Hi,

If you have ideas, feedback, features that you would like to see in Ensim WEBppliance, please feel free to drop me an email and we can schedule a conference call. I'll be happy to give you some insight into where Ensim is going with WEBppliance and more importantly get an idea of what you would like to see us add, where you would like to see it improved, etc...

you can email me at: mwu@ensim.com


Mike
Ensim Corporation
Product Manager

I dropped a few feature ideas on the RS thread but I feel they were ignored.

- When a reseller is removed there sites should also be removed.

- Suspended sites should goto a suspended page rather than the server /var/www/html/

- Be able to Quota MySql/Subdomains for resellers.

- Process monitor / killer script.

- DNS management for site admins (i.e. add and remove a / c names.)

- Better perl Module management. Currently I install a perl module to the server then delete the perl dir for a site and copy the server one over - not a good solution!

I'll add more as I think of them :)

Just to note that the above is just my dream list, We are extremely happy with the progress Ensim have made with Webppliance PRO, the best CP on the market!

Building on what UH-Matt said, I think that when you delete a reseller you should have the option to transfer sites over to a new reseller?

Get a DNS Manager to control reseller name servers. Why are we still doing it by hand?

Lower your prices.

Site Admin Level
- Fix cron for GUI-based management
- Allow multiple admins
- Add scripts and other features to system with auto-installers


Applaince Level
- Better Sendmail management, like setting mail limits to help prevent bulk e-mails, intigrate RBLs like ORDB and Spamcop to where admins can checkbox set up. Then have relays to allow IPs that are false positives.
- Allow us to remove/add poprelay with a check box.
- Like your Windows version, create a mass mailer option to allow admins to communicate with the users on that box.
- Add PostgreSQL as a feature.

- Crete a version of SIM strictly for Ensim that will monitor warning signs and stop them. Like run away scripts. Auto-responder loops. Etc...

I'd also like to add mulitple domain support for one account.

All suggestions mentioned above should be evaluated and added to Ensim. And after the rip-off I feel that Ensim Pro has been, you really need to learn and listen to your customers. Not that many features were released in Pro, justifying the price for the upgrade. That is, however, a complete different discussion - I know - but you'll loose customers by continuing that way. Only the RS special at $10 a month kept me from switching to another control panel.

That being said, lots of complaints are coming your way nowadays, especially regarding upgrade trouble, Ensimized modules (that's an old one) etc. I feel that these are the most important issues you'll have to deal with, and you need to deal with them immediately! There is no excuse for the lack of information that followed the 3.1.11 upgrade! As a result, many server admins had a tough day resolving the errors caused by cancelling the (what they thought was a faulty) installation too early, I myself had Perl deleted from the box just because it was mounted to a site and Ensim apparently didn't like that.

Upgrades should be painless and quickly released, as many rpm's as possible should be RedHat stadard.

That being said, there is one feature that will become not only important, but completely essential for many, if not most European hosts in the near future (perhaps already within months). That is, the support of domain names containing 8-bit characters (unicode characters). The cTLD registries are expected to start registering such domain names anytime soon. This is not the plugin option which Verisign has offered a long time already. This is the industry standard, and litterally thousands of companies and individuals are just waiting for this to become real. As soon as the registering of these domain start, the solution must be installed on every server running with any hosting company interested in getting their piece of this cake. That means, you need to make this possible for Ensim to handle long before these domain go live!

If not? Well, byebye Ensim! (please feel free to comment!)

Originally posted by polarbear
I myself had Perl deleted from the box just because it was mounted to a site and Ensim apparently didn't like that.


That was a custom mod YOU made which is totally unsupported by Ensim. The tutorials which tell you how to do that mod with perl being mounted to a site give a fair warning that Perl can be deleted when using the method.

If you kept your box standard and used Ensim then most your errors would NOT have occured. Ensim can hardly support/fix errors when so many people make so many custom modifications to the environment it runs in!

Originally posted by UH-Matt
If you kept your box standard and used Ensim then most your errors would NOT have occured. Ensim can hardly support/fix errors when so many people make so many custom modifications to the environment it runs in!

Matt, I don't blame Ensim for not removing the perl mount, resulting in the deletion of it. I blame them for not documenting their upgrades properly. It sure would be appreciated to know that this upgrade messes with such parts of the site's files and file systems, something like "This upgrade will replace files placed in blablabla..." so that proper actions can be taken upon upgrading. You may disagree with me, but the last upgrade did NOT have a proper manual.

Originally posted by UH-Matt
That was a custom mod YOU made which is totally unsupported by Ensim. The tutorials which tell you how to do that mod with perl being mounted to a site give a fair warning that Perl can be deleted when using the method.

I've seen a lot of people get broadsided by this particular issue. Too many of these mods and hacks are put out there without the slightest safety margin built into them, and too many people with little or no experience blindly install these mods without any understanding of how they interact with the rest of their system, or of the potential for trouble that they bring. There are some shoddy hacks out there, more than a few of which have been released by some of the "respected" names.

.

