Is it possible to outright purchase licenses for Cpanel? Or do you HAVE to rent it?

If you can purchase it outright, who would be a good supplier to go through?

Thanks in advance,

Brian

Nope, can't purchase it, only license it month to month.

Hmmm... I feared that would be the response. Two more questions then:

1) How much does it cost to rent, and what is the cost factor, by CPU, by server box, site license?

2) What control panel alternatives are there, beyond Cobalt and Webmin - and are there any alternatives that are as good at CPanel?

Thanks - Brian

If you can wait one or two months, I think hostGUI will be released which is said it could be an alternative.

FYI, HostGUI has been developing by JagaurPC ( http://www.jaguarpc.net ) for serveral years now and I heard it is close to public release.

Originally posted by bteeter

2) What control panel alternatives are there, beyond Cobalt and Webmin - and are there any alternatives that are as good at CPanel?

Thanks - Brian

I think DarkORB will make alot more money leasing it month by month other than selling it.

Originally posted by bteeter
2) What control panel alternatives are there, beyond Cobalt and Webmin - and are there any alternatives that are as good at CPanel?

Well, there's Plesk, HSphere, Sphera, Ensim, and a free open-source one Felix at Can-Host is working on called webCP. More and more seem to be cropping up all the time. You've got to really test drive them all to determine which would work best for you. It's a highly subjective matter.

Personally, I'd stay with CPanel but pick up a sleek new skin at cpanelskins.net. (No offense, Carlos!) ;)

Originally posted by bteeter
[
2) What control panel alternatives are there, beyond Cobalt and Webmin - and are there any alternatives that are as good at CPanel?



Both Ensim WP LS and Plesk charge one time fee. And WP LS 3.0 is supposed to come out in Dec. They are both said to be more stable and less buggy than Cpanel.

h-sphere also has one time fee's. low cost too.

hsphere is a nice product but I would not call it low priced. At $4 per site that would run you $1600 to place it on 400 sites. Most modern server configs with dual cpu's and loads of ram can easily place 400 per server. $1600 per machine for a control panel is a bit much if you ask me, but otherwise it is a nice peice of software. I dont know much about the support behind it but Im sure a few experienced users of hsphere that are here could fill you in on that.

hsphere is a nice product but I would not call it low priced. At $4 per site that would run you $1600 to place it on 400 sites.

Hi Jag,

This is not true; they cost $4 per customer you have. With your customer capable of having 100eds of domains and\or sites; so if you would have 100 customers with 1000 sites it would only cost you $400.
In our experience their support is really good; although now we start noticing that they have busy times....

DrAtomic (a H-Sphere customer who's starting up....)

My earlier post holds true. Sure some clients have more than one site but not all users have multiple sites and in fact its more common that they don't in our experience. At any rate its still doesn't compare to a system that is unlimited per server instead of per client. Good luck with Hspere though DrAtomic, it is a good prodcut and your clients should be very happy.

Originally posted by Jag
hsphere is a nice product but I would not call it low priced. At $4 per site that would run you $1600 to place it on 400 sites. Most modern server configs with dual cpu's and loads of ram can easily place 400 per server. $1600 per machine for a control panel is a bit much if you ask me, but otherwise it is a nice peice of software. I dont know much about the support behind it but Im sure a few experienced users of hsphere that are here could fill you in on that.



Keep in mind that this thing includes a built in site design interface for your clients, domain registration, ticketing system, and a billing system (pretty much can automate your site)... Some companies are charging up to $500 per month just for the a billing and ticketing system. Also, it's capable of scaling better than many other control panels (due to it's cabability to run on multiple servers).

If you're planning on sticking around the webhosting biz for a while, the $1600 for 400 clients is well worth it. $99 per month for Cpanel (or however much it costs), is gonna eventually end up costing over $1600 anyways (in 16 months).

One thing I don't like about it, however, is the fact that they insist that everything must be installed by them.... So in the event that you need to do an emergency reinstall of the control panel software, for one reason or another, you kind of have to wait for them to do it. If they're busy, then your site can be down for days.... or even weeks... or perhaps forever if they go out of business.