Hi,

We are considering offering HostingController on our Windows servers however have not heard a lot about it.

We are using Ensim Webppliance and will continue but looking at other alternatives for Windows since we have cPanel for Linux & FreeBSD as an alternative to Ensim.

I am aware that Helm is popular too.

I would appreciate your feedback.

I have been using it for a long time. But it really depends on one's preferences and requirements. They have a 30 day version. Try downloading and see if it is suitable for u.

Its always a good idea to offer variety to your customers so that they decide what they want. As far as Hosting Controller is concerned we are using it since 4 years now and never faced major problems. In our view it is the best Control Panel available for windows and its true because no other windows control panel offers as many features as Hosting Controller does.

It is a well know fact that no windows control panel as of today is perfect but yes when you compare from the ones which are available the best option for us was Hosting Controller.

I've heard a lot of good things about it. Any of you guys running it with Java (Tomcat)?

Thanks
icon

I also have been using Hosting Controller since 2000 the 1.0b. My opinion is they are willing to listen to my suggestions for new features.
Sometimes when a feature is not available, they actually wrote a patch for me to run a particular function. I cant find this sort of customised support for other controllers I have been using. Try purchasing a license and asking them to install. They look into your Windows setup and security and suggest which part to harden. Which was very useful when I first started out with no firm foundation of Windows

Here is my honest opinon about Hosting Controller.. Whatever my opinons worth...

I have worked with a lot of companies out there and by far Hosting Controller has one of the best supports staff I know of! Yes there may be some bugs in the system(but look at Microsoft) and mind you some are users not configuring correctly, but when you need support or a fix they are right there to give it to you.. They go the extra mile with their service and support. Usually you need to pay for support that they give, not with them!

I would recommend Hosting Controller for their service, support and commitment to their customers.

I only can speak for myself and what type of service they have given me.. I don't think you will find it in any other controler software.

FYI: I have purchased HC and am not affiliated with them.

If you have any questions for me - Let me know and I will answer them.

Thanks,
<<Signature to be setup in your profile>>

We have used Hosting Controller since 1.0 also and never had any major problems. We have also checked out HELM before and the customer response was they liked hosting controller better because it was alot easier to navigate. They stand behind there product and they value there customers feedback for new features. We have been happy with them so far which is why we became a reseller for them. Good luck with your decision and as always take the 30 day trial and see how you like it.

I see there are many favorable comments regarding HC, and rightly so. We have been using HC for quite a while now and are more than satisfied with our decision to deploy it on our servers. I offer the following additional reasons to choose HC over the others:

1) Server Admistration:

Whether your customer is an end user with a single site, a reseller, or a dedicated server customer HC has the most features for the admin. From ACL management to Zone file editing there is very little one cannot do from control panel. HC is an excellent tool that has cut our support costs by offering the web admin the tools needed to manage his/her web site.

2) A Turn-Key System

Throw in a billing system (includes automatic recurring charges, discounting, etc), ticket system and autosignup and you have everything you need to run a hosting company. Your resellers and dedicated server customers have nothing left to do. We use all of HC's features and it has saved us tons of time and a lot of money.

3) Support

Unless you are willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for an annual support contract you cannot beat HC's support. They are always willing to go the extra mile to solve your application problems, even if its your fault. No application is 100% bug free....the question is: are the creators willing to deal with them? HC is.

I have used/evaluated all the control panels you listed and none of them include all the features of HC. While each of them are nice panels in their own right they do lack in many features. For example Helm does not have a billing system that automatically charges customers each month and does not have a ticket system, Webppliance does not include a billing module or autosignup, etc.

Conclusion: Get HC!

Regards,
Dean

I see everyone here is just as satisfied with Hosting Controller as I am. I have been with HC for a year and a half now. I cant say enough about the support staff. They have handled every single one of my questions even if they didn’t have to do with HC. They helped me configure everything and even terminal serviced into my servers to do it for me.
I’ve seen HC change into a really great product over the last 18 months. They offer a solution that no other control panel software does. I did my due diligence and tested out all the evaluations of the most popular control panels out there and HC was the best every time.
Over time they have catered to every single one of my needs which makes my job so much easier now. I can only commend them on a great product and a super support staff.


Regards,

Michael

mbatalha@prestigetechnologies.com
www.prestigetechnologies.com

Originally posted by ccurtis
Hi,

We are considering offering HostingController on our Windows servers however have not heard a lot about it.

We are using Ensim Webppliance and will continue but looking at other alternatives for Windows since we have cPanel for Linux & FreeBSD as an alternative to Ensim.

I am aware that Helm is popular too.

