General Settings

To view a website's general hosting settings, click Hosting Settings below the site's name in Websites & Domains.

The general website hosting settings are divided into groups:

Basic Settings

• Domain name. The domain name that you register with a domain registrar and will use for this website.

  Note: Depending on the hosting provider's policy, you may not be allowed to modify the domain name of the main domain of your subscription. By default, the main domain's name coincides with the subscription's name.

• Hosting type. The hosting type (Website, Forwarding, and No hosting) defines the website behavior. By default, all websites belong to the Website hosting type as they are physically hosted on the server.

  To change the hosting type, use the Change link. To learn more about hosting types, see Hosting Types.

  To suspend the website with all mailboxes and mailing lists hosted under the website's domain name use the Suspend option.

  Note: Other basic settings depend on the selected hosting type. See Hosting Types.

• Website status. The website status defines the site's accessibility in browsers and available hosting services. Apart from working as usual, the site can be suspended so it will not open in browsers, and even more, the hosting features of the site (such as the mail service and DNS service) can be disabled. You should change the status if you want the site to be temporarily unavailable, for example, for maintenance purposes. See Website Status.
• Document root. Displayed for domains with the Website hosting type. See Website Hosting.
• Preferred domain. Displayed for domains with the Website hosting type. See Website Hosting.

Security Settings

• SSL support. Secure Sockets Layer encryption is generally used for protecting transfer of sensitive data during online transactions on e-commerce websites that run on dedicated IP addresses. SSL certificates that participate in the encryption process are usually applied to a single domain name on a single IP address, therefore, each site that needs SSL protection must be hosted on a dedicated IP address. An exception to this is subdomains, which you can protect with a wildcard certificate. Installing an SSL certificate on a web server that hosts several websites with different domain names on a single IP address is technically possible, however, it is not recommended: the encryption will be provided, but users will get warning messages on attempt to connect to the secure site. To allow SSL encryption for the website, select the SSL support checkbox.

Web Scripting and Statistics

• Scripting languages. Specify programming and scripting languages you want the website to support. For PHP, you can also select the custom PHP version and handler type. More PHP settings are available on the PHP tab. To learn more about PHP handlers and PHP configuration, see PHP Settings.
• Web statistics. Select the web statistics software that you want to use for viewing graphical reports and charts on website visitors. If you want to protect the directory containing the web statistics files with your FTP username and password, select the "Protect access to your web statistics with your FTP user and password" option. Note that unless you select this option, anyone on the Internet will be able to see your web statistics.
• Custom error documents. When site visitors request pages that the web server cannot find, the web server generates and displays a standard HTML page with an error message. If you want to create your own error pages and use them on the web server, select the Custom error documents checkbox.
• Additional write/modify permissions (available only for Windows hosting). This option is required if web applications on the site will be using a file-based database (like Jet) located in the root of the httpdocs or httpsdocs directory. Note that selecting this option will seriously compromise the website's security.

Hosting Types

The hosting type defines the website's behavior. Plesk supports three types of hosting: Website hosting, Forwarding, and No hosting.

Website Hosting

The Website hosting means that a website is physically located on the server.

For the website hosting type you can specify:

• Document root. The location of the directory where all files and subdirectories of the site will be kept. You can use the default directory httpdocs or specify another directory.
• Preferred domain. Typically, any website is available on two URLs: with the www prefix (like in www.example.com) and without it (like in example.com). We recommend that you always redirect visitors to one of these URLs (typically to the non-www version). For example, after you set the Preferred domain to the non-www version (example.com), site visitors will be redirected to this URL even if they specify www.example.com in their browsers.

  
  Plesk uses the search engine friendly HTTP 301 code for such a redirection. This allows preserving search engine rankings of your site (preferred domain). If you turn off the redirection by choosing None, search engines will treat both URL versions (www and non-www) as URLs of different sites. As a result, rankings will be split between these URLs.

Forwarding

You can point one or more registered domain names to the same physical website, by using the domain name forwarding. This allows automatic redirection of visitors from the URL they specify in a browser to a site with a different URL. For example, visitors of the site www.example.com can be redirected to www.somedomain.tld. There are two types of forwarding in Plesk: the standard and frame forwarding.

Standard Forwarding

With the Standard forwarding, users who have been redirected to another URL can see the destination URL in the browser address bar.

Depending on how long you intend to use the redirection, you can select the type of redirection – Moved permanently (code 301) or Moved temporarily (code 302). These are HTTP response codes which Plesk sends to browsers to perform the redirection. From visitors’ point of view, the response code does not matter: in both cases they will be simply redirected to the destination URL. For search engines, the code defines how they should treat the redirected site and affects search engine rankings.

• Moved permanently (code 301).

  Use this redirection type if you want to keep search engine rankings of your site after moving it permanently to another address.
  For example, if example1.com has been moved permanently to the domain example2.com, the rankings will not be split between example1.com and example2.com – search engine crawlers will treat them as a single website.

• Moved temporarily (code 302).

  Use this redirection type when the destination domain is used temporarily, for example, when you are testing a new version of your site with real visitors while keeping the old version intact. If you set this redirection for a newly created destination domain, this domain will not be indexed by search engines.

Frame Forwarding

With the Frame forwarding, when visitors are redirected to another site, the address bar of their browsers continues to show the source URL. Thus, visitors remain unaware of the redirection. This is called frame forwarding as the index page of the source site contains a frame with the destination site.

You can switch off web service and use only email services under that domain (Websites & Domains > domain name > Hosting Settings > the Change link near Hosting Type > the No web hosting option).

Website Status

The website status defines whether a website is available over the Internet and what hosting services are provided for it. The hosting provider may need to change the status of a site if the client does not pay for the services. Site owners can change the status of their sites if they want the sites to be temporarily unavailable.

Plesk supports three website statuses: Suspended, Disabled, and Active.

Suspended Sites

If you want to shut down a site for maintenance and let your visitors know that it is temporarily unavailable, you can suspend the website so that it will not open in browsers (Websites & Domains > domain name > the Suspend link). Visitors will be redirected with the search engine friendly 503 HTTP code (Service Unavailable) to the "503 Service Unavailable" error page. The site's search engine rankings will not be affected, and the hosting services such as mail will still be available and manageable by means of Plesk.

You can customize the error page using the link Edit error page in Customer Panel > Websites & Domains > domain name.

Note: The link Edit error page is displayed only if your hosting plan provides the option to customize web server error documents (the Custom error documents is On in the domain settings in Websites & Domains > domain name > Hosting Settings).

Disabled Sites

If you stop maintaining a website, you can disable it using Websites & Domains > domain name > the Disable link. Visitors will see the web server's default page set by the hosting provider, and the site's search engine rankings will drop.

Disabled websites stop being hosted on the server: They are excluded from the web server configuration. However, the physical directories and files of disabled sites can be accessed by FTP clients and File Manager. The hosting services such as mail will be unavailable.

Note: In Plesk versions earlier than 11.5, this status was called Suspended.

Active sites

To bring the website back online, use Websites & Domains > domain name > the Activate link. The website will start working as usual.