Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

17 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Yuck by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Yuck by baadger · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Sure, to us web geeks the functionality demo'd in the screencast just shows how the control panel generates a simple htaccess / web server configuration to keep your code out of your actual public html directory (uses mod_rewrite?) but this is still quite a useful feature to incoporate into a control panel.

      Not everyone wants to deal with .htaccess files or web server config, otherwise they wouldn't be using frameworks like rails or django or control panels like WebFaction to start with. I think the point being made is that organisation of various framework powered websites on a single domain or server has always been a bit of a pain, needing hand crafted attention.

      Oh and since the summary seems to be pretty heavy with the commercial linkage, here's my vote for DirectAdmin which has much more reasonable licensing than CPanel.

  2. Hmmm by giginger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Re:buzzword bingo by k-sound · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    Uhu and real admins don't have a collection of shell scripts to perform redundant tasks over and over again. In fact I've heard that real geeks no longer use keyboards, they send the electrical pulses to the PS/2 port directly using a battery and some wires.

  4. 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.

  5. 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

    1. Re:Astroturf? by Chainsaw76 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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

    2. Re:Astroturf? by Elliot+Anderson · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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...

  6. 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).

  7. 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.

  8. 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.
  9. NExT STeP by Vo0k · · Score: 5, Funny

    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"
  10. What? by timecop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I want 5 minutes of my life back that I spent watching their "screencast".
    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 .html in nano, is that what they expect all users to do?
    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.

  11. I'm confused... by samj · · Score: 4, Funny

    This ad appeared in the article section, what's with that?

  12. Re:buzzword bingo by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, no-one seemed to notice that the panel is not a product available to the public at all. You have to sign up for their services and then you get to use it. Why is this different from, say 1&1 who also have their own custom-developed control panel?

    The product placement of /. does seem to be so prevalent now that it cannot be just accident. What next - a slashdot story about a new herbal drug that will make you sir last longer and have none shame in bed?

  13. 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!