Plusnet Update:

Using Plesk we will be able to provide a range of new hosting products, in line with our desire to provide a high quality hosting platform that is fit for all purposes. This includes professional and business use. It will mean we can keep things up to date and maintenance will no longer be the chore it is today.

This should prevent the same issues occuring that we’ve seen with the CGI platform over the years. There are however some drawbacks, such as the lack of support for shell logins on the new system. We hope customers will be able to work round these and will find that the benefits of the new service (such as PHP5) outweigh the disadvantages.

New Products
At the time of writing, we are planning to launch four products for Plusnet customers on the PAYH platform. These are:

Residential Options:
* £0 per month - 250Mb Storage, 1.5Gb Data transfer per month, 1 MySQL DB, Standard Apps. Community Support Only

* £2.50 a month - 350Mb Storage, 2Gb Data transfer per month, 3 MySQL DB, Standard Apps + Premium Applications (when available). One month free trial to all customers choosing this option. Telephone / ticket support available on PAYH number.

Business Options:
* £0 per month - Community Support Only, 500Mb Storage, 3Gb Data transfer per month, 1 MySQL DB, Standard Apps

* £5 per month - Telephone support, 750Mb storage, 5Gb data transfer per month, additional features. Telephone / ticket support available on PAYH number. 3 MySQL DBs, Standard Apps + Premium Applications (when available). One month free trial to all customers choosing this option.

Platform Features and differences

There are a number of key differences between the CGI platform and the Plesk based service. An FAQ will be published which details these further, but some key items are:

* Support for Perl [5.8.8], Python [2.4.4], PHP [5.2] and ASP [perl based]
* Ability to pay for additional MySQL databases, storage space and data transfer.
* Supports SSI, Suexec, log files, HTAccess, Custom error documents and CGI-BIN amongst others.
* A new web based control panel and file upload tool is available.
* SSH / Telnet access to a shell on the new service will not be available.
* Support for MS Frontpage extensions is no longer available as the product used by providers to supply this is end of life and no longer available. Microsoft have replaced Frontpage with MS Expression.