Very top of the list, please step up your efforts to get security patches released in a timely fashion. Case in point is the as-yet unresolved kernel/quota issue (for those who are going to chime in with "it's fixed", no it isn't). Our current options are either no site-level quotas or a vulnerable kernel, neither of which are acceptable this late in the game.

Next would be an import utility to pull 3.1.x backups into 3.5.x. This should have been released with 3.5.

Other than that, I generally go along with the suggestions put out there by the others in this thread, particularly uh-matt's suggestion of better perl module management.

Thanks for askin' :)

.

You want to sell more licenses? Lower the entry cost of ServerXChange. Sure it can handle thousands of servers and is geared towards the huge datacenter so Ensim feels justified in asking how many servers we have before you even give out pricing. I've even heard of guys getting the response of "you don't have enough servers yet" instead of an actual price quote.

If I only have 20 servers, but you talk me in to putting them all on ServerXChange...now I can offer VPS, reseller billing suites, managed servers...etc, very easily. Chances are that unless your software is really terrible, I will not be looking for other panels to run. You would have me locked in on Ensim software for all my new shared, VPS, and dedicated servers for the life of my company.

Instead, with your high entry level pricing for ServerXChange (or whatever it's called now), I have to wait until I'm running a hundred or so servers to even look at it. Now when I have around 150 servers full of clients running software other than Ensim, you guys expect to convert me? Now I get to take months to migrate thousands of accounts, pay huge upfront costs to convert, and throw away all the now useless software licenses I used to build my business?

Do you really think that is a situation I am looking forward to? Tossing the system that got me where I am to bet the business on your system being better and more efficient since if it was not there would be no reason to pay even $1 for Ensim.

All the above suggestions are good and will help you improve your software. A scalable pricing model for ServerXChange will get you the cash to pay for the development of those upgrades.

I know this mean like an unproductive statement but...just get your s!@# together over there. I can't really describe it any other way.

There have been feature requests for YEARS that have not been done. I mean is multiple domain hosting really that hard? Or even a simple DNS manager to manage resellers name servers and IPs?

Mike, you can't possibly be saying you are coming to this forum and asking for our opinion about what should be added when you must havea HUGE list of features that have been requested and were never done.

My suggestion is for you guys to go buy a copy of h sphere, cpanel, plesk and dsm and take all the features and widgets from them and add them to webppliance. Just poke around the other panels and see how they work, what features they really have, etc. Open a hosting account with a company that offers all the panels and try them out in a live environment.

Then lower the price.

Originally posted by UH-Matt
If you kept your box standard and used Ensim then most your errors would NOT have occured. Ensim can hardly support/fix errors when so many people make so many custom modifications to the environment it runs in!

I'm not going to comment on the perl mounted to a site because that is going to delete perl if you modify the site or upgrade. Documentation is out there on that.

However Matt, if Ensim is kept standard it is absolute crap from a user standpoint. It is only through customization that it actually becomes useful. I love customized Ensim. I (and many customers) dislike the stock releases.

If those customizations aren't done, system administrators are left running old versions of nearly everything. It doesn't matter how how Ensim has jailed users in a virtual environment to make it secure. If you're running out of date modules, the least of your worries is going to be users on your own box, it's the people looking to get in from the outside that is going to get you.

I'm not blaming Ensim for not being able to keep up with or support customizations. It is impossible for any company to do that. What I do dislike is how they continue to ignore the biggest complaints about the control panel.

Originally posted by Coach
I'm not going to comment on the perl mounted to a site because that is going to delete perl if you modify the site or upgrade. Documentation is out there on that.

However Matt, if Ensim is kept standard it is absolute crap from a user standpoint. It is only through customization that it actually becomes useful. I love customized Ensim. I (and many customers) dislike the stock releases.

If those customizations aren't done, system administrators are left running old versions of nearly everything. It doesn't matter how how Ensim has jailed users in a virtual environment to make it secure. If you're running out of date modules, the least of your worries is going to be users on your own box, it's the people looking to get in from the outside that is going to get you.

I'm not blaming Ensim for not being able to keep up with or support customizations. It is impossible for any company to do that. What I do dislike is how they continue to ignore the biggest complaints about the control panel.

Of course you need to keep things upto date, I was talking about HACKS and CUSTOMISATIONS, not updating things which are normally bundled with Ensim.

Im not even saying you shouldnt hack ensim, ours is one of the most extreme customisations I know of - BUT what I am saying is that people shouldnt bitch about it when their customisations slap them in the face and Ensim dont help.... If you were to sell a car to someone and they change the engine, then the engine blows up - would you help them out? I certainly wouldnt!

Definately need multi-domain support. Next I would include your billing module with the Pro version of WEBppliance. Make it optional to use other billing programs if people wish.

Thanks,

Neofree

Agreed Matt. That's why I said that Ensim shouldn't be blamed for such issues.

Everyday had a good point once you got past his first "unproductive statement". ;) Try running a hosting company. Look at what customers are requesting. Look at other control panels and see what they are offering that Ensim isn't.

