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Control Panels for Web Hosting? 61

Posted by Cliff from the easing-website-administrivia dept.
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."
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Control Panels for Web Hosting? More

Control Panels for Web Hosting?

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  • Fedora Core Test 3? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:18AM (#10707355)
    You're running a pre-release distribution on production servers? Remind me to NOT be your client.
    • I agree 100% with this comment.

      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)

      by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @02:09AM (#10707953) Homepage
      If you must have Red Hat (and there are good reasons why this is a good choice for you), RHEL3 or as a min, RH9, would be the way to go. Fedora Core 3? Are you INSAIN?
    • I have to say that so far Fedora has proved quite stable in my testing. I have not yet deployed this server so I am up for changing distributions if I see any stability issues. By the time I am ready to install this server Core 3 should be out of Beta and final. I am looking at RH. I ruled out Debian (although I am a long time debian user) as it is too long of a release cycle and there are too many upgrades that I have found clients want in between. --Josh

  • cPanel. (Score:5, Informative)

    by keeleysam ( 792221 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:19AM (#10707362) Homepage Journal
    Its expensive but the best http://cpanel.net

    • Re:cPanel. (Score:4, Informative)

      by ezeri ( 513659 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:31AM (#10707426)
      I concure. Though if you account for all the time it saves I think it the cost is well worth it. You can get it for as low as $40-50 per server. Most of the time savings come with alowing your customers to manage just about any aspect of there hosting without having to bother you about them. This is especialy true if you get Fantastico, a one time payment of around $100, and adds alot of extra little things like forum templates, etc. Another great thing about cPanel is WHM. Especialy if you are like me and web hosting is not your core business, it realy takes care of most system administration work for you, and does it well. The one gripe I have is the documentation, it could use some better documentation, since they do things there own way in some cases, but eventualy I have managed to get through all my problems without too much trouble.
      • and it's the least of a bitch to install (even though ALL admin things are a bitch to install)
      • You can get it for as low as $40-50 per server.

        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
    • I use this as a "user" for a site and like it. Makes things easy. My major complaint is that some security things like anon-ftp seem on by default.
    • Yes, the hosting I pay for uses cPanel and I quite like it. My only wishes are that it was documented more thoroughly and the e-mail forwarder configuration was better designed (i.e. into something like directNIC.com uses.)

  • Ensim and HSphere (Score:4, Informative)

    by Malevolyn ( 776946 ) * <{signedlongint} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:21AM (#10707376) Homepage
    From a sysadmin point of view, Ensim is really good because it's so easy to deply. I've heard good things about HSphere as well.
    • Ensim is the worst piece of malformed crap I've ever had the displeasure of using. It's virtually impossible to upgrade anything on the server using normal packages, and their version of Apache has some of their own crap inserted into it that leaks memory like a sieve, eventually leading to a complete halt. It comes with a cron script to restart Apache once a day! On top of that, the user interface is not very intuitive and things like webmail and user authentication are easily broken. Then they want you to

  • there is a few (Score:5, Informative)

    by i88i ( 720935 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:26AM (#10707396)
    cpanel, ensim, h-sphere, virtualmin (free plugin for webmin) and there is probably more as well. Google should turn up a few.

  • Check Out Plesk (Score:4, Informative)

    by Korgan ( 101803 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:31AM (#10707427) Homepage

    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)

      by gregmac ( 629064 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @04:14AM (#10708493) Homepage
      I'm mixed. I've been involved with servers (as an admin) running Plesk for a few years now. To sum it up, I hate it.

      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..").
      • I could not agree more with this post. I help admin about 60 servers, and a large number of them run Plesk. I have ONE windows server that has Plesk on it.

        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)

        by gtrubetskoy ( 734033 ) *

        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.

      • I concur. I've provided support for cPanel, plesk, and many other control panels, and plesk is the most solid. It also depends on the features you need.

        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)

    by cuteseal ( 794590 )
    I've used cpanel and plesk... I tend to like cpanel, probably because I'm more familiar with it. Especially if it comes with fantastico too!

  • DirectAdmin (Score:5, Informative)

    by mind21_98 ( 18647 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:45AM (#10707485) Homepage Journal
    DirectAdmin [directadmin.com] is the best out of the others I've used (cPanel, Ensim Webppliance, and Plesk). It's just cleaner overall. Of course, no control panel is much better than having one, IMHO.
    • I've had a couple of unmanaged dedicated box custoemrs install this for their users. They have been really quite pleased with it in terms of reliability. Support has been decent, and there seems to be a large enough community of users to the forums and faq's a good source of information.