I would appreciate your feedback.


HC is one of the best control panels on the market today for windows reseller hosting we have been using it since 2001.

HC gives the reseller the most options and with a completely automated solution from billing, user signups and support. Our reseller clients can brand the control panel, emails and more using their logo and text.

We have created a page with information, links and tutorials on hosting controller if you would like to review some information on it. http://www.resellerchoice.com/hostingcontroller.htm

Best of luck to you.

Just an example , I had HC 2000 version quite a few months back. I dun want to use the Billing function, and dun want to show the menu to my clients, one of their engr customised for me immediately. And the new version HC 6.1 have this function to turn off the billing so that your users will not see it. I bought 13 licenses.

Hey Guys, I have been using hosting controller for a few years now & have Always been VERY happy with it!

I had a slight issue setting up some permissions with a few versions ago & they term served in to my server & set it all up for me! Very Nice.

Then on the last version I had a database issue & I emailed my DB to Aziz & he fixed it right up for me & had my up a couple hours later!

In my opinion with Customer Service like that coupled with such a Great product HC is going a long way...

I Highly Recommend Hosting Controller to any size host looking to make life a little easier and save hours on customer setup & maintenance.

Robert R.
WorldWideYou.com Web Hosting
CaliforniaBands.com California's Source For The Music Scene

Well as you can see from all of these posts, it is quite evident that HC is in fact a great product, and I couldn't agree more.

With every new version that is released, the features become more and more integrated with the daily lives of both us as a company, and the client as the primary user of the control panel. The feature set allows the client to do pretty much everything that he or she would want to do in terms of the administration of the website, which then translates into a huge reduction in support time and cost.

The controller itself is relatively easy to use and easily customizable in terms of skins and addition of other features. It is just overal, great to work with. The staff, both customer service and technical support, are also a pleasure to work with as they do their best to make sure that you, as a customer, are happy and are getting the exact solution that you require for any problem or any question. Response times are great as very rarely do emails take more than a day to come back to you and their determination to deliver is definitely worth mentioning.

Overall, a great product with a great team to support it.

Would anyone happen to know if HC offers monthly leasing of their product for one server, or if there are any resellers available who do? I am totally ready to get away from Helm.

Thank you.

Yeap they offer monthly leasing, try emailing their sales.
If you are a dedicated server or colo provider, or if you need 2 or more Hosting Controller licenses then you have the option to rent Hosting Controller instead of paying upfront $500 or more.

Hosting Controller rental starts from $45/month. For rental and bulk orders, please contact sales department sales@hostingcontroller.com.

HC Rocks!

We have been using HC for over 4 years now (first as a hosting client, and later as a hosting provider), and am 100% certain we made the right choice.

As others have said, if you have a problem, the guys at hosting controller will look at it, tell you how to fix it, or fix it themselves for you, or write a script or patch to solve your problem. Try getting that level of support out of other panel companies!

HC even helped me with a third party email server problem that i was having, as it wasnt working in HC. Not their problem, but they fixed it! (thanks again HC, if your reading this)

I also look forward to each month's new release for some new features. They just keep on giving extra stuff to us.

I think however the best sales pitch for HC is to actually use it. Get the demo, install it. It just works, there is no screwing around with configuration etc.

All my clients love it, I love it, my tech guys love it.

'nuff said.

Brett.
7 Squares Media - Windows 2000 Advanced Hosting.

I ABSOLUTELY AGREE!

I totally recommend HC. I downloaded the demo and installed it in less than 5-10 minutes. Within the next 30-40 minutes I had everything configured, such as FTP, Webstats, Mail, DNS etc. It was simply amazing and totally stress free.

Helm was a complete disaster. I spent almost $200 dollars for 3rd part help with the installation. After everything was installed and working, I couldn't even delete domains! I wasted so many hours on the Helm forums only to find many redundant questions without detailed answers. In addition, the documentation was very weak. The forum support staff were excellent I must say with their response time, but again the answers just didn't get the ball rolling enough times to solve the problem. Unless of course I spent more money.

Helm works great for many no doubt, but if you're a Linux/Cpanel admin like myself and would like to try things out with Windows, I would have to say HC is the way to go.

Have fun with your Windows server and go with HC. It's worth it!

Doesn't look like there is much more to say about HC. Lots of satisfied users certainly goes a long way.

Just to throw in my vote it's for HC all the way.

HC has a feature others have actually refused to implement for me. There is a feature I'm not sure many are utilizing but for me it is essential. The feature I'm referring to is called "Initial scripts". This allows the resellers to load up a folder with stock scripts that can be added at the time the web site is created. This one feature was the shoe in for my decision, other panels either wouldn't talk to me about it or just wouldn't entertain the idea. Then when I tested HC and found it was a built-in feature the rest is history. This feature with a little tweak allows me to install the script that my company is centered on.

It's been said and I will reinforce it, HC's willingness to help is outstanding. They are without question experts in the field. Many times they have helped me with non HC related problems, problems I've created.

HC is my panel of choice absolutely.

That Aziz is a little too much , never mention this feature to me.....
Must really check this out? This is under which option?

Look in Preferences, actually the name changed sorry it's the "Auto Script Copy" If you'd like email or pm me I'd hate to disrupt this thread.

We've been using HC for a couple of years now, overall it is a good product with plenty of functionality. Don't see any competitor product even close to HC.

Peter

We have been using Hosting Controller for several years now and have seen this product come a long way. The one things that stands out with HC is its support. They are quick to respond and have always worked with us to resolve the problem, even when it has been due to our misconfiguration.

They often spend time with remote access checking our configuration and have written several custom scripts/patches to help resolve problems or to offer additional functionality when it wasn't available in the release version.

Hope this helps.

WOW, I really can’t believe this thread.

We used HC for 3 years and had nothing but problems with it and the support. The control panel GUI looks awful, it had loads of bugs, when you tried to do something it was pot look if it was going to do it or not, you need a different control panel for each server you have. I could go on all day but would like to add that we haven’t used it for just over a year now because as soon as an alternative came out we jumped ship. It was the best decision we made.

We moved to helm. We now have one central control panel which everyone can use no matter what server their site is on, we can add new servers with ease whenever we like and Helm distributes sites evenly, or if you have some more powerful servers it will give them a bias over less powerful servers. Our customers made us promise to never go back to HC, the ones that were happy with HC realised how green the other side of the field was when we started using helm.

If you just have one server and are happy with second best then use HC, if you want to grow and have a control panel that will grow with you use Helm, your customers will thank you for it.

As a long time user of both HC and Helm my opinion and advice would be to use Helm. Just look at the demo's for each and maybe install the trials. We would never go back to HC and nor would our customers.

Kind Regards

Gawd, never heard of the program and already thinking of buying it! I have used Ensim, ( SUCKS! ) :angry: and I have heard that Helm is pretty good, and Plesk has a windows version now, but have not heard if it is any good, but it does look really nice.

Anyone got some words on how Hosting Controller stacks to Helm and Plesk for Windows? I'm trying to run away from Ensim!

Try it , 30 days free, and I guarantee u will buy it. Dun just listen!

Originally posted by boonchuan
Try it , 30 days free, and I guarantee u will buy it. Dun just listen!

I am sure if you try both the HC trial and the Helm trial you will choose or would prefer Helm.

Have you had a look at both of the online demo's of Helm and HC?

As a user of both HC and Helm I would always recommend Helm. I know many people who have moved from HC to Helm but not one that has moved from Helm to HC.

Regards

jgriff64,

That is about what I had thought, Helm has a better price tag, and from what I have seen all the same features. I know a company that developes Mail, Ticket and Stats for Helm and say they are the best CP on the market for the User, Admin and even for 3rd Party companies that are developing applications to work with Helm.

They say it is really easy to install, really easy to uninstall and has no adverse effects and service is pretty good. I did take a look at both of the Demo's and helm did look a little better laid out for usability, but does not look as pretty, which I can fix.

Thanks for your comments!

Regards,
Jon T.

I think if you really looked at the pricing Helm is a lot higher in respect to multiple servers. HC supports remote servers for mail and dns without the need to purchase the individual remote machine licenses , in other words HC on a primary with 2 secondary machines is the cost of one license whereas with Helm you need a license for each machine, even if your just running dns remotely, so that would be 3 Helm licenses off the bat. I've always seen Helms pricing compared to HC with Helm using a single server license. Well if you can get away with running everything from webs, to dns and mail on one machine, I would think you wouldn't need a control panel, and running only a single dns server wouldn't be a good plan. This is of course unless something dramatically changed with Helm's pricing model lately.

But for me the last I knew they still refused to add functionality that was essential to my organization. Which was built into HC.

Helm doesn't have the same features as HC, they do have some nice ones but fall short. Helm has pretty icons, HC has functionality.

Again the best said test is set up the trials.

tonymak,

What key features does HC have that Helm does not that made you choose HC over helm?

