Running Plesk Behind NAT

Plesk Behind NAT

Many hosting providers use NAT in their network to limit number of public IP address as well as to improve security of the server. Network Address Translation (NAT) is the process where a network device, usually a firewall, assigns a public address to a computer (or group of computers) inside a private network. Today we will discuss how can we use Plesk behind NAT.

The most common form of network translation involves a large private network using addresses in a private range (10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255, 172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255, or 192.168.0 0 to 192.168.255.255).

There are benefits using NAT but you may face the issue with third party control panels while using NAT.

If your Plesk server is behind NAT, you can match your private IP addresses on the server to the corresponding public IP addresses via the Plesk interface. This way, instead of private IP addresses, the corresponding public IP addresses are displayed in the Plesk interface, making the existence of NAT transparent to customers and resellers. This will ensure that clients are seeing correct IP addresses in their Plesk control panel.

To match a public IP address to a private one, go to Tools & Settings > IP Addresses, click the IP address which you want to match to a public one, and type in the corresponding public IP address in the Public IP address field as shown in the following image:

Once you save your setting, it will now show public IP address in Plesk control panel.

After matching one or more public IP addresses to private ones, all A records in the DNS zones of all existing domains will be automatically re-mapped to the corresponding public IP addresses, and A records in the DNS zones of newly created domains will point to the corresponding (public) IP addresses after the domain creation.