Several months ago we made a shift in our dedicated server provider from CI Hosting in Texas, to GoDaddy in Phoenix, AZ. Initially, we were not used to their offerings and how they handled dedicated server packages, but we were able to over come some of the shortcomings of their offerings. (CI Host by the way is absolutely one of the most incompetent companies we'd dealt with in 8 1/2 years and I am thankful we only got ripped off for $2K and had a backup of all of our data - they were simply incompetent and crooks to boot.)
That 2 cents out of the way...
Plesk Control Panel. On the surface, and even under the covers, this is quite a dynamic tool for those that are looking to manage shared hosting with a limited IP pool, and that want non-trivial security tasks handled in a smooth way for them (like blocking / unblocking remote desktop access, FTP security, and a host of other things).
The woes.... And what a woe to be aware of.
We recently purchased a certificate for one of our clients. Interestingly, neither the support from GoDaddy or SwSoft were compentent when it came to installing a certificate for a site that was being managed by Plesk. Well, today, talking with someone that 'knew' what they were talking about we walked through a setup, saved it - and guess what? It did not work. Alas, delete the sub domain we just created and let's move onto something else.
Deleting the Sub Domain for this site? Deleted the entire site - 150% and then some. It was not in the Recycle Bin and Plesk and GoDaddy were both at a loss for this one.
We back our sites up to remote servers on a regular basis, but we still lost about 30 man-hours of work here.
So, a very good lesson learned. Like any other software package (that so many of us develop) Plesk is riddled with a number of issues - but this one experience was worse than an F5 tornado in the Oklahoma plains.
I VERY rarely share this sort of dialog on my blog because I'm just another geek in need, and I spend a lot of time sharing detailed documentation on work that I've done in an effort to help others. But I felt this more than important enough to speak out.
If you are planning to do hosting for customers, beware of the Plesk Control Panel - and take that as good advise. We certainly learned the hard way....