On 14 August 2013 16:53, MJ Ray mjr@phonecoop.coop wrote:
[...] Plesk doesn't reliably import from its own exports in my experience (failure is correlated with the number of version/platform/moonphase differences), so it's a bit harsh expecting anything else to import it!
[snip: lots of useful stuff about Plesk]
Thanks for that; as I mentioned earlier I don't have any experience with Plesk. As you say, biting the bullet and migrating sites to something new would probably be the right thing to do.
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.
As I mentioned, I use VirtualMin (on WebMin) myself when I need something like that, which is at least open, but that's of relatively little use to someone who doesn't have the capability to install it when as far as I can see no major hosts support it. And I suspect (without knowing my way around Plesk/cPanel) that VirtualMin is less easy to use.
My friend is a designer, not a web host, and only hosts because he has to. He's spending more and more of his time managing the hosting due to issues with his current provider and he wants to dump as much of that onto someone better qualified to deal with it as possible. All he really needs is a way to set-up a site (allocate it disk space, configure Apache for the domain, configure email for the domain), with the rest being managed via FTP. And to be honest, if his way to set things up was to fire an email to someone who did it all for him with no web interfaces involved, just leaving him with an FTP account per site to upload to, then I think he'd be very happy (as long as whoever responded to those emails did so in a reasonable time frame, of-course).
If any of this is something that software.coop (or anyone else on the list) are interested in just shout! I'd really like to give him some choices of people I "know".
Mark