Plesk 9.5 and domain is expired

Currently doing some Plesk administration and migration of a couple of servers and run into “domain is expired” errors.

To be frank here, I’m very surprised at how many hosting companies have Plesk deployed, even thought the system has one of the worst user interfaces and to use it is like “searching” instead of “Oh, here it is”. Finding what you need within the Plesk administration is a frustrating task, to say the least.

So, today I was hit with a message of “… domain has expired”. While surprisingly it is easy to “unsuspend” a domain, it is quite the opposite if you are being hit by another message of “The domain is still suspended for the following reason: Domain is expired“.

Now, what? The domain is still expired even thought I just “unsuspended” it? There is no message indicating what you have to do next or what is still causing the domain to be expired. (I already ranted on the usability part, right?)

To make a long story short, the reason why Plesk is reporting the “domain expired” message is that the domain has a expiration date set!

Now, to fix this you have to go into the Domain itself, then click on “Resource Usage” (that icon belongs to the “Statistic” group!!!). At the very button of the Resource Usage page you will find the expiration date setting.

By now, you will probably wonder what the Usability designers of Plesk have been thinking and really wish that someone over at Parallels will get their act together. I wonder, who I can bill my time now, after searching countless of hours for such settings?