I just wanted to let you all know that you can run Plesk on a Sun Cobalt RAQ! Soon our clients will not have to deal with that clunky old RAQ control panel! FINALLY!!!

Over the past years, we have been disappointed in Sun/Cobalt for not releasing updates to their control panel. My clients have trouble using the GUI, and it is so difficult to customize to our site's look & feel! We have been watching the "Control Panel Wars" and had selected Plesk because of its streamlined interface, reseller features, easy customization, modular design and so on...

Having seen little news from Sun/Cobalt on new RAQs with increased performance (processors, ram, etc). We have started to look at some of the other hardware options. One of the biggest problems we were going to face was having diffrent control panels on diffrent machines. This was going to create a huge nightmare! So we needed to find a flexible/industry leading control panel that would run on our RAQs.

Well, after reading in this months "Web Hosting " magazine that Plesk had developed a migration process for transfering data from a RAQ and moving it in to their control panel, I had to find out more!

Basically, with Plesk you purchases a license for the number of virtual sites you plan on hosting on a single box. The license for 300 sites is a one time fee of $599. Or roughly $2/domain. Since the the cluggy nature of the Cobalt's control panel limits the number of sites to the 250 range, you can have 20% more sites on the same box. It will pay for itself in 37 days!!!

Value Equation
$599 + Install Fees = 20% more sites & a better client experince!
50 sites @ $10/month = $500/month or $6000 per year!

Also, if you ever want to move from the Cobalt to another machine, simply transfer your license and presto, very little downtime & your customers never even know!

I am so happy that we can keep our reliable hardware and move our hosting company forward with a worthy control panel. Not only that, but we can now have 300 sites per server or 20% more!

If you want more info on running Plesk on a RAQ email Tim O'Rourke (tim@plesk.com) (tim@plesk.com), he helped us out.

Sincerely,

Andy R.

I thought the whole point of getting a RaQ was because of their ease of use and out of the box CP...

Why don't you just purchase a regular vanilla box, and then you won't have to use the RaQ's 450Mhz processor. In my opinion putting Plesk on a RaQ makes no sense at all.:confused:

I'ld be more interested in doing it the other way around. Put the cobalt CP on a regular machine. :)

Nevertheless I find it interesting to know that it IS possible to put another CP on the Raq and since this is something you are happy with...I'm happy too.

Enjoy!

Organic, are you in anyway related to Plesk ?

http://www.organichosting.com/

well he may work for PLesk or not but i cant reach his http://www.organichosting.com/
so that plesk-cobalt thing is not working...

Yikes i can, its at everyonesinternet (rackshack i suppose), and got a ping from.......1778ms !!
Thank you Verio inc.!

it works now...hm

Just got my first plesk box and it is alot easier and quicker than the cobalt one (the dns are set up autoamticaly and thanks to the command line function no need to buy the autosetup program. Plesk also has reseller controll pannels and seems to be more stable than the cobalt rubbish !
I'm now thinking about getting rid of my cobalt machine as it is more of a pain to use ...
You say no pkg installations ... but I already comes with webalizer + webmail ...
Easier to customise (choose logo etc ...)
ALso remembers all customer information ...
I love it !

(No I'm nothing to do with plesk, I just like their system...)

hoot

Organic Hosting was one of the first customers at Rackshack.net. We got our RAQ there the first day they were open. We plan on switching to RLX Technologies serverblades in the next couple of months. That is why adding Plesk to our RAQ makes so much sense. Basically, we will need a control panel that will work on a 7.2 Red Hat server and do not want our customers to notice when we switch.

As many of you know the setup fees are huge at RackShack. So instead of shutting down our RAQ that has been extremely reliable, we are going to add Plesk. If we wanted to start leasing a White Box @ RackShack, our setup would be $349 - $499. And for that, RackShack retains ownership of the Plesk license. So $599 formy own copy that we can move to our new serverblades is a GREAT deal. At that point we are going to have to buy a control panel anyway! Plus after my extensive research, I really like Plesk over the other options available anyway! Our main sales channel is resellers. So the Cobalt GUI kinda sucks for customization. I currently use AutoSetup for provisioning, but Plesk has an autocreation tool too!

Hey Dutchie and Angel78, thanks for studing my connection this morning! I have been noticing performance decrease since RackShack moved to their new facility. Do you guys know of any Colo facilities that would be good for a 3U server blade chassis with a few blades to start? Does anybody out there include as much bandwidth as RackShack?

FYI: I am in NO WAY affiliated with Plesk. I am just a techie with a Finance Degree, and I know how to spot a good deal. I was told by Plesk that this license can be moved from RackShack as soon as we get our new hardware. That means that Organic Hosting owns the license and as soon as we are comfortable with the new serverblade technology, we will transfer our sites to our new hardware. This should be as easy as backing up pur RackShack Plesk RAQ and restoring it onto our new 7.2 Redhat Server Blade. From our clients point they will not be able to tell a diffrence that they are diffrent hardware when we move. (They currently do not use the Cobalt GUI, because we find support to teach them the GUI to be more trouble than administering it ourselves).

Cheers,

Andy R.

Sounds great organic, btw your connection looks much better now with 155ms avg.

I have a little experience with plesk from a customers point of view, and found the plesk admin confusing compared to the Cobalt interface. but that could very well be just me :)