Hello,

I'm currently running a single Plesk 7.1 server and will soon add about 65 domains. I want to setup a solution that incorporates billing, account management, backup, and basically everything else that I'll have to do as a web hosting business and I'm currently considering HSPComplete 3.0 as a solution.

Does anyone have any experience with HSPcomplete 3.0? Is it as good as the marketing literature leads me to believe? What are the downsides?

Any thoughts would be greatly apprecieated,

Josh

I have not personally used it, but if budget allowed I would purchase it in an instant.

I've worked on a few HSPcomplete servers, and I really like it. Its a nice setup.

What do you think is the best way to setup HSPComplete? Should I find a host that has prior experience doing this and work with them? If so, can you recommend anybody.

Also, any idea what I might expect as far as price to set everything up?

Thanks!

I contacted SW-Soft about it. They said it is nothing like Plesk and requires over 10 hours to install. That is why you need to pay the $1500 installation fee, and then the mandatory $1500 instructional fee. Then the product itself is $500, then you need to buy Plesk and Virtuozzo licenses.

Have fun. :)

HSPcomplete manages Virtuozzo and Plesk. Seems like a nice setup but also very costly.

I recommend looking at H-Sphere. It does most of the things that HSPcomplete, Plesk and Virtuozzo combined do for a fraction of the cost.

Thanks,

Neofree

I have to agree with Neofree. It is tough to justify the money for HSPcomplete when you have products like HSphere available for pennies on the dollar that do the same thing.

With HSphere, you would be looking at about 2hrs a server for installation and if you outsource the install it is only a few hundred dollars or less. We provide training at a very reasonable rate and you can buy licenses from many companies for about $3.50 a license or less.

When you figure that out with your 65 domains your total bill for server installation, training and licenses would be less that $500 for HSphere in comparison to $3000 + licenses for HSPcomplete.

Unless you are charging premium dollars to your hosting customers, HSPcomplete is a pretty steep investment when you see other products like HSphere available.

Carmen Koop

Stay away from HSPcomplete, I hate to say this, but I bought the product over 2 months ago and now they cannot even upgrade me to the latest version, and I have not used the product because waiting for the upgrade. I spent around $8000.00 with them and they cannot offer me an upgrade from the 2x to the 3x version. If you want to play with HSPcomplete you can use mine and help pay for it if you like it. I also have hsphere setup and it is promising, especially since their updates and patches seem to work over 98% of the time and then they fix quickly what doesn't work, I have not used it in production yet either but I would when I need to. Let me know if you want to use my HSPcomplete, Plesk, and/or HSPhere. You can contact me at rkatz@simplicityhosting.com

Why couldn't they upgrade you, rkatz? Fees, or just them being unable to?

Hi, They came out with HSPc version 3x a few months ago, perhaps 4-5, they promised an upgrade from 2x in the middle of October, it was pushed to the end of October, it still is not out, I have paid for, taken the training with my guys, and will not use 2.1 because it does not have the features we need to keep our clients (A VPS cannot delegate control of a domain to a user, everything needs to be done by the VPS owner, unless you plug in Plesk or something like that, then there are billing issues, which we hope are fixed, upgraded in 3 but cannot know yet...).

I anyone wants to take a stab at the software we purchased let me know.

cool at the FREE vhcs.net

We have both HSPcomplete and H-Sphere for years. For VPS solution, HSPcomplete is still the best software out there. It's not cheap, but that's for a reason. Although you can create virtual hosting plans under HSPcomplete, I will not do this. For virtual hosting, HSPcomplete/Virtuzzo is just too complex. Management with HSPcomplete is not as easy as one would have thought, since SW-Soft does not release updated application templates. The application templates that come with the base OS usually needs to be upgraded right after the VPS is deployed. There are few other minor lack of features with HSPcomplete that though not too essential/fundamental a problem, is still rather annoying.

H-Sphere is the best way to go for shared hosting solutions. It's not build on the concept of virtualization, something that you don't need for shared hosting accounts anyway. Thus, you only have one services (e.g. one apache, one mysql, etc) on a server shared by many clients. This will allow management become easy in a sense that if you need to upgrade apache, you will only do it once for all of your clients. Together with the fact that H-Sophere also comes with build in billing management, ticketing system that work right out of the box, it's a solution that will fit your needs well. It's also a lot cheaper to deploy than HSPcomplete. For only 65 shared hosting clients, your ROI with H-Sphere is much better than with HSPcomplete.

We have used both H-Sphere (since 2001) and HSPcomplete (since 2002) and we still use both of them. H-Sphere for our shared hosting clients and HSPcomplete for our VPS clients, which is what each of them do best at.

Best wishes finding the best solutions for your clients.

Originally posted by rkatz
Hi, They came out with HSPc version 3x a few months ago, perhaps 4-5, they promised an upgrade from 2x in the middle of October, it was pushed to the end of October, it still is not out, I have paid for, taken the training with my guys, and will not use 2.1 because it does not have the features we need to keep our clients


In all fairness, HSPc 3.x BETA was released on September. They promised the upgrade to follow by October. Sure they missed, but I won't hold a grudge over this. We are scheduled for a 2.1 to 3.0 upgrade soon, as soon as we can set up an upgrade time with them. The few months 2.1 to 3.0 upgrade is not bad at all. We were first with them with HSPc 2.0 and was promised HSPc 2.1 upgrade few months after. But the upgrade never came until 14 months or so. Not happy about it, but then it's still the best VPS solution out there.

