Plesk Obsidian Crashed Again, Thank God For SnapShots

Plesk Obsidian is proving to be a weak link under load. cPanel is a much better operating system I have run for over a decade. But the license fee has skyrocketed in the past two years. The current fee for the Admin 5 domain license is $39 monthly. I run a $40 4cpu, 160 GB instance from Vultr who i have been a client for over a decade. The instance price seems reasonable, but throwing in another $39 for a cPanel license is not presently in my budget. I do not intend to bash Plesk Obsidian, but when it crashes, I can not open a support ticket with Plesk because they require the license number, which must come from Vultr, who can not supply it.

But the good news about PlesknObsidian Web Admin SE is that it is Free. And if it is free, it’s for me. It has a three-domain / subdomain. And three email addresses. That works well for me as I am only running WordPress. Another domain that supplies my raw videos is run through a free Cloudflare account, where they are super-cached before being fed to my video server on another domain. This dramatically reduces server load, with the CF cache doing 80% of the streaming. This is a sweet setup for an old, poor cracker guy on a tight budget. This is a hobby and a classroom for me, and I love it!

Another bit of Doc’s FREE webmaster advice is, are you using CloudFlare? If not, you should take advantage of their global Content Delivery Network (CDN) that pushes data out of the closest node to your site visitors. What’s beneficial is Internet traffic travels in hops. The more hops in routed traffic, the more it slows it down.

My server (instance) is in Stockholm, Sweden. Yet with CloudFlare, all thirteen hops were in the west Florida (Tampa Bay) area. The fewer hops, the faster the trip takes. Search engines also gauge the position in their SERPS on how quickly a website is!

One last big website performance option only costs $5 per month! It is called WordPress automatic content optimization (APO.) It works because CloudFlare caches your website’s JavaScript, CSS, And external fonts such as Google fonts, etc. All you need is a FREE CloudFlare account. And if you’re running CloudFlare? $5 for their APO. I can help set it all up. Have questions? Comment below.

Back to my Plesk Obsidian crash from hell. A botnet that’s controlled by a person who uses infected smartphones, personal computers, Internet of th9ngs (IOT) that are internet-connected applications, and cable modems can send a simple ping hundreds of times in a short time, denying legitimate traffic access, causing the server crawls to a stop and roll over on its back and dies. I believe this took me offline. I was in WordPress and noticed save commands were not working. Then I caught the unable to connect to a database error. As Scotty on the Enterprise said, It’s dead, Jim! What saved my ass was my web host offers instance snapshots. I restored the snapshot, and it was back up in an hour! ❤️