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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.
Having used a couple of very bad web hosting interfaces, here hoping this makes providers all jump up and add extra ajaxy goodness.
Though I agree these should'nt really need to do much more than allow you to set FTP/Mysql passwords and set home directories for your domains.
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
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 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!
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
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).
"Thanks to a shipping error, I am now currently overstocked on wacky, waving, inflatable-arm-flailing tube men and I am passing the savings on to you!" But seriously, besides the flashy images, AJAX, and there seems to be quantifiably less significant and useful features than any other control panel I know of. The way Ruby on Rails and these other applications are setup, installation is meant to be simple and easily done by anyone. Just save yourself some expense by downloading gem and typing "gem install rails --include-dependencies" then "rails ." Yes, if the Buzzware can do it... so can you!
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.
I thought I'd seen their web site design somewhere before ... I was using that for a bit, too.
Wasting your time since 1997.
NExT STeP in Control Panels for ISP? I know it has a nice GUI, but I think bit antiquated for controlling ISP software.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I want 5 minutes of my life back that I spent watching their "screencast". .html in nano, is that what they expect all users to do?
So what does this "control panel" do? Auto-installs blogging software for you?
Wow, what a progress.
What about user management, account management, etc etc?
The dude showed him editing some
This isnt even a "control panel" in any sense of it, its just some GUI installer for blogtrash.
ISP control panel does a million more things.
Yawn.
This ad appeared in the article section, what's with that?
I think the write of TFA has ISPs and web hosts confused. ISPs serve up the internet, web hosts serve web sites.
I didn't understand a single sentence of the write-up. But I'm sure it must be me. I'm not young enough or something. Or maybe I'm out of touch. I'm sure everyone else has a natural understanding of what a 'hosting provider control panel' is. And what it means when the application is 'decoupled from the domain'. They got it in school. Yeah. That must be it. I must get out of the woods. Fly from my mother's basement. See the blue sky. Shake people's hands. Tell them I love them. In tears. Any day now. Any way now. I shall decouple my applications from the domain, and use my hosting provider control panel to get my satfisfaction. But the voices in my head keep telling me to shut up. Stay put. Keep those applications coupled to the domain. Eschew Ajax-based control-panels. Edit in nano. Nasty, nasty little me. Shh.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Companies/individuals making money by freely advertising on /., instead of paying ads fees ?
Webmin is open and extensible, if you really need a control panel of some sort, I can't see why you would use anything else.
http://www.webmin.com/
It already controls many many more things than any of these so called control panels.
The 3rd party modules are pleantiful as well.
Regards
Wax on, wax off baby!
I'd say it's more of a Fantastico replacement than a cPanel or Plesk replacement.
While you are right that a good admin needs to know how to do things manually, having a GUI often speeds things up and saves you time.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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!
Sure, AJAX is the current buzzword, but nothing they've mentioned is "revolutionary". We use Ensim and it works great for us - we can do/install anything we want, no problem. No it doesn't have Ruby on Rails as a single-click install, but who asks for that anyway? None of our clients. If we want Rails, we can install it, it is easy. What is the big deal? If they want to be "revolutionary", let them open source their control panel. That might get some attention, and then people can actually see if there is anything there worth seeing (I doubt it)...
I wonder how many signups they got for getting plugged on Slashdot.
1. Make nice looking control panel with some ajax and webby 2.0 stuff
2. Post article with said buzzwords to slashdot
3. ??
4. Profit
This site use to provide useful information and stuff that matters. Not balant ads masked as articles.
Notice the that when you click on rdelon's name, you also go to WebFaction, wonder how impartial can he be?
Guys, this is not nice. Act like serious people.
I don't run an ISP, and I don't have experience with the control panels mentioned, but I am running ISPConfig and I think it belongs on this list of control panels. It's hard for me to offer intelligent comments about it when I have nothing to compare it to, and I still struggle with Linux sometimes. The documentation can't keep up with updates in the various software it uses, but in the end, it works, and it looks pretty slick to my eyes. The authors are, so far, very responsive to emails, too.
-Rich
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?
Well, so you are recomending your own software ? Bleh.
I'll not even waste my time visiting the site until I see some good review about it on WebHostingTalk.
morcego
I cast my vote for HSPhere.
It has a very affordable licensing plan and it does what my company had tried to develop, but never had the time to do: deploy domain services over multiple servers.
We can define which servers are web (CFMX), web (PHP), e-mail, db, etc., then define hosting packages. When we sign someone up, HSphere configures accounts and access on the differenct servers under a single control panel URL. It's all java, so you can write custom modules as needed.
Customers can configure FTP, e-mail and db, as well as deploy various open source packages from a very simple interface.
It's made us and our customers very happy.
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.
This is a commercial, not a serious article.
Show an application doing all that Ensim or Plesk do in a better way and we will believe it.
Omar
Someone I know told me that her husband, who interviewed with the cpanel guys, was given top secret insider information that they were developing cpanel for windows. She added that I should keep quiet about this 'privileged' information.
My reply was silence. Partly because interviewees don't get insider information. The other part came from looking at their website and noticing that they publically announced windows cpanel development. The last reason why I was silent was --- CPANEL FOR WINDOWS? YOU NEED CPANEL FOR WINDOWS?
Seriously - why put cpanel behind a product you MUST pay a license for? Isn't the beauty of web control panels making free as in beer linux admin-friendly? I hope some fellow geeks side with me on my response.
Good point. So help out these poor marketers... what are the hip buzzwords of 2006 that WON'T draw ridicule?
Webfaction used to be called Python-Hosting.com, I speak from experience that they are good at python hosting, they also provide free SVN and TRAC hosting to open source projects (such as http://www.xinha.org/).
.htaccess files (or vhost containers), and an email configurator. Certainly not to be dismissed out of hand, because it's an interesting concept in the way it's implemented. But not a cPanel contender I'm afraid.
That said, this isn't really news, it's advertising. This control panel appears to be little more than a setup tool for various common applications utilising what's probably AddHandler/Action/mod_rewrite commands in
Props to the python-hosting guys on your technical prowess, but please don't try to slip adverts into slashies.
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Well, from the screencast i cannot tell how it is done. because i have a century experience with JavaScript i would say: the animated gif approach while sending post/get data is not crossbrowser save (go try it on the various IE Version from IE4-6 and the GRE pre FF 1.0). OTOH adding rows in a form (table) is pretty simple with dom-javascript because you can just clone the preceeding row and null the values in the input fields. so ... no xmlhttprequest involved with this, usually - it's simpler that way, takes of load from the server and the ui is more responsive.
So i guess it is rather the way i explained it, but we can only speculate.
-S