Saying Goodbye to Costly cPanel and Hello Plesk Obsidian Web Admin SE

Recently I gave cPanel the boot and said hello to Plesk Obsidian Web Admin SE which is FREE for up to 3 domains. I’ve run cPanel for well over a decade, but its license fee has skyrocketed within the past year. Searching for an alternative and trying two others, I chose the FREE Plesk Obsidian Web Admin SE version as the easiest to set up. And had my two sites online within an hour.

Plesk Obsidian is way different than cPanel and with such, there is a learning curve to overcome. The main difference is Plesk does not directly support running under Cloudflare. If you are using a Cloudflare origin SSL/TLS certificate it must be added manually and then selected when adding a domain. Plesk Obsidian has an excellent help tutorial that I suggest reading first.

As a hobbyist and blogger who is not intending to profit from my posts and videos, cPanel got to be cost prohibited. My server is leased for $40 per month from Vultr.com. Add the cPanel $ 19-month license fee it was ridiculous paying $59 month total. They just got too greedy and are shooting themselves in the foot. Plesk Obsidian Web Admin SE is a lot of bang with no license fee!

Plesk Web Admin SE edition supports FREE lets encrypt SSL/TLS certificates through manual name-server setup. Meaning your domain’s name-servers must point to the default Plesk selects when adding a domain. All I did was change my IP Address in CloudFlare and www.fidosysop.org came right up. Plesk shows a warning under SSL/TLS because of the CF origin cert. That can be ignored.

So are you ready to take the plunge and dump WHM and cPanel? If so I highly recommend Vultr.com who has many options for web-server one click installation. You can select your servers physical location. Click application tab and select Plesk. Lastly select your server size option. I’m streaming videos from a second domain that can be somewhat intensive at times. I’m finding vultr’s 4 core Intel CPU, 8192MB ram, and 160GB drive is more that sufficient for my needs. www.fidosysop.org runs 10 sub-domains easily under Plesk Web Admin SE edition.