The IP pool is a set of available IP addresses that you can pass on to customers and resellers, or utilize them for your own websites. IP addresses may be designated as either dedicated, meaning that the target subscriber becomes the only owner of this address, or shared, meaning that this address is shared among many subscribers.
Next in this section we will describe the concepts of IP addresses and how they are allocated in Plesk for web hosting purposes.
An IP address is a number that uniquely identifies each device, such as a computer, on a network. The use of IP addresses makes it possible for computers to find other computers on a network and communicate with them.
There are two formats of IP addresses:
192.168.1.1
. They are currently used by most network devices. The number of IPv4 addresses is limited and the last remaining portions of vacant IP addresses have already been allocated to Internet service providers.2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334
. IPv6 is the new standard that was developed to address the exhaustion of IPv4 network addresses. When Plesk is deployed in IPv6-enabled networks, it can operate simultaneously on IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Providers can add IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to the server IP pool, allocate them to resellers, and create subscriptions based on them.
Each hosting subscription can be allocated:
Note: Each subscription that needs to host FTP shares accessible by Internet users without password authorization (Anonymous FTP) must be assigned at least one dedicated IPv4 address.
The following requirements must be met to ensure the proper operation of Plesk in IPv6-enabled networks:
To see the list of Linux operating systems that support this feature, refer to the release notes to Plesk.
It is possible to hide one or more IP addresses registered in Plesk from the Plesk interface. IPs that are hidden will not be displayed in Tools & Settings > IP Addresses, and will not be available for assignment when creating subscriptions.
To hide one or more IP addresses:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Parallels\Plesk\admin\conf\panel.ini
for editing (create the file if necessary) and add the following lines to it:[ip]
blacklist="<IP addresses to be hidden>"
Type in the IP address or addresses you want to hide as a comma-delimited list. You can list both IPv4 and IPv6 IP addresses to be hidden. For example:
[ip]
blacklist="192.168.1.10, 2002:5bcc:18fd:c:f482:d057:9ccf:993D"
Hiding an IP address already assigned to one or more subscriptions will result in the "The IP address is already used for hosting" error. The IP address will be marked as "blacklisted" in Tools & Settings > IP Addresses, but will be available in the Plesk interface.
The following is an overview of how IP addresses are allocated in Plesk:
After installation, Plesk reads all assigned IP addresses from the operating system configuration and adds them to the server IP pool. When you obtain new IP addresses that you would like to use on the server, you should add them through Plesk to that pool, as Plesk might not recognize manual modifications you make to the network configuration files.
Note: If you are running Plesk in a Virtuozzo container, you can add IP addresses only on the Virtuozzo hardware node.
When adding addresses to the server IP pool (in Tools & Settings > IP Addresses > Add IP Address), you select how they should be allocated - either as dedicated or shared:
Note: The Server Name Indication (SNI) makes it possible to enable SSL protection for sites on shared IP addresses; however, this might not work for all hosting servers and users' browsers. For more information, see the section SSL and Shared IP Addresses. On Windows platforms, it is also possible to protect a group of websites with one certificate. See the section SSL and Shared IP Addresses (Windows) for more details.
Plesk examines its IP pool during the web server start and removes IP addresses that do not exist in the system. This does not allow administrators to allocate non-existing IP addresses to services or subscriptions.
To view the IP addresses you have at your disposal:
Your IP addresses are listed and the following supplementary information is given:
You might need to do this if you manually added IP addresses to the network interface in the server operating system, or when operating in Virtuozzo containers.
To add a IP address to the server:
123.123.123.123/16
or 2002:7b7b:7b7b::1/64
.Note: To enable secure FTP connections, the FTP server installed on your Plesk server must support FTP over SSL. For example, Gene6, Serv-U FTP, IIS FTP 7.x servers support FTP over SSL.
To remove an IP address from the server:
To assign an IP address to a reseller:
To revoke an IP address from a reseller:
Since users can refer to a web resource on your server by typing an IP address and there can be several websites hosted on that address, Plesk needs to know which of the sites to show in such cases. Plesk automatically assigns the first website created on an IP address as the default website; however, you can select any other website and make it default.
To assign a default website (default domain) for an IP address:
To change an IP address allocation type (shared, dedicated) or assign another SSL certificate to an IP address: