On 15/08/13 07:57, Mark Rogers wrote:
On 14 August 2013 16:53, MJ Ray mjr@phonecoop.coop wrote:
Similar arguments against cPanel and other proprietary control panels,
In terms of "pile it high, sell it cheap" hosting offers, which to be honest are probably appropriate for this user with only basic per-site requirements and little systems knowledge, I've only found two options: proprietary panels like cPanel and Plesk, and bespoke panels that any of the larger hosting organisations will have designed themselves. In terms of interoperability cPanel and Plesk are better than the alternatives.
Yeah, and why do they use them? One reason is the sell it cheap merchants rely on customers staying long enough that they recoup the hosting creation costs, and one way to make people stay longer is to make it more difficult to leave. Another is that things like buying cPanel and Plesk is cheaper than buying a decent control panel and are standardish - they're common but don't give customers most of the interoperability and portability benefits of real standards.
There are a few FOSS panels like DTC (which we use for a few years but Thomas Goirand's gplhost.com are its main developers), ISPconfig and some others whose names I'd have to look up. I've not found a perfect one yet and they each have their own quirks, but the main challenge stopping Plesk users is that they're different quirks to Plesk's. Most of them make it easier to extract a domain in something like standard formats: DTC prints out zone files and has Maildirs, htdocs and logs folders you can download.
I don't know VirtualMin but it wouldn't be hard to be as good as Plesk - Plesk's really not that good, especially if you do anything its makers doesn't consider commonplace, like change configurations in certain ways or install extra software that Plesk can't "manage".
I'm not pushing the co-op at your friend because I don't know that PHP package, I'm very wary of hosting other people's PHP these days and it seems like price is a big enough issue that he probably won't afford us - let me know off-list if that's wrong and I'll send over a quote ;-)
We started out offering and supporting hosting, but it isn't as big a part of our business any more - we still do it mainly for WordPress and our own CMS, ecommerce and libraries software because anyone cheaper is far worse, although we take some paying outside customers too - so I might be a bit behind the news on control panels.
If anyone in ALUG has noticed the launch of a brilliant standards-based control panel, please tell the list ;-)
Regards,