      My customers have also been pleased with the price.
      -MS2k
    • Ones that haven't been mentioned would be
      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)
    • Search the WebHostingTalk forums for Cpanel vs. DirectAdmin. DirectAdmin is more secure and stable according to most admins. The market leader is Cpanel, but DirectAdmin is starting to make some ground. Trust me, don't waste your time with opensource control panels, as none of them are up to par. Also, don't even attempt to code your own unless you have a lot of time on your hands.

  • cpanel (Score:2, Insightful)

    by cdgod ( 132891 )
    cPanel is incredible. Automatic updates, very easy to use. All my clients are using it.

    Only negative is the price....

    www.cpanel.net

    • Re:cpanel (Score:2, Informative)

      by SSilver2k2 ( 820869 )
      CPanel's autoupdate should usually be turned off. cpanel takes over most of the server, and allowing it to update everything by itself has caused problems before. personally, i like having a control panel that doesnt take over the server, and instead, sits ontop of the distro.
      • This is a good example of differing aims. The autoupdate feature is a huge feature to larger operations. CPanel basically administers a farm of hosting appliances for you, thus saving a lot of local administration. If you want custom software, you need to think very carefully about what it is that your customer is buying and what it is taht you want to support.

  • The choice you make depends on your market (Score:5, Insightful)

    by madstork2000 ( 143169 ) * on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @12:51AM (#10707513) Homepage
    I worked at a small hosting company for three years before taking it over almost 2 years ago. In that time, I have developed my own panel for my customers, at the same time evaluated many other panels / managed options.

    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)

    by SSilver2k2 ( 820869 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @01:18AM (#10707675) Homepage
    webhostingtalk.com is a great resource for newbies and veterans alike with the webhosting world. Im not a webhost, but i do web development, and ive found thier community to be one of the best out thier. enjoy.

  • Avoid Plesk (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dasunt ( 249686 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @01:30AM (#10707760)

    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)

      by Phil John ( 576633 ) <philNO@SPAMwebstarsltd.com> on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @04:03AM (#10708450)

      ...Plesk, Ensim and our own in-house system. We're going to phase out ensim because

      • It's a real bitch to upgrade packages on the server from the distro supplier - most packages will break ensim
      • You have to wait for their updates (for instance we had to manually fix sendmail until they deigned to release a patch weeks later to fix a remote execution flaw)
      • It costs too much for what you really get, since hosting is becoming increasingly commoditised getting margins down is important.
      • It's nowhere near the most user-friendly of the available offerings

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @01:30AM (#10707764)

    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...

    • 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

      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.
      • "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"

        "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

  • GoDaddy.com (Score:1, Interesting)

    by BandwidthHog ( 257320 )
    Speaking solely as a customer, GoDaddy's admin system is awesome.

  • Don't worry! It's no problem! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @02:16AM (#10707991) Homepage
    I wouldn't worry too much about it. You are running a server running Fedora Core 3??? Same server as your DB and mail server? Your customers will not be able to get to the control panel.

  • Eleet? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Look at this guy's domain name...
    http://eleet-tech.com/
    Sounds like a reliable name!

  • Virtualmin (Score:5, Informative)

    by SwellJoe ( 100612 ) on Wednesday November 03, 2004 @03:36AM (#10708357) Homepage
    Someone else mentioned it in passing, but since I had a hand in making it happen and I think it's very nice, I'll mention Virtualmin.

    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.

  • We [slashdot.org] weren't able to find a suitable control panel so we've created our own.

  • ZPanel is good [thezpanel.com]...it runs on Linux now, but they're phasing out Linux support :S.
  • cPanel is by far the most popular, but my favorite is Plesk [sw-soft.com] (available for both Windows and Linux). I think it provides the most pleasant experience for the end user. It's not cheap, though. If you're looking for cheaper, you might consider DirectAdmin [directadmin.com]. Cheers.
  • There's also something called VHCS (http://www.vhcs.net/ [vhcs.net]) I haven't yet actually gotten it installed, but it looks pretty nice and is free as in beer.
  • I'm a FutureQuest customer and like their CNC interface. I don't know if they wrote it or its a relabeled product but it seems pretty complete: ftp, mail, server info, statistics, and a lot of documentation. Its my third webhost and they haven't pissed me off yet.
  • I know this is a bit late but hopefully the poster will read this.

    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
  • I'm not sure how good it is, or how it compares to anything else, but you could check it out
  • I like the CPanelX interface; I'm not a programmer but rather an artist and I like the simple to use tools available to me.

    BR

  • Ok, a friend of mine uses this thing for his and it is incredible. I love it, every hosting company I have ever been with has used it (I've been with a good 5 hosting companies in the past 3 years) and ive always enjoyed cpanel.

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