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."

DirectAdmin + SSH

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.

Astroturf?

[Elliot Anderson]

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

Where's the meat ?

[Spliffster]

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).

half of people who comment on this story

[jt2377]

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.

Gotta Love That Free Stuff

[Strepsil]

I thought I'd seen their web site design [oswd.org] somewhere before ... I was using that for a bit, too.

Re:buzzword bingo

[ComputerizedYoga]

i think this company might have a shot to dethron the current king of control panel.(cpanel)

They're not selling a control panel to other places. They're marketing it as a competitive advantage for themselves -- a reason to use their service.

I'd bet on one or more of the following:
(1) The backend to their panel is a hairy mess, and not of the quality that they would be willing to stake their reputation on it without having exclusive administrative control of it.
(2) The options and setups are hacked up in such a way that they are very specific to that host's configuration -- ie, it would be basically impossible to package and sell their panel to other providers.
(3) Possibly because of 1 and/or 2, they feel that it's going to be more profitable to keep their panel a proprietary selling point for their service, rather than selling their panel itself -- that is, the hosting market is more lucrative than the software development market.

Any one of those would be a compelling reason to pursue their current business model, selling access to their panel as part of their service, rather than entering the software sales business.

But within the role of service provider, they're extremely limited in scope. There's no way even a majority of people on other providers are going to migrate to their service. So no, they're not going to dethrone cpanel. They're not even playing in the same arena. They're just finding creative ways to save money -- paying python and ajax developers for an in-house solution rather than paying cpanel (and that's just fine -- more in-house apps means more jobs for developers, and more variety in applications).

Re:DirectAdmin + SSH

[andersa]

Let me throw some wood on.. :)

AlternC [alternc.org] is thoroughly integrated with Debian [debian.org]. 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.

Webmin has always been enough for me

[capedgirardeau]

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/ [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

Next Gen?

[nuonce]

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/ [bluequartz.org] took the project over and have been doing one hell of a good job with it! Over at http://www.nuonce.net/ [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!

ISPConfig

[Rich Klein]

I don't run an ISP, and I don't have experience with the control panels mentioned, but I am running ISPConfig [ispconfig.org] 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.