Ensim does a *lot* of things better than any other control panel out there and despite my qualms about certain issues with it, I wouldn't trust my business to anything else at this point. I don't care about pre-installed modules like forums/guestbooks/counter and other things like that because it is just one more way to hack into the server with and more things to keep up to date.

Make the administrative, reseller and end user fuctionality easier to do. Add more options and control for the end user over their own site. Add more fuctionality for resellers because simply put, cpanel/whm are way ahead of you here despite their lack of security.

Get bettre sales people!

They don't answer emails and when they do they push generic products.

Example i need to manage say 10 ensim servers from one "provisioning" or "management" console. They're trying to push ServerXChange and just yesterday one of my techs was told serverxchange was a waiste of time unless i had dozens and dozens of servers.

So what i need is a centralized provisioing server so DNS entries go to the DNS servers and new accounts go to the appropriate server to handle the load.

Rather than people sitting and moaning about it .. take up Ensim's offer. We are setting up a conference with them to give some honest feedback and throw some ideas around.

Oh.. and for a PRO product get a fully supported Java server.

I'm implementing Caucho's resin webserver and it would be great if you would provide "modular" support for me to use Caucho's killer servlet/jsp engine without all the manuall processes.

I neeeeeeeeeeeed an application server!

We turn off tomcat. Not a feature we want to offer, just a resource hog.

Another conference call? There have been enough.

Just add the features.

It is funny. Some people have no clue when it comes to features in CPs. Just because you have one customer who requested a 'shark with lazerbeams', doesn't mean everyone else would want it. Get a clue.

A few times I have heard about Multi-domain hosting. What is that? I am not a CPanel user. Is that a simple redirect to a subdir? If not, then why not use the Reseller panel to support multiple domains?

UmBilly,

The reseller control panel should have more features than a shared hosting account. So if I use the reseller panel for single users now I have to worry if ensim adds anything for the resellers that I don't want those customers to have.

Not to mention that its still a pain in the butt to move back and forth between control panels for the reseller. Why not have a "Back to Reseller Admin" button for the reseller instead of opening extra windows and/or making them log back in?

I'm not attacking you UmBilly, its just that to see a post like this from ensim after I have first hand knowledge of all the requests that have been submitted is a bit strange. They haven't implemented more than maybe 20% of the ones requested in the past 2 years so why come here and ask, just go back to the mountain of emails they have.

I'm not attacking you UmBilly,

Neither was my post. It was directed elsewhere. :)


I agree with you on a lot you say. I happen to know Mike means business. I have had numerous account reps since 2000 when we bought the $25,000 SX product. He seems to be the best at asking, clarifying, then integrating. I feel that if you heard what some of the new ideas were, you would be pleased. He is asking not to see himself post. He is asking to get new ideas. Productive ideas. Not "I want some ridiculous option no one has heard of integrated".

I agree with Umbilly, our customers who want multi domain hosting get given the reseller control panel and actually love it.

Well for one thing I'd like to see you not put this in a non-advert forum...

Originally posted by comphosting
Well for one thing I'd like to see you not put this in a non-advert forum...

Everyone does this. Headsurfer does this all the time. Who cares if he "owns" the board. You lead by example. I do not see Ensim begging for business. Just doing market research on a web hosting board.

LOL...yeah wouldn't this technically be self promotion and should be moved to another forum?:D

Originally posted by UmBillyCord
Everyone does this. Headsurfer does this all the time. Who cares if he "owns" the board. You lead by example. I do not see Ensim begging for business. Just doing market research on a web hosting board.

Yeah and how quickly would a host get flamed for asking for "suggestions" and posting their URL in Running a Webhosting Business? In 2 seconds, they'd be flamed and moved to website reviews or RO&R. Headsurfer does this because he owns the forum.

It happened to webreseller...

Originally posted by UmBillyCord
Everyone does this. Headsurfer does this all the time. Who cares if he "owns" the board. You lead by example. I do not see Ensim begging for business. Just doing market research on a web hosting board.

Seems to me that someone got chewed out for this very thing just a few weeks ago:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=145649

Selective moderation strikes again.

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I reported the post so we'll see what happens. If a mod decides not to move it I'd certainly like to see the reasoning.

Originally Posted By The Rules Page

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Participants may not solicit the membership for feedback or suggestions on their product or services.

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I got this one copied and pasted for when someone breaks the rules again.

Now that we're aware; thread moved.

This is exactly why I didn't jump to conclusions about this... SWR may seem to close a lot of threads, but he's always been fair ;).

That Webreseller thread must have been bad, because the Ensim thread got moved while the Webreseller thread was tossed leaving them wondering why. I didn't see the Webreseller thread, but from the thread mentioned above alone it seems that certain companies are allowed more room to bend the rules than others. Of course I don't know the whole story, so I could be wrong.

To be perfectly honest, it wasn't any worse then headsurfer's thread. And I'd say this thread was even MORE advertisment-like. Just me though, and moderating is ALL about opinion and how you see something.

I can't compare it to any headsurfer threads, because he can do what he pleases. Comparing this to the Webreseller thread does seem like an apples to apples comparison, but with a very different outcome. Who knows why?

I can guess, but it would all be pure speculation so why bother?