brandondawson.org Drupal Website Developer and Consultant

Don’t buy Parallels Plesk 10

I'd just like to take a brief moment to "thank" Parallels, makers of the Plesk Control Panel, from the bottom of my heart, for costing me several hundred dollars in lost time and money by springing their version 10 release on an unsuspecting world months before it was truly ready for production use.

I say "months" because they seem to have released it in late 2010, but it was still very, very broken when I attempted to upgrade, about ten days ago. Over the years, I'd stuck with Plesk because its user interface was much more attractive and user-friendly than its primary competitor, cPanel, which has a few issues of its own.

But the simple truth of the matter, the bottom line, is that this is hardly the first time Parallels has dropped an unproven upgrade, and let their customers serve as unpaid QA testers. This is not acceptable, and I doubt I'll be alone in pursuing alternative options on my next server build.

So as of the date of this post, I would very much encourage anyone still on the relatively-stable Plesk 9 to avoid Plesk 10 at all costs.

(And yes, I said "build" and not "lease": my server provider didn't exactly distinguish themselves in this debacle, either, but that's a subject for a whole 'nother post.)