Hi all,

I have been searching and reading about RackShack. And they seem pretty good. I was wondering if you people that are signed up with them can tell me a little about your experience with them and basicly if you're happy or not.

Thank you.
:beer:

Yes, please, I am interested in purchasing a couple of these as well, and was wondering what your experiences have been. Specifically:

1.) Their control panel (for the end customer) seems somewhat limited vs a product like Cpanel. For administration it looks easy enough, but I'm concerned it won't be 'feature rich' enough for my customers.

2.) How difficult is it to get MySql up and running?

3.) What are you using for a shopping cart?

Thanks much. Rackshack looks great, but need a little more product information.

captnroger, I can probably answer some of your questions since I've been using a RaQ3 for a few months.

The control panel is the same for admins/users. Offcourse the users won't have as much control as the admin, but it looks and functions the same with options for email and stuff.

To get MySQL installed, all you have to do is to copy paste an URL into your admin install box. The hard part is to set up the user access and such, which I'm pretty sure can be done easily with some help programs.

Shopping cart I don't think it's included (not sure). You can always install a free one, or pay for one.

Thanks Zolbian!

What's the URL for Mysql installation?

Which shopping cart do you like?

You will find the MySQL package file at: http://pkg.nl.cobalt.com/ (towards the bottom).

I actually program everything I need and use myself. Depending on what I need I can use PHP, Perl/CGI or ASP to code the software.

We have been with RackShack for only a week, which is obviously not long enough to evaluate them properly, but I think they are pretty good considering their prices. Our server was online within minutes of signing up, we requested additional IPs and we had them within 24 hours, their support appears to be "OK" and their network is pretty fast.

About the questions:
1) Yes, the RaQ control panel is very limited. The customer will not have access to many features. We started offering hosting with RaQ4s and are now into the CPanel. We still use RaQs but only for our basic hosting plans, however, if you want to offer other features like password-protected directories, custom error pages, subdomains and more you need to start thinking about something else because the RaQ will not do it for you. In the beginning we used the RaQs for every hosting plan, but every time that the plan included one of those features we had to create individual scripts for the users. This turned out to be very time consuming and kind of confusing for the users because they had to go to different places to do things.

2) SQL is easy to install. Just like Zolbian said copy and paste a URL or download the package from Cobalt's website and upload it to your server.

3) You can just buy any shopping cart software. If you want a real nice one, the MIVA works great on RaQs but is quite expensive.

In my opinion RackShack is well worth trying and Cobalt RaQs are very easy to use for the admin and "relatively easy to use" for the average user, however, I would only use a RaQ for a basic hosting plan that does not offer features that are not available though the control panel.

:)

Bert thanks for the reply. I appreciate you sharing your experiences with us.

Regarding cpanel, couldn't that be used on the Raq? I guess I'm a little confused - couldn't I just install cpanel on the machine and use it instead of what Cobalt provides?

-Roger

Originally posted by captnroger
Regarding cpanel, couldn't that be used on the Raq? I guess I'm a little confused - couldn't I just install cpanel on the machine and use it instead of what Cobalt provides?

No Roger, the CPanel does not run on RaQs :( You need a Redhat Linux 6.2 box to be able to use the Cpanel.

So far no one has come up for a control panel that works on a RaQ (as I am aware) There is a company called smarthostingtools.com that is supposed to launch a new panel that will work with the RaQ. I don't really know when that is going to happen.

In the mean time we just use the RaQ panel for our customers, and like I said before it is not the best panel out there because it lacks a lot of features :angry:.

So, if you want Cpanel, you need to go with a VDI based host or you can just get a Linux box somewhere else and then purchase Cpanel separately for $175.00 a month (I think) :bawling: