuring that your hosting environment is secure, stable, and optimized for performance. Plesk provides a centralized interface for managing server-wide settings, including system updates, DNS settings, performance options, security configurations, mail settings, service management, and more.

Whether you are an administrator fine-tuning the server or a power user exploring advanced settings, Plesk makes it easy to access and modify all key server configuration options.

In this tutorial, we will guide you through managing your server settings in Plesk.

Getting Started

First and foremost, please ensure you are logged in to your Plesk control panel. To do that, please enter your IP address, hostname, or domain name inside your web browser’s search bar and add “:8443” at the end. It should look something like: “https://yourdomain.com:8443”. By doing so, you will be prompted by a login form that requests your username and password.

After logging in with your username and password, Plesk will automatically display the “Websites & Domains” page, which will serve as the index page from where you can manage everything related to your websites and domains on Plesk.

Accessing the Server Settings Panel

All server-wide configuration options are located in the Tools & Settings section. To access them, please click on the “Tools & Settings” option from the left side menu.

Performing this will redirect you to the page containing a vast number of tools for your Plesk server. Under the “General Settings” category, you will see the “Server Settings”. Please click on that functionality.

Upon doing the above, you will be redirected to the server settings page from where you can start tweaking your Plesk settings as per your needs.

Managing The Server Settings

Under the “Server Settings” functionality, you can configure a wide variety of server settings, which we will cover below.

• Full hostname - Please use the text field here to set a hostname for your server. Please note that you can change this at any time.

• Retain web and traffic statistics for - Please use this text field to set the number of months you would like to keep the web and traffic statistics for. The default value is 3 months, and we believe it is a good value to keep.

• Include in the disk space usage calculation - Please use the checkboxes available here to configure Plesk to calculate the ticked items in the disk utilization calculator. Typically, this will include log files, database, mailboxes, and backups, but you can modify this, as per your needs.

• When calculating disk space usage, count - Please use the radio button to choose either file size or disk space used here. The default value is the amount of disk space, as it shows a number that is easier to read/understand, rather than the file size for each available file/directory.

• Include in the traffic calculation - Please use the radio button to choose how traffic on your server should be calculated. The three options are from inbound traffic, from outbound traffic, or from both.

• Forbid users to create DNS subzones in other users' DNS superzones - Please use this checkbox to prevent users from creating DNS subzones in other users’ DNS superzones. This setting is usually disabled, but we recommend doing it for security purposes.

• Customers can change the name of their system users - Please use the radio button here to choose if your customers can perform changes to their system users. You can fully allow them to do that, completely prevent them, or only allow them if the Hosting Management permission is granted

• Forbid customers and resellers to change their main domain name - Please use the checkbox to forbid or allow customers and resellers from changing their Plesk main domain. This depends on your personal preferences and the type of service you would like to offer your customers.

• Preferred domain for websites - Please use the radio button here and select the way domains are added for websites on the server. The options include “no preference” which means they can be added as the user wants, www.domain.com, which means that the user must use the www version of their domain, and domaim.com, which means the user needs to use their domain without www. Again, this is completely up to personal preference.

• Anonymize IP addresses during log rotation and collecting of web statistics - Please use this checkbox to hide IP addresses during log rotation and when statistics are being collected by Plesk. This option is disabled by default, and we recommend keeping it this way, as having the IP addresses inside the logs can be really useful when troubleshooting your traffic’s origin.

• Force daily log rotation for all domains - Please use the checkbox to force daily log rotation for all domains on the server. This depends on your personal preference; the default is disabled, as that way, there will be a lot of log rotation files.

• Allow to store website logs for - This setting signifies the number of days logs are being stored for. The default value is 7, and it cannot be changed.

Finally, when you are done tweaking the settings above, please click on the “Save” button at the bottom of the page to apply them.

Conclusion

As you can see, Plesk provides a powerful and user-friendly environment for managing all of your server settings from one central location. Whether you are handling updates, security configurations, mail settings, services, or system resources, everything is organized clearly and conveniently.

We hope this tutorial was helpful, and we kindly encourage you to explore your server settings regularly to ensure a secure, stable, and optimized hosting environment.