Control Panels for Web Hosting? 61
jstrzalko asks: "I recently started a web design and hosting company and am looking at all of the control panel solutions to offer my clients. I consider myself quite adept at Linux so server administration is not the issue. I just want to be able to allow my clients to easily add/remove email addresses and domains, give them stats, manage their databases etc. Has anyone had good experience with any of them? I am currently running Fedora Core3 (test3) on my server, if that helps anyone."
Fedora Core Test 3? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fedora Core Test 3? (Score:1)
Please use a stable and secure distro such as Slackware or even Debian (it may be old, but it is stable).
Quickly instal RHEL3, please! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Quickly instal RHEL3, please! (Score:3, Funny)
Or "insain".
Re:Fedora Core Test 3? (Score:1)
cPanel. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:cPanel. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:cPanel. (Score:1)
Re:cPanel. (Score:2)
Some places incorporate it in the price, or give it to you at much lower prices.
My VPS [dinix.com] came with WHM/cPanel installed at not cost. (They added Fantastico a bit later, too. Dinix rocks.) $20/month to add it to a dedicated box.
RackShack (now EV1Servers) does it for $10 or $20 more a month; managed.com does it for $10; ServerMatrix (owned by ThePlanet) charges $20. Come to think of it, I'm not sure where there is that still charges $40-50, though I'm with you
Re:cPanel. (Score:1)
Re:cPanel. (Score:2)
Ensim and HSphere (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ensim and HSphere (Score:3, Insightful)
there is a few (Score:5, Informative)
Check Out Plesk (Score:4, Informative)
CPanel seems to be one of the most popular, but my personal preference at the moment is for Plesk [sw-soft.com]. It'll run on most platforms, including (but not limited to) Windows, RHEL and RHFC, Solaris, FreeBSD, and there is Debian support due before the end of the year.
Its got a bit of a price tag on it, but for the features you get out of it, I definitely recommend it.
Re:Check Out Plesk (Score:5, Informative)
They used to be good at listening to requests and bug reports, now they don't. Their QA also seems to be lacking, or even non-existant - we've been trying to upgrade/migrate to a new server running Plesk 7 for a while now. We've actually spent several hours at it twice now, both times when plesk says "oh, we're sure it will all work properly now" and came up with a huge list of bugs both times (and ended up aborting the upgrade, I might add).
One suggestion they gave us at one point was to upgrade the existing server to plesk 7 first, then migrate. We didn't even consider that - besides not liking the idea of upgrading a production server, I didn't trust that their upgrade process even worked at all. Wasn't really willing to bet several people's domains on it, to say the least..
Anyway, one of the other things that really bugs me is the fact it's proprietary. I can't change the code. I can't add buttons to add features specific to our server. I can't fix their bandwidth reporting (ie, how it says some clients use 200k of mail traffic when really they're using 2GB). I can't make a custom DNS zone (that's not even in Plesk) without it getting randomly overwritten every 1 week or 3 months or somewhere in there, or even figure out why it does (did? hasn't happened in a while.. knock on wood) that.
Even if they did provide source, who am I fixing them for? I pay swsoft, then develop for free, and let them sell my changes?
One of the other things I'll point out is that Plesk was orginially linux and freebsd. As far as I can tell, Plesk for windows is a different codebase, with maybe a similar gui - on *nix, it uses Apache, on windows, IIS. I don't run windows servers on the internet to begin with, but I certainly wouldn't consider running Plesk on them, considering the QA experiences I've had with them.
Of course, these are just my opinions, and while I do come down hard on Plesk, I do really like their interface. Strictly as a webhosting client (that doesn't have to do anything out of the norm), it's a nice management interface. Also saves dealing with simple client requests ("can you add an email alias for me?" "oh sorry, that also needs to go to this person..").
