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In Plesk, its quite simple to do it. Go to the DNS zone management (Read about the “missing” DNS zone management in Plesk 9) and configure it like the image on the right. You might have to delete the primary MX entry first, then add them all again from 10 to 30. Google recommends a higher setting, but I’ve found 10 to 30 works fine.

Next is an important part of this configuration – turning off emails so that your VPS knows you’re using an external email server. If you don’t, your users will face problems emailing each other within the same domain (or server if you have other domains that email this user). Its also important when you have a form mail installed or even any other script that sends emails from a web-based form so that it does try to deliver your email locally.

So, here’s a Plesk tip – go to Mail Accounts > Mail Settings and  uncheck the box next to “Activate mail service on domain”. This will tell Plesk to not use the local mail service.

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Configuring Plesk to Support an External Email Server (like Gmail)

Enter server monitoring. There’s many options out there that’ll inform you via Email, SMS or even Twitter when something stops working. If you’re starting out, here’s one that’s free – www.mon.itor.us.

As you can see on the right, you have the option of monitoring various ports and services and setting how often you want it to check your server – it can be as frequent as every 1 min (for the paranoid webmaster – Premium version only). It’ll check your website from 3 locations – Austria, Germany and the US to ensure its not just a temporary ISP network issue before it sends you an email.

The feature that I like is the weekly email report that will compare your site with another benchmark site. The report will contain your uptime, average and the number of times your server was inaccessible. These reports have really saved me a few times when clients have complained that their sites were down “according to their friends” and I was able to prove that its fine from 3 worldwide locations…

Another use for services like these is to check the uptime for a host. Ask them for a typical server you can monitor and set mon.itor.us to check it for a month. While you’re at it, check it against a few other potential hosts as comparison!

Post from: www.vpsguides.com - Guides, Tutorials, Tips and Articles on Everything VPS!

Free Server Monitoring – mon.itor.us