General Hosting Settings

Introduction

The hosting settings of a Plesk subscription define the technical foundation for operating a website. This overview covers key configuration areas: the hosting type, security-related options, scripting features, and statistics settings.

Prerequisites

Plesk server

Navigate to the Websites & Domains overview in the Plesk Control Panel and select the Hosting and DNS → Hosting tab for the subscription you want to configure.

Domain Settings

Edit Domain Names

In the screenshot, you can edit the domain name for the corresponding subscription under Item 1.

Please note that you are modifying one of the most fundamental mechanisms in web hosting; the domain’s A and AAAA records must resolve to the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of your Plesk server. Otherwise, your visitors may receive a certificate error message and, after ignoring it, be directed to the login screen of your Plesk Control Panel.

Change Hosting Type

Under Item 2 in the screenshot, you can select the hosting type, which includes Website, Redirect, and No Web Hosting.

Please note that switching to the “Website” type will completely and irrevocably delete the website data and logs for the subscription. Plesk will also warn you again before making this change.

Website

As the name suggests, this option allows you to host a website under a preferred domain (with or without the www prefix, or none). For this type, you must also specify a document root, which is relative to the Plesk subscription path.

In the file system, each subscription is located at: **/var/www/vhosts/your-domain.tld** By default, Plesk sets the document root to the httpdocs subfolder located within that directory.

The document root is the directory whose contents visitors to your website can access. Shopware, for example, stores this data in a directory named **public**, which means that if the web application—such as Shopware 6—was installed in the httpdocs directory, the root directory must be configured as httpdocs/public.

Redirect

For a redirect, you can specify a domain or URL in the Redirect visitors to text field to which visitors should be redirected. You can choose between a permanent redirect (301), temporary redirect (302), or frame redirect.

Caution is advised when using a permanent redirect (301), as many browsers store these in their cache in a very specific way, and users cannot easily remove them. As a result, your visitors may no longer be able to access your website correctly even after the redirect type has been corrected, provided they accessed the domain in question while the permanent redirect was in effect.

No Web Hosting

"No Web Hosting" can be selected here if a domain is used exclusively for sending email.

SSL/TLS Support

Under Item 3 in the screenshot, you can enable or disable HTTPS encryption of data traffic by checking or unchecking the box. With the option Redirect visitors from HTTP to HTTPS via an SEO-friendly 301 redirect, traffic is automatically redirected from HTTP to HTTPS via a permanent redirect (301). In the multiple-selection list for Certificates, you can choose between SSL certificates in the subscription’s repository; see Installing the SSL Certificate.

Webspace Settings

In Step 1, you can set the system username and password for the subscription. The user specified there is therefore also the owner of the files in the file system that are part of the subscription. The password you set is used for authentication when logging in later via SSH or SFTP.

For more information about the system user, see the article System User.

SSH Access

SSH access in Step 2 is set to Forbidden by default, so that for successful access via SSH, FTP, or the su command, a shell must be selected from the drop-down list.

The most common shell is bash, so you can select /bin/bash or /usr/bin/bash here.

IP Addresses

Item 3 controls the IPv4 and IPv6 addresses used for the subscription. By default, only the IPv4 address is set here; therefore, to ensure maximum compatibility, the IPv6 addresses should also be set.

If you have obtained multiple WAN IP addresses for your server, the multiple-selection list will display all WAN IP addresses available on the server.

Since this is a webspace setting, changing the IP address(es) will affect all domains within that webspace.

Please ensure that a required AAAA-type DNS record exists and resolves to the IPv6 address specified there; otherwise, the Plesk Control Panel page will also be accessed.