Re:Check Out Plesk (Score:2)
WE HATE PLESK
WE LOVE CPANEL
Customers on the other hand seem to prefer Plesks pretty interface, but that is where the prettiness ends. Their QA is nonexistant. We hand to rebuild our windows server *from scratch* and migrate the users data *manually* because their scripts did not work. Heck THEY tried to do it and couldn't get it. We lost many clients o
Re:Check Out Plesk (Score:3, Interesting)
They used to be good
This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Plesk got bought by Sw-Soft and they outsourced all development _and_ support to Russia. Plesk always had a team in Russia, but had a good balance between folks in the US and Russia. Now as I understand it most anyone in the US has been laid off.
I personally think webmin is good, the only thing it lacks is a decent skin.
Re:Check Out Plesk (Score:1)
cPanel has a easy to use built in DNS Cluster feature, but it breaks so often and has so many bugs that you'll end up over working your support team getting it working right.
It also uses exim for mail, and everytime an automatic update is done it overwrites the config file. It does this for most services. Forget doing custom changes.
Plesk uses Qmail wh
CP (Score:1)
DirectAdmin (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DirectAdmin (Score:2)
My customers have also been pleased with the price.
-MS2k
Re:DirectAdmin (Score:2)
dtc (domain technology control) gpl
serverworx ( a new one I believe)
starflow (an european product, built on the hsphere model)
cpanel and hsphere seem to be easiest for newbie clients to pick up, so far. But directadmin has some very nice conceptual features that make me wish I had a copy to play with)
I second DirectAdmin (Score:1)
cpanel (Score:2, Insightful)
Only negative is the price....
www.cpanel.net
Re:cpanel (Score:2, Informative)
Re:cpanel (Score:1)
The choice you make depends on your market (Score:5, Insightful)
The choice you make should depend on the types of clients you market to (or intend to market to). Do you want a lot of "retail" customers that want to host one or two domains with lowend features? Do you want to host business / ecommerce sites? Will you allow your customers to resell the hosting?
Each customer has very different needs. Onesy/twosy customers need A LOT of hand holding and get quickly inundated if the panel is too powerful and has too many options, leading to a lot of support time. Businesses like easy to use features, at a fixed cost. My clients like A LOT of email options and flexibility. Business sites also like the buzzword features like easy to setup SSL, automated backup / restores, etc. Your resellers will want features that allow them to customize the look and feel of the panel so their customers see their logo not yours. They also like the ability to add / remove features.
Anyway, slashdot is probably not the best place for this type of discussion, there are MANY MANY websites that have forums explicitly geared at the hosting community. You'll be much better off to first identify who you want to sell to, then determine what your market needs, then find / write software that fits those needs.
A control panel is a lot more than setting up web sites and email accounts. I strongly suggest finding a couple of hosting sites and lurk on the boards a while. http://webhostingtalk.com is probably agood place to start.
Trust me it is a lot better to do the research and planning now, rather than later. Because once you have customers then you lock yourself in, because it is very difficult to change things on a customer base.
I don't believe slashdot should be used to plug my company/work (besides I have been too busy supporting users, so my own sites look like shit) so I won't get into the specifics of what the software I have written does, but if your interested I'll be happy to exchange emails and share more of my work. You should be able to track me down via my web site if you're interested.
-MS2k
WebHostingTalk.com (Score:4, Informative)
Avoid Plesk (Score:3, Interesting)
Plesk seemed to have several issues last time I dealt with it, including the following:
Very tempermental to updates under one of the supported OS's (Redhat), to the point where upgrading some packages would break it.
Win32 releases would be sooner then Linux/Unix releases.
Lack of clear, clean update tools to move from one version to another, or from one platform (Plesk 5 on unix) to another (Plesk 6 on windows).
Never took advantage of native package formats under Redhat, which made it possible to clobber plesk quite easily. Sure, plesk used a unique directory for its files, but if a native daemon grabbed a port first, it would prevent Plesk from working.
And my personal pet peeve is that it never added its man paths for its packages to the system.
