The core Plesk services are the major services required to host websites and email. In here you will find services like PHP, NodeJS, Ruby, Dovecot, MYSQL and many more. You are able to add and remove these services as well as update them through the Plesk Update utility.

To get started, log in to your Plesk Control Panel. Next, go to the "Tools & Services" tab on the left-hand side. Under the "Plesk" section, click "Updates and Upgrades"

This button will open up a new tab, launching the Plesk Update utility. Once it's loaded, it should look like this:

Install or Upgrade Product is only used for major updates. Be aware that major updates will take your server and websites offline. We recommend doing these only when you can afford to have your websites offline for a little while. Major updates may take anywhere between 5 minutes to 1 hour to complete.

Add/remove components is where you can add and remove core plesk features. This is what the "add/remove components" page looks like:

You can choose to add or remove programs here. Notice how some of the options have a small plus sign beside them (Webmail Services, Mail hosting, Web hosting, and Plesk Extensions).

You can press this plus sign to get a more in depth view of the services that you can add or remove, here is what mail hosting looks like:

To apply any changes that you've made, press the "Continue" button at the bottom. This will bring you to a different page which outputs the results of the operations. Monitor this page for any error messages, typically these error messages are due to a configuration preventing the operation from happening. Here is what the output page looks like:

Once your operations are complete, you will see a success or failure message that looks like this:

At this point, it is now safe to close this tab as all of your operations are complete.

Update Components will allow you to conduct minor updates to your Core Plesk Services. Here is what this page may look like (yours may look different as it only shows services that can be updated):

On this page, simply select the services you would like to update and press the "Continue" button at the bottom. You will see an output page displaying the operations in progress, pay attention for any errors here.

These minor updates should not take your websites offline, although the services behind them like PHP or Apache may restart causing any operations in progress to be killed or stopped. Once the updates are done, you should see a success or failure page that looks like this:

At this point it is safe to close the tab as all of your update operations are done.

If at any point you run into issues with adding/removing/or updating your core Plesk services, please contact our 24/7 customer support team and we will help you get it done!