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Next Step in ISP Control Panels?
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."
Dunno about the article, but, that summary, toss in a few more buzzwords and it'll bamboozle any manager into buying the product. Techies on the other hand, if you need a control panel to manage the server, probably shouldn't be managing it anyways, should really get somebody that knows how to run the machine for you.
Let me try to figure out what that summary is saying. Here we go:
Some companies provide user friendly interfaces for running web servers.
WebFaction devloped a "better" user interface (because it uses AJAX?), that can do a bit more
So what? It doesn't sound revolutionary or innovative in the least. Was this supposed to be in the vendors section, because it certainly sounds like it?
Philosophy.
Surely it's WHAT the control panel does and not HOW it does it? Maybe it's just me who loves features but would happily have it in a plain interface as long as it worked...
BIYC Records
I concur. This is a pretty pointless feeling article to me.
... yeah, cpanel isn't much fun, neither is plesk or ensim. But that software is at least interesting.
... well, the same standard-fare software. The only remotely interesting thing here is that he went through the trouble of encoding the video in ogg+theora.
... isn't an answer to that. It's not a "here's our cpanel-competitor, and it's totally F/OSS and integrates with 4 major distro-families" ... it's "here's our cpanel-competitor, this and more is available if you switch to our super-nifty hosting service".
I mean
This would be the equivalent of Dreamhost posting a story demoing their "one-click installs" of
Don't get me wrong, there's a LOT of room for improvement in the server control panel realm. But this story
Sad part is, it's not even a control panel company, it's a hosting company, who's dedicated servers START at $350/mo. (Celeron 2.0ghz, 120gb drive, 1gb drive, and 1300 gb of data transfer, That'll run ya about $65/mo from other providers so $285/mo markup), and sure they offer shared hosting at $7.50/mo.. but who doesn't?
-Jason
I don't know what your link to WebFaction is, but it really doesn't help your credibity when you praise a company thats astroturfing while having it as your profile url...
Well, no.
Plesk is a real bitch when it comes to rebuilding certain things, such as.. MySQL, PHP and Apache. I worked for a hosting provider for years, and always recommended cPanel over Plesk, since the end user could easily add new PHP modules, rebuild Apache or MySQL when a new version was released (All done through the WHM login).
Plesk, you CAN rebuild them, but you have to find where they put various files (of which there are 3 copies, for different things), and install using the same path as Plesk's original install (and sometimes it's not that intuitive).
Ensim, as well, is a pain to update. If Ensim themselves did not release an update, it most likely wont be updatable by you, as they use proprietary modules for Apache (at the time I last used it)
Control Panels are for people who dont want to hire a full time Admin, and just want a simple way to resell shared hosting. Or, they're also for actual experienced Admins who want to simplify everything. Why spend 20min to set up a new domain in apache, then exim/qmail/sendmail, setup the jailshell, set their quota, their allowed bandwidth, etc, when you cn do it in 3 minutes or less with a control panel? Unless you're paid by the hour, being efficient is better than being inefficient.
OMG... I have a sig?
I don't work for these guys so these opinions are merely my own.
You guys just read the summary and everytime is says AJAX you automatically start bashing the company using it. AJAX is a tool for allowing a smoother, more interactive, and more responsive interface on the web. AJAX simply makes it a little better than hitting a button and waiting to see if the screen will refresh. If you guys write software and you don't agree that user interfaces should be responsive and informative then I pity your your users. Who the hell labeled AJAX as a buzzword, it's an acronym. I don't want to say 'asynchronous javascript and xml' everytime I want to describe my usage of a set of a few technologies working in tandem, just like you don't want to when you describe the large set of technologies you use in your everyday job. Without acronyms our writing and speech would become long winded, muddled, and confusing. So please stop the hatred of acronyms, they never hated you for anything.
Secondly, real administrators do use control panels and/or scripts to do things you need to do. As a real administrator your tasks everyday simple encompass too many areas of responsibility to spend 10 hours a day setting up features for hosting accounts. A control panel can speed this up as it provides a centralized interface to access a lot of common functionality. The argument against this is similar to an argument for just using flat files that accounting will go look through for information instead of using a database and some application that accesses it, that would be lunacy.
Thirdly, I'll gladly take an interface that isn't slow, obnoxiously ugly and difficult to use. Webmin, CPanel, Ensim, they are all deep, complex, and ugly. Webmin is the worst. The benefit of the webfaction control panel is not that it can do what other control panels can't already do, I mean if that were ever the argument for any progress we'd still be using C for all our applications since it does everything in a very portable way. The benefit is that it provides a simple easy to use interface for setting up and configuring web applications, source control repositories, as well as hosting features like email, databases, and user accounts. It does this is a straightforward way that doesn't confuse the issue. This increases the speed with which you are able to add and modify these features.
The other thing it does is treat all of those other applications and frameworks as if they were like PHP. Meaning that if more hosting companies had a similar panel that some of these applications and frameworks would become ubiquitous like PHP is. This company is just trying to make money while pushing forward the adoption of good new open source technologies, which is more than almost any of you could say about yourselves. On slashdot of all places how could this be seen as a bad thing?
Slashdot really has turned into something else altogether.
That being said, you shouldn't post about your own company on slashdot.