:confused:

Originally posted by tonymak
I think if you really looked at the pricing Helm is a lot higher in respect to multiple servers. HC supports remote servers for mail and dns without the need to purchase the individual remote machine licenses , in other words HC on a primary with 2 secondary machines is the cost of one license whereas with Helm you need a license for each machine, even if your just running dns remotely, so that would be 3 Helm licenses off the bat. I've always seen Helms pricing compared to HC with Helm using a single server license. Well if you can get away with running everything from webs, to dns and mail on one machine, I would think you wouldn't need a control panel, and running only a single dns server wouldn't be a good plan. This is of course unless something dramatically changed with Helm's pricing model lately.

But for me the last I knew they still refused to add functionality that was essential to my organization. Which was built into HC.

Helm doesn't have the same features as HC, they do have some nice ones but fall short. Helm has pretty icons, HC has functionality.

Again the best said test is set up the trials.

The main feature that swung us to Helm is the fact that we have so many web servers. When we used HC we had to install it on each web server and customers had to log in to the control panel that was installed on the same server that their domain was running from, this made it very hard to work with. Especially the built in ticket system, we ended up with a large number of different ticket systems :(.
Also if you have resellers using HC all the sites they add are only setup up on the server that their control panel is on. Helm distributes resellers websites accross your chosen web servers which stops one server having many more sites than other servers.
There are not many features remaining that have not been developed for Helm. Password protected directories using IIS filters, rather than HC's way of using MS authentication, will be out by the end of the week. After that the billing side of the control panel is being worked on.

In addition with helm you can setup as many mail servers, ftp servers. stats servers etc as you like. If you had 5 mail servers Helm will distribute new sites email settings accross those 5 servers, same with FTP etc. (Granted you will need a remote for each). When Helm v4 comes out different services will have different remote costs. EG a remote FTP server will be cheaper than a remote IIS server. The way HC works is that any new site installed by a particlular HC system will be setup on that server and the email will be set up on that server or the 1 remote mail server that you have configured.

I will have to check out the look of HC again, as I say we havnt used it for some time but the comments here suggest it looks quite good. When we used it it looked awfull to say the least.

Kind Regards

Looking at HC's prices I dont think Helm is more expensive.

Say you have 2x DNS servers, 1x mail server, 1x ftp server, 10 IIS servers.

for HC you would need to buy 10 licenses as you need HC for each web server but dont need them for the DNS and mail Servers.

Total cost for HC = $5000 (Using the HC bulk order you would pay $3500 but you would need to buy them all at once)

for Helm you would need 1 control license and 13 remote licenses.

Total cost for Helm = $999 + $3887 = $4886
Helm do members offers all the time. Last month they did a 50% off offer on all orders. The most recent offer was a free remote with the control license. If you contacted them before order and say you wanted 13 remotes I am sure they would give a discount. They also offer a discount for users moving from competitor control panels.

If you bought the above helm licenses from a Helm reseller you would be paying $3993 for all the licenses. Thats without taking advantage of any current offers.

You can tell I like helm. I have no connection to them, apart from using them and I am not a reseller. There are some good resellers about you can see them on the helm website.

Kind Regards

we currently host many HC Servers , and we do not have many complaints, however on our shared and reseller hosting we use H-sphere as it offloads the things windows is not good at off to linux/BSD

Originally posted by jgriff64
Looking at HC's prices I dont think Helm is more expensive.

Say you have 2x DNS servers, 1x mail server, 1x ftp server, 10 IIS servers.

for HC you would need to buy 10 licenses as you need HC for each web server but dont need them for the DNS and mail Servers.

Total cost for HC = $5000 (Using the HC bulk order you would pay $3500 but you would need to buy them all at once)

for Helm you would need 1 control license and 13 remote licenses.

Total cost for Helm = $999 + $3887 = $4886
Helm do members offers all the time. Last month they did a 50% off offer on all orders. The most recent offer was a free remote with the control license. If you contacted them before order and say you wanted 13 remotes I am sure they would give a discount. They also offer a discount for users moving from competitor control panels.

If you bought the above helm licenses from a Helm reseller you would be paying $3993 for all the licenses. Thats without taking advantage of any current offers.

You can tell I like helm. I have no connection to them, apart from using them and I am not a reseller. There are some good resellers about you can see them on the helm website.

Kind Regards

Interesting on your price comparison, When I contacted Helm with a list of 15 servers and 4 email servers and 2 dns servers at that time I was offered a 5% discount As long as I bought it all at one time. Sorry I guess they are fussy who they offer the really good prices to. Oh and this was after in a previous email I was offered 10% off from a reseller.

But also see what you are saying for your self, so far everything for helm has been it "will be", meaning it isn't yet. But in reality as long as I can remember when I first tried Helm it was "we are planning on that".

