While I was loitering in the requirements section of SWsoft’s Plesk website I noticed a curious thing:
Standard configuration of Debian 3.1 (coming out in the end of December)
Hey, check that out! I’m assuming that once Debian 3.1 is final Plesk is planning to launch support for the platform. Traditionally Plesk has only supported RPM-based distros (first Red Hat and now RHEL, Fedora, SUSE, and more). I also notice that they’re planning to roll out support for Mandrake and FreeBSD.
While it’s obviously running a bit behind, this move further underscores the move away from legacy Red Hat, expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and bloated/slow Fedora Core and towards other systems. I think it also adds to the viability of Debian as a replacement for traditional Red Hat systems. I’ve already seen anecdotal evidence of Debian being rolled out in traditionally Red Hat shops, but I’m always glad to see more evidence.
Now that I’ve babbled a bit, allow me to explain what Plesk is for those of you who don’t know. Plesk is a web-based control panel similar to Ensim, CPanel, and even (sorta) Webmin. It’s commercial glue on top of a LAMP architecture that allows colo customers and web hosting providers to sell and resell their services. I didn’t originally have a particular affinity towards Plesk but ended up deploying it on one of my servers. It requires a little bit of maintenence and updates of course but in general it’s a very good fire-and-forget platform manager.
I might just have to upgrade to Plesk 7.5 reloaded when I can redeploy it on a Debian box.