I've been looking around and people ahve been asking "is this a good control panel" or "what is a good control panel" .

We've been through this more time than i'd want, so i 've written up little reviews..

While we were deciding what to do with our growing virtual hosting customers as we were developing the plans for our new datacenter, we looked in to many options thoroughly.

We wanted a "control panel" so that the management of the virtual accounts could be effortless. because we were focusing on customer support, we never got around to actually implementing a control panel..

Anyways.. We looked at the following and here were my views on each..

Professo Appstreamer.. http://www.professo.com
COST: basically your left nut and your right arm.. ~30k license up front.. and then per server costs.. and the per customer costs..
COOLNESS: very nice interface, for all levels of control, needed atleast 3 servers.. but when installed.. it handled everything from package creation, billing, invoicing, and had support to build other applications apart from hosting just websites.... someone like digex or interland could afford it.

Ensim Webappliance http://www.ensim.com
COST: Their hardware solutions were very expensive.. signed a NDA.. they have a software version now.. but not as comprehensive.
COOLNESS: ****ty interface, the guy giving the demo was dumb.

Sphera Webhosting Controller http://www.sphera.com
COST: similar pricing as Professo, but a little cheaper, still your left nut and your right arm
COOLNESS: Java interface, to manage one or many computers.. showed me a working demo of a control panel to manage a heterogeneous hosting environment.. both nt and linux.. very nice.. the coolest thing was drag and drop from one server to another.. each client has a "virtual dedicated server" , meaning their own instance of their respective services. similar to what VMware is going to be releasing which will support multiple OSs on one system. that has major possibilities.. kind of like HP's huge box.. back on track. sphera was very nice.. the co-founder and engineer gave us the demo at ISPCON.. very smart guy. .


CPanel http://www.cpanel.net ?
COST: they change their prcing everytime i look at it..
COOLNESS: over glorified webmin. . ****ty interface.. wants too much to be like Alabanza's interface.. i hate it from the looks of it.. they need a better GUI designer.. they should look at http://www.dimac.net and see their portal ware programm.. maybe dhtml could be cool ..

Plesk http://www.plesk.com
COST: 550 something..
COOLNESS: simple to use, i like it, and their office is 15 mins from my house, so if i have trouble, i could .. .....

Webmin http://www.webmin.org
COST: FREE!!!!
COOLNESS: its getting there, the caldera version looks pretty cool

evolutionware.. http://www.evolutionware.com
COST: dont know, looks very expensive..
COOLNESS: very very very nice interface, meant for the ASP market, more in the range with professo's excellent product, but only handled redhatr when i talked with them..

psoft hosting controller http://www.psoft.net
COST: in the same price range as Plesk..
COOLNESS: alright looking, based on simple text databse, coudl use some work.. some russian guy wrote this in his apartment,
we were going to write the NT version for a small cut of the profit, but the cut was too small..



SmartHostingToolsController ( forget their website )
COST: not too shabby pricing..
COOLNESS: its alright, i didnt like the package management that they had.. would probably work on redhat, but i ws really looking for a solution to do both NT and Redhat, i mean if i was paying money, i might as well get what i want..

Hostopia.com (http://www.hostopia.com)
COST: Start up costs are under 1000 dollars, but allows you to add as many sites in that month as possible, and then a standard monthly fee if you dont have enough customers, but if over that amount, you pay a basic rate for each type of plan..
COOLNESS: very nice.. better for the client than the company, but has an excellent interface.. for the client user, and a pretty good interface for the company panel.. very interesting hardware setup..

Telnet/SSH
COST: free
COOLNESS: gives Ultimate control over the system as if power has been handed down by god.. very nice..

Terminal Server http://www.microsoft.com
COST: need to have Win2k running on the other side..
COOLNESS: lets you have VNC type control over the computer, but can let more than one person access it..

What we chose to do...
Create a huge schema of all possible configurations.. create a combination SQL and XML database...
Created abstractions for the different OSs.
Put together a fat fiber channel fileserver..
load balanced our mail, and webservers with round robin dns.

Spent some time writing perl scripts for linux, and then some vbscripts for 2k..

in the end.. we got what we wanted..

how much did it cost? just the cost of the hardware, you coudl easily do it on one server as long as you can program..

i really would like to open source the code, but im afraid some guy will take it and start making money off it .. until we make that decision, decide between the above..


rahul.singh@serverrack.net
CTO

I would like to know where you get your information...