Granted Helms distributed resources is a great feature, I would love to have that but in reality I need the functionality that I have now with HC not maybe someday with another control panel. When I tested Helm couple things come to mind. There was no stats except for what was it LiveStats or something like that? and that would cost an extra what was it around a grand for limited licenses? There has no choice of mail servers, you used what they had or nothing at all. It took Helm over three weeks to even get around to getting it installed on my test machine because all my attempts to install the demo failed and even then after Helm installed it I couldn't add sites, they never responded after that so that's where it died. I'm sure the stats situation may have changed by now I would hope so it's been close to a year so I may have just the information from my personal bad experience, similar to your bad experiences that you may have had with HC

HC's look has changed. I really like the look of HC now, but even when it was as you say awful, at least it had functionality. Helm v4 original planned release date was for January of 2004, that was indicated to me back in June of 2003. This is April of 2004 when will there be a v4? Coming close to a year now. Functionality that was told to me that Helm would have back in Jun of 2003 still isn't there and as it was at that time the updates where only for 7 months so I'd at this time be paying for extended update fees for things that where promised close to a year ago. It was said to me "purchase Helm now we will have it before the 7 months". Then one of the features was played down because of the distributed resources schema, the word back to me was since the resellers don't have a place of their own then having script copies at site setup would be "difficult at most". A reseller was willing to add the functionality but in the long run that would be the end of helms updates as the additional purchased functionality would negate the ability to update Helm with fear and probability of over writing the add-on

If the distributed resources will limit me to run my company other than the way I want, need, and desire to run my company, then I'll pass on that one. HC lets me run my company my way either with it's built-in features or the ability to add my own on top of HC as well as the ability to restrict what features I wish to what ever resellers I wish. That's important at least to me, I wish to dictate how I have my resellers setup and what options they are allowed to have I don't need a control panel to control my company I need my company to be able to control the control Panel.

We all have our personal preferences and needs, my needs don't fit into Helms time frame, Sorry I can't wait over a year for features on a "maybe" for things I already have. I really hope Helm can get it all together someday, but it just won't work for me.

Tony,

Interesting what you say - I do agree to a point in that with Helm you definitely have to work with it a certain way. However, we found this pretty easy to adjust to and are quite happy with it now. (For example, the integrated billing was different in a few aspects to the billing we used to run on our in house system.) I would say one of the strongest selling points for Helm in our view was the ability to have multiple servers through one control panel, giving you economies of scale (in time & support) that wouldn't be achievable otherwise. These economies are necessary for the continued development of any company, as your overheads increase with size.

I think it's also good that Helm supports external statistics package rather than their own - I haven't ever seen a control panel with decent integrated stats, why reinvent the wheel? Sure, there's a little extra to spend but you only need one license (if you go Livestats rather than AWStats that is!) for many web servers.

As you may be able to tell by now, we're pretty happy with Helm. I think the last thorn in its side (password protected directories) is being sorted out in the next few months, then after that, we take THE WORLD! ;)

HC does not use a master control panel, this does cause the server admins to login and maintain multiple control panels.

Having 1 master control panel can also cause issues; if that server goes offline all your customers’ loose access.

I guess there is no perfect solution.

Hosting Controller does a good job with the control panel. I use nexpoint.net for a dedicated HC server.

Hosting Controller does have some bugs and some of it, is just getting used to HC.

HC staff is really nice, and always willing tp help, even if you are a complete dunce (as long as your nice).

It may take them a day or two, and calling on the phone wasn't very successful.

I look forward to further improvements in HC ... but all in all it works really well.

IT is WAY better than Ensim, whose support sucks (unless you kick out the cash).

So far HC has been a terrific control panel. However, support has been very slow and rather ineffective. I am now currently looking for a good Windows2003 server admin/company for some help but no luck so far. I really like Helm's support, but I could never get that control panel to work properly. However, with everyone's success it definitely makes me think twice. I think I'll stick with HC for now though since it really is easy to use. I just wish support was more effective and reasonably prompt. Nothing is perfect I suppose. ;)

I just want to thank everyone for all the great feedback I got here - both good and bad.

We did decide to go with Hosting Controller as another Windows control panel (in addition to Ensim Webppliance). I think it will be an excellent alternative from what I have heard and seen so far.

For those recommending Helm - it too came out well in testing but we decided to just go with just these 2 at this point (when time permits we may look at adding others).

Curtis :D

Thanks for all your feedback,

I was just going to ask this questions before I noticed it was already asked so I am going to try the 30 day demo.

Thanks again