Control Panels for Web Hosting?

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."

Comments

cPanel.

[keeleysam]

Its expensive but the best http://cpanel.net

Re:cPanel.

[ezeri]

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.

Ensim and HSphere

[Malevolyn]

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.

there is a few

[i88i]

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

[Korgan]

CPanel seems to be one of the most popular, but my personal preference at the moment is for Plesk. 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

[gregmac]

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..").

DirectAdmin

[mind21_98]

DirectAdmin 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.

WebHostingTalk.com

[SSilver2k2]

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.

Re:cpanel

[SSilver2k2]

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.

Virtualmin

[SwellJoe]

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

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 use...

[Phil John]

...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.

Re:Bad CPanel Design Choice

[Jucius Maximus]

"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 access to ports 443, 80, 23, and 21. (Respectively, these are https, http, ssh and ftp.) Good luck trying to adminster your personal site when on break at work.