Ensim WEBppliance is not a hardware solution. WEBppliance comes in three solutions. WEBppliance LS is a standalone downloadable SOFTWARE package. WEBppliance LH and LW (windows) is bundled with their ServerXchange Hosting Automation Suite.

As far as the rest of the information you provided? Who knows? It would be nice every once and a while if people did their research would be less opinionated and more factual.

Originally posted by thewebbie
I would like to know where you get your information...

Ensim WEBppliance is not a hardware solution. WEBppliance comes in three solutions. WEBppliance LS is a standalone downloadable SOFTWARE package. WEBppliance LH and LW (windows) is bundled with their ServerXchange Hosting Automation Suite.

As far as the rest of the information you provided? Who knows? It would be nice every once and a while if people did their research would be less opinionated and more factual.
Actually - it is my understanding that the ServerXchange includes a (3U, if I'm not mistaken) hardware appliance which serves as the heart of the system. Perhaps an Ensim rep or a company using Ensim can verify this?

Best Regards,
Matt Lightner
mlightner@site5.com

You asked, so here goes.

We have two main products. WEBppliance and ServerXchange, they are independent products, but can be used seamlessly together.

WEBppliance is a software product that is downloadable from our website for a one time charge and turns the server hardware of your choice into a virtual web hosting appliance. It has three levels of control panels and supports Redhat Linux, pricing is based on the number of domains you wish to support.
http://www.ensim.com/products/webppliancels.shtml

As you grow, this product can be seamlessly migrated into our larger product ServerXchange, protecting your financial investment as well as your training.

ServerXchange is the management appliance we send to you on a 3U server. It is our Hosting Automation Platform that enables you to manage multiple servers (that you build/buy) in your datacenter across various OS's (Redhat, Win2k, Solaris) from a single GUI console.

It supports the above mentioned WEBppliance product as well as an additional version of WEBppliance that supports Win2K. ServerXchange also has fully integrated billing support for the ISP as well as the Reseller. The reseller solution that the ISP provides to a client automates everything (think Alabanza). ServerXchange also enables you to offer many other solutions than just virutal hosting. Dedicated, Virtual dedicated (Private Servers) ecommerce, streaming, Exchange Mailbox hosting and others.

Our site is being updated, there are walkthroughs of most of the above capabilities available today.

Hope this helps.

KenP
Director, US Sales

ServerRackNet, are you serious????

What you just did was went to 10 different churches, sat in and listened to one sermon, then made judgement, and then created your own church.

Unless you spent weeks testing these to the full extent, which it sounds like you just saw demos on most, how can you make judgement? Most the stuff is BS.

The funniest one -
similar to what VMware is going to be releasing which will support multiple OSs on one system.

and regarding CPanel-
QUOTE]over glorified webmin. [/QUOTE] [:confused:

I am glad you don't do reviews on web host that use this Forum.

All the solutions i looked at didnt fit what i wanted.

And the whole deal with the churches is ridiculous.

As with the comment on VMware, do you even know what im talking about?

Microsoft is coming out with a product to run different instances of Windows on one system.

VMware which already makes software that does to a certain extent, except you need to be running Linux or Windows on it first.

And with the reviews, its called editorial opinion, I wasn't paid to do it, i wasn't forced to do it, I just wanted to express my opinion on the software.

- rahul.singh@serverrack.net

As with the comment on VMware, do you even know what im talking about?

Yes, but do you? It tells me you think you can run a Windows OS and Linux OS on the same machine. Maybe you meant it different......
similar to what VMware is going to be releasing which will support multiple OS's on one system.


And with the reviews, its called editorial opinion, I wasn't paid to do it, i wasn't forced to do it, I just wanted to express my opinion on the software.

Thanks for your opinion. And like all *editorial* opinions, be prepared for other opinions when you post them to a forum.

PS - when you release your holy grail of a control panel to the world, please give me a demo for a few minutes. I would then like to post my expert opinion. :)

similar to what VMware is going to be releasing which will support multiple OS's on one system.

If you meant simply they are Virtual Servers that run isolated instances of the same OS, then OK. Oh - yah, we have been using Ensim for 6 months now. We also tested Sphera for about a month. So yes, we under stand this concept.