Preparing Servers to Be Used for Publishing Users' Sites

In Plesk Sitebuilder, sites can be published to:

• FTP servers
• Virtuozzo Containers on servers running Business Automation, Standard
• Local Plesk Sitebuilder server using XCOPY technology

The default Plesk Sitebuilder license allows you to register only one publishing server (or host). To purchase a license with unlimited number of publishing servers, contact Parallels Sales. With this license, you can publish Plesk Sitebuilder sites to any FTP servers at your disposal, without having to register a new server in Plesk Sitebuilder first. (After you publish a site to a new host, this host is automatically registered in Plesk Sitebuilder.)

Host is a web server used for publishing web sites.

If the number of hosts is Unlimited, then users who have the permission to modify site publishing settings can also publish their sites to any available FTP servers. For users restricted from modifying the site publishing settings, you specify the publishing settings yourself. The permission to modify the site publishing settings, as well as a list of servers available to a particular user, is defined in a user's plan.

Plan is a set of limits and permissions applied to a user account. The general purpose of a plan is to regulate distribution of the Plesk Sitebuilder resources, such as hosts, sites, modules, and so on among the users.

Before adding a server to be used for publishing Plesk Sitebuilder sites, make sure that it meets the following requirements:

• PHP version 4.3.9 or later is installed.
• PHP supports:
  • The ionCube PHP Loader 3.1.15 or later
  • DOM XML with XSLT support or PHP XSLT extension (Sablotron)
  • Multibyte string functions (mbstring extension)
  • Zlib compression functions (zlib extension)
  • Session handling functions support (session extension)
  • SQLite 2.x with UTF-8 encoding support
  • GD library 2.0.1 or later
• In php.ini the following directive is installed:
  • default_charset = "UTF-8"

Note: Make sure that all extensions you have installed are listed in the extensions directory and in the php.ini file. If PHP is installed as an Apache module, restart Apache after applying the changes.

To register a publishing server in the system:

1. On the navigation pane, click Server.
2. Click Hosts.
3. Click Add New Host.
4. In the Host DNS name or IP address field, enter an IP address or domain name of the host.
5. Click OK.

To verify that a publishing server meets all the Plesk Sitebuilder requirements, go to Sites > site name > Publishing Settings tab, specify all the required parameters and click Verify Location.

To make a publishing server available to a user, include the server into this user's service plan (on the Hosts tab) and make sure that the corresponding publishing mode is also included in the plan (on the Publishing Settings tab). For information on configuring service plans for users, see the next chapter.