If you've been blogging, running discussion forums, or managing a simple website, there's a good chance you started out using one of the free services. And that probably worked well enough for a while, but then you outgrew it; you were ready for your own web space, your own domain name, professional-looking e-mail, and no ads. So now, you're either looking into or have already moved into shared web hosting, where for a reasonable rate you can have your own space on a professional web server.

Once you start handling all aspects of your website, you learn one thing right away: it's not easy setting things up on a machine many miles away from your home or business! You've got image files to upload, e-mail addresses to configure and databases to manage, all on a machine you'll probably never see in person. Fortunately for you, the aspiring web journalist, entrepreneur, or community leader -- there's Plesk®. Plesk® is a control panel, which basically means it helps to handle day-to-day administration at all levels of a server. As a shared hosting customer, that means it will help you to performs tasks like:

 automating backups
 dividing your domain into sub-domains
 installing popular blogging and forums software
 creating new email accounts
 password protecting your non-public pages
 setting up databases

If you know how to point and click with your mouse then you're ready to use Plesk® to do all of that and more.

Plesk is a solution to many problems, but you can think of it as your all-in-one website solution. Totally web-based, it's a tool that will be there for you anywhere you have Internet access. From the comfort of your web browser, you'll be managing your Internet domain like a veritable server guru in no time!