Storj DCS + Plesk: Decentralized Webserver Snapshots

Kevin Leffew
April 22, 2021

Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership and technology integration with Plesk, the leading WebOps hosting platform to run, automate and grow applications, websites, and hosting businesses. 

This partnership introduces Storj DCS (Decentralized Cloud Storage) to a huge market of new customers and developers. Today, Plesk runs on more than 384,000 servers, automating 11M+ websites and 15M+ mailboxes.

As a first use case, we’d like to showcase how you can backup your webservers to Storj DCS using the Amazon S3 Backup function in Plesk. With Storj DCS and Plesk, backups are a fraction of the cost of other backup and storage solutions. 

This solution pattern uses encryption by default to offer enhanced privacy, edge-based access management for superior security, and is compatible with the S3 protocol. Storj DCS offers industry-leading SLAs, providing multi-region redundancy at no extra cost. 

How to use Storj DCS with Plesk

Note: Whether you’re backing up your server or website inside Plesk using Storj DCS, the process is the same. We focus on how to back up your website into Storj in this article. If you prefer to backup your whole server to Storj DCS, just use the server level backup manager with the same principles.

  1. Create and login to your free account on Storj DCS
  1. Go to “Objects” and create your first S3 bucket: 


  1. On your Dashboard, create your access grants (if you did not create an access grant during the initial setup wizard): 


  1. While creating your credentials, select “Generate S3 Gateway Credentials” in the last step: 


  1. Now we’re ready to go and move to the Plesk side. Go to the Domain or Subscription and select “Backup Manager”: 


7) Select “Remote Storage Settings”: 


8) Select “Amazon S3 Backup”:


9) This one is important to get right: 

  • The service provider has to be “Custom (Minio, Openstack, etc.)”
  • The API Endpoint URL is the “End Point” from Storj
  • The Login (Key) is your “Access Key” generated by Storj
  • The Password (Secret) is your “Secret Key” generated by Storj
  • For the bucket, please use the bucket that you generated earlier in these steps
  • As Path, I usually set “/” unless you want to use a subfolder, then please define your subfolder of the bucket here. 


10) Then press “OK,” and we’re good to go for our first backup. Go back to the Backup Manager in Plesk and select “Back Up.” Make sure you select either to store in just the remote backup location or a combination of the local and the remote location. 


Once you click “OK,” we’re backing up into Storj! 

11) Now, every Backup is only as good as its restoration if things go wrong. So let’s try to restore the backup we just made into Storj. Click on the Backup you made: 




12) Select “All objects (entire system)” for the restore, but you are free to also use any other options, including selective restore. Then click on “Restore”: 


13) Congratulations! Your first backup from Storj has been successfully restored: 



Future outlook 

As we extend the partnership between Storj and WebPros—the creators of Plesk—you may also use the same functionality as above in cPanel. You can refer to this video to check out how to do this. 

In addition, we are also closely working with the Plesk team for an auto-installation of the Storage Node agent on a Plesk server so you can take advantage of the Storj DCS service for secure and economic backups and monetize extra storage space and bandwidth by joining our network of over 11,000 Storage Nodes. With this feature, you could also earn money with your Plesk or cPanel server. Storj pays Node Operators for their unused storage and bandwidth so that anyone can monetize their underutilized devices. But details on that follow soon—watch our blog for updates.

Want to try Storj yourself now? 

If you are ready to try Storj DCS for free, sign up today to take advantage of their offer of 150 GB of capacity and bandwidth across 3 projects (50 GB each)

You can also check out Plesk’s overview on their website.

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