Disclaimer: The above is my opinion of Plesk. YMMV, and the most recent versions of Plesk (6 & 7) may be quite nice now. I wouldn't know, since Plesk 5 led me to avoid using their system.
We use... (Score:5, Informative)
...Plesk, Ensim and our own in-house system. We're going to phase out ensim because
Counter to this, we also run Plesk 6 on and absolutely love it. I can upgrade Apache, PHP and MySQL RPM's without fear of breaking plesk (just have to remove the ssl reserved word in mysql 4+ and then compile the srpm).
It also looks a lot nicer than ensim and our clients seem to find the interface much easier.
Bad CPanel Design Choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's not use a standard POP daemon and instead use a Perl script of our own design.
It's hard to keep webmail working so we'll offer three clients and hopefully at any one time, at least one of the three will be working.
Let's run the webmail on port 2095, that should make it easy for people to access behind gateways
Let's write an HTTP daemon in Perl and use it to serve up the user portion of the control panel instead of using Apache
Having written that daemon, let's run it on port 2086, again ease of use for the customers
and many more...
Re:Bad CPanel Design Choice (Score:1)
Having written that daemon, let's run it on port 2086, again ease of use for the customers
Actually, as an end-user of CPanel, I've found this quite useful in that I can crawl in and check the statuses of my site, even when Apache bombs out.
Re:Bad CPanel Design Choice (Score:3, Informative)
"Actually, as an end-user of CPanel, I've found this quite useful in that I can crawl in and check the statuses of my site, even when Apache bombs out."
You misunderstand. This is not a good idea because it prevents remote administration for many users behind proxies that only allow outbound ac
Re:Bad CPanel Design Choice (Score:2)
Re:Bad CPanel Design Choice (Score:1)
GoDaddy.com (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't worry! It's no problem! (Score:3, Funny)
Eleet? (Score:1, Funny)
http://eleet-tech.com/
Sounds like a reliable name!
Virtualmin (Score:5, Informative)
Virtualmin.com [virtualmin.com]
It's free (as in beer and speech), integrates cleanly with Webmin and Usermin for system administration and user level access to email, spamassassin configuration, etc.
It doesn't do everything that all of the control panels do, but none of them can do everything that Webmin/Usermin/Virtualmin can do either, so it all comes out in the wash. It has the benefit of being easily modified without violating any licenses and is very polite to the underlying OS and services. Unlike pretty much all of the other products in this space (except for the Positive Software CP+ product that is based off of Virtualmin and Webmin) it does not screw up the configuration files, or require you to do all of the configuration of the services from within the GUI. You can switch between vi or emacs and Virtualmin without fear of losing comments or configuration file order.
It has a couple of long-term commercial sponsors, including my company (Swell Technology) and the previously mentioned Positive Software, so it gets consistent developer attention and fast bug fixes. And like Webmin on top of which it runs, it is easily themeable, provides online help features, and is internationalized with many translations.
It may not be perfect for every purpose today, but it gets better all the time and is already in use at a lot of ISPs and hosting providers, as well as ASPs. Worth a look, at least. You may find that with some customizations (which you can do, or you can hire Jamie or someone else to do) Virtualmin can provide a better fit for less money over the long term than any of the proprietary options.
And since it is free, it will cost you nothing but a few minutes or hours to give it a try.
Rolling our own (Score:2)
Re:Rolling our own (Score:2)
zpanel (Score:1)
Control Panels (Score:2)
vhcs (Score:1)
FutureQuest CNC (Score:2)
A bit late, but... (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I do not do webhosting. I am merely a client talking favorably about my host [nexpoint.net].
I do my mail administration using stuff from Inter7, specifically qmailadmin [inter7.com] and vpopmail [inter7.com]. It is terribly easy to use. My only complaints are that it does not let you forward outside of your own domain (I think), but that's not really needed so it doesn't really matter.
Both programs are Free As In Beer. They make some allusions to open-source on their
phpmyadmin (Score:1)
Control panels (Score:1)
BR
cPanel (Score:1)