Fifty New Features for Plesk

In a massive upgrade, the software engineers from SWsoft have piled on the goodies. Now they're looking for beta testers like you.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 28, 2004]

It appears that The Matrix sequel remains popular, at least with marketers. The people at Herndon, Va.-based SWsoft could have called their new release "Plesk 8" but opted instead for "Plesk 7 Reloaded."

Kurt Daniel, the company's director of marketing, says that the real explanation is that the company is adding so many new features that it doesn't want to be constantly changing version numbers. "It has so many new features that we could have called it Plesk 8, but we do not want new names every six months," he explains.

The fifty features are basically industry best practices—plus a few things you don't expect in a webhosting control panel. Overall, the package is designed to play nicer with others, using XML and SOAP. It also incorporates domain name systems and human languages from around the world.

The company itself is global. It was founded with offices in the U.S. and Russia, and nabbed some key customers in Singapore early on, where it now has an office. It is currently headquartered in the U.S., with regional offices in Japan and Germany.

SWsoft engineers are also using standard practices to lower the cost of ownership with such improvements as a better GUI interface and an auto update feature, while leaving text-only shell access available.

For security, the product now comes with anti-virus from Dr. Web, another Russian company. We've never heard of them, but Daniel is enthusiastic.

"They've been around for over ten years. They have very aggressive support, and they update as often as several times each day. Also, they're an easy download and have broad platform support. They're good software but not super expensive." ISPs certainly prefer basic anti-virus that works to bloatware.

Other interesting new features include (we're certainly not going to list all fifty here):

• An optional (i.e., not free) website editor developed by SWsoft
• Security "jail" enabling admins to restrict users to a single directory in a Chrooted shell account
• Integrated Java SSH Client
• Easier reconfiguration—you can now turn spam filtering or anti-virus on or off for all domains with one operation.
• Website preview feature
• Backup to and restore from an FTP server directly
• Support for the Safari browser popular with Macintosh computer users

For the future, SWsoft is working on adding more service provider-oriented features including game server support but also much, much more.

This beta test will be over soon—the commercial version of the software is due out in July—so if you're interested in being a beta tester, sign up now.

Pricing and availability
It's a beta test—so it's free! And it's available now direct from the company.

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