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Next Step in ISP Control Panels?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the pride-in-your-widgets dept.

rdelon writes "Finally there is some movement in the hosting provider control panel department. cPanel and Ensim have been around for years but some people have grown increasingly frustrated with them. WebFaction has developed a new type of control panel. It offers an Ajax web interface that decouples the application from the domain: the root of a website might be served by Ruby on Rails while the /blog URL might be served by WordPress; reciprocally, multiple websites might be served from a single Django application, which reduces the resource usage on the server. A screencast demo of the control panel is available on their blog."

7 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. DirectAdmin + SSH by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use DirectAdmin as a control panel when I need something done quickly, but the simple fact of the matter is, if you want the job done right, you're going to have to log in witha secure shell. There are no real alternatives.

    --
    May the Maths Be with you!
    1. Re:DirectAdmin + SSH by andersa · · Score: 3, Informative

      Let me throw some wood on.. :)

      AlternC is thoroughly integrated with Debian. Which means it knows about how Debian does things and doesn't screw up your system, like virtualmin for instance.

      I have used it on a couple of sites now, and I am pretty happy with it. The only inconvinience with it is that the lead developers are French, and the English translation isn't exactly perfect, but it is only a minor one.

  2. Astroturf? by Elliot+Anderson · · Score: 5, Informative

    First we had Matt trying to pimp his eefoof.com site earlier, trying to pass it off as a "You Tube Killer", now we have some control panel company trying to do the same thing. The submitters URL goes straight to WebFaction. It wouldn't be quite so annoying if they wern't trying to pass themselves off as being an uninvolved third party and talking in the third person context all the time. Atleast they didn't call themselves a [cPanel|Ensim] Killer

  3. Where's the meat ? by Spliffster · · Score: 5, Informative

    altough it is only a screencast (no demo available AFAIK) I find the UI is pretty nice and cleaned up. We are using Plesk here which is kinda messy (UI wise). I did no really see the point in using AJAX from what was shown in the demo. the only use of ajax in the demo was displaying an animated image while submitting data (and adding some rows in forms, but this is just javascript).

    So, comparing (from what was shown) with cPanel or Plesk, i do not see that killer feature which would make ISP's switch (except maybe the price, but i couldn't find any).

  4. half of people who comment on this story by jt2377 · · Score: 3, Informative

    know nothing about webhosting, a control panel is not an application for admin. it's an application for users. you do not use cpanel/DirectAdmin/Plesk to manage your server. you do it the traditional way, SSH w/a admin who know his kung fu.

  5. Gotta Love That Free Stuff by Strepsil · · Score: 3, Informative

    I thought I'd seen their web site design somewhere before ... I was using that for a bit, too.

    --
    Wasting your time since 1997.
  6. Next Gen? by nuonce · · Score: 3, Informative

    How about a flash back instead? Remember the old Cobalt Network Ones? After Sun decided to EOL of them, they choose to release the code under the BSD License and open source it! The guys at http://bluequartz.org/ took the project over and have been doing one hell of a good job with it! Over at http://www.nuonce.net/ we took the BQ project 1 step futher and made an installer that will build you an entire Server in less then 15 minutes. Complete with free Control Panel! It may not be as good as Cpanel or Plesk. But it is great for people who want a free, simple solution!