Slashdot Mirror
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."
You're running a pre-release distribution on production servers? Remind me to NOT be your client.
cPanel is incredible. Automatic updates, very easy to use. All my clients are using it.
Only negative is the price....
www.cpanel.net
This
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
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...
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?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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 buy an upgraded version of their product so you can install free software like phpBB and Gallery.
Cpanel is 100 times better IMHO, and provides a clean interface for both the admin and the user.