To Plesk or not to Plesk

We are currently hosted on a resold Alabanza platform and have reached a point where we need a dedicated server. We have an in-house person with intermediate UNIX admin experience (has adminstrated a FreeBSD/Apache system for about 6 months). We have selected a hosting provider (he wants FreeBSD instead of Linux) and we have the option to use the Plesk Web-based administrator. We are planning on hosting a couple dozen different web sites, 2 of them fairly complex, dynamic scripted sites using lots of Perl and mySQL, the remaining 22 sites are simple static sites with just a couple pages and are all very similar.

My Intermediate UNIX administrator's expertise is growing quickly and he is pretty meticulous now about setting up security, blocking ports, etc. However, this is not this person's primary job. We want the lowest maintenance solution with the most flexibility. The Alabanza control panel has served us well to this point.

I am wondering whether or not using Plesk will limit too much the ability for this UNIX Admin to "do his thing" or whether it will help him, and help us use him less since we can use it ourselves too. Can the Admin tweak the configuration of the server outside of Plesk when he/she wants without messing up Plesk? I saw a note on the Plesk FAQ that says creating directories and changing permissions via FTP instead of Plesk can screw things up. I also saw another comment on this site that "Plesk has problems with CGI" -- whatever that means.

Our sites rely heavily on Perl and mySQL. Will we my UNIX Admin-by night hate me for ordering the server with Plesk installed?

 

 

 

 

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