Unable to cURL website hosted in Plesk: connect to 203.0.113.2 port 443 failed: Connection refused

Symptoms

• Unable to cURL the example.com website hosted on Plesk from the server itself:

  CONFIG_TEXT: curl -vv https://example.com
  * Rebuilt URL to: https://example.com/
  * Trying 203.0.113.2...
  * TCP_NODELAY set
  * connect to 203.0.113.2 port 443 failed: Connection refused
  * Failed to connect to example.com port 443: Connection refused
  * Closing connection 0
  curl: (7) Failed to connect to example.com port 443: Connection refused

• cURL is accessing example.com successfully when running it from a different location.

• This domain is bound to an IP address  in /etc/hosts file:

  CONFIG_TEXT: 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
  203.0.113.2 example.com

• There is a different IP assigned to this domain in Domains > example.com > Web Hosting Access

Cause

This behavior is expected because nginx on Plesk is serving the hosted domains from the IP address set in Domains > example.com > Web Hosting Access instead of the one set in /etc/hosts file.

Resolution

1. Connect to the server via SSH.

2. Remove or comment out the line 203.0.113.2 example.com in /etc/hosts
   or use custom configuration templates to make nginx listen on all IP addresses.

Note: custom configuration templates will affect all the websites on the server.