I currantly use HSPComplete one one of my vps servers. I dont think its bad. :D

FHDave,

Thank you for sharing, understood. I do not think it is very professional at all to schedule a release and then let the client wait for 14 months, especially if you are paying rolls royce prices for the software.

I will hold a grudge as I have software which is basically non-useable for anything but allowing guys that want a cheap root server access. It does not address nicely any of the guys who want root, vdomains, and want to manage them and delegate authority to THIER OWN users like around 90% of our client base does and most of the web hosting market (most of them are webmasters with multiple accounts etc....). So I am not happy.

HSPhere is the closest I have seen to doing things right. I have been following/applying their updates for almost a year now and the only glitch I saw that was major was not even a release but a beta, and all betas come with a disclaimer about production use. But they keep on cranking. If their price was double or more it would still be the best deal around, but not for VPS, currently no-one has an acceptible to manage VPS available to the serious hoster.

My main grudges with SW-Soft are:

1. I have spent a good 7+ years talking to them about what to do and they do not do it, I am done with that.
2. I purchased the product just to see how it would fit, and it really offers nothing over the code we have banged out over the last 4 years. I really wish it did because I would like to either launch a software company (not likely) or stop writing this code!
3. They are not professional when it comes to documentation on the back end for common support and migration issues, nor are they professional about patches/updates, look at the way Plesk still needs to be manually updated and mostly fails where the installation of Plesk is a gem, they have the technology but have only half applied it, unacceptible for how much they charge and how many they have on their team.

I believe my statements are fair, and as I write them it helps to clarify my position, guys should know these things BEFORE they buy, they will not be so patient as us once they are in the drivers seat!

Hello Randy,

This is Oleg Shaikhatarov, the product manager for HSPcomplete. Just wanted to make a little clarification on what is being discussed here.

I like the constructive criticism - it gives us a lot of knowledge on what could be improved in our product, but I hate when people just bitching about the product in public without real experience in using it.

Just a few facts about release schedule and upgrades:

1) HSPcomplete 3.0 was publicly released on September, 21.

2) At the same time we were working on development of upgrade for our HSPcomplete 2.1 customers. First several "controlled" upgrades has been done throughout October and first part of November. This was done for our most active customers.

3) On 25th of November we released the upgrade procedure in public and our support team is working hard to upgrade every HSPcomplete 2.1 customer to HSPcomplete 3.0 (currently we upgrade few customers a day).

Therefore, the correct period between public release of new version and public release of upgrade is _2 months_ (not 14 months as you wrote).

Finally, your system have been upgraded to HSPcomplete 3.0 just yesterday, so it gives 2.5 months between public release and upgrade of your system.

4) Last update for HSPcomplete 2.1 (2.1.15) was released on 15th of May, so the time between last 2.1.x version and new major 3.0 release is about 4 months (I still don't understand which 14 months you are talking about).

As far as I know you are using HSPcomplete for several months or so and hardly went into production with the system. I would not share all the information with everyone, but I have a big doubts that you used HSPcomplete enough to say "...it really offers nothing over the code...".

We have much much bigger installations in production (may be thousand times bigger) and they are quite positive about our product.

I'm not sure about real problems that prevents you from using it and experiencing its advantages, but I would like to hear from you what these problems are. I hope most of your problems are just misunderstanding or miscommunication and I could help you with this.

Originally posted by olsh
Therefore, the correct period between public release of new version and public release of upgrade is _2 months_ (not 14 months as you wrote).


Oleg,

Just to clear up. The 14-month is not written by Randy, but by me, and it's in relation to HSPc 2.0 to 2.1 upgrade, and not HSPc 2.1 to 3.0 upgrade.

Congratulation on the good job with HSPc. We are looking forward for a better HSPc, especially with the Windows VPS integration! :D

Hey olsh!

Thank you for misquoting me, one of your tiny and insignificant customers. And yes, your code still does not offer the functionality of ours in terms of Virtual Hosting which we would need, in order to convert clients from OUR code to your platform. It is wonderful that VPS's can be controlled and that a root user can do whatever they want, but you guys had that going back to the beginning days of Virtuosso.

Now I know I am such an insigificant client so it really doesn't matter what I say, even if it is true, so I will stop saying it, perhaps one of these days we will be able to use your product for something, I'm sure we will get quite a few accounts when your thousands of times larger clients have to tell their users that the control tool just doesn't do things that they expect and they must to elsewhere for their hosting needs, but for now I gues you guys are on top of the world.

At this point, in all honesty, I can say that paying for your software and going through the training, install, was very close to pissing in the wind.

To the SW-Soft team ... thanks for the smooth 2.1 to 3.0 upgrade! :agree:

Hi,

In all fairness we got an upgrade from 2.1 to 3.0 from SW-Soft, it was not real smooth, strange things were wrong. We are still trying to resolve how to get Plesk inside a VPS defined and operational in templates, and they are not recalling the Ticket number, etc.

I just want to make it clear the objective of my posts here. $8-$10K is not a tiny amount to shell out, these guys are getting it from every opening account, and there are horror stories. I don't think they deserve it if that is the case, I want the small, insignificant hosting companies that work their butts off for $10K to be warned about the potential, BEFORE THEY SEND THE CASH!

As you can see in olsh's reply that basically I am an insignificant, grumpy user which was far from accurate, my opinions are based on direct, inside experience (I bought the stuff just to test it) with SW-Soft.

Also, in all fairness, we are trying to get the software working and creating a business model around it, just to not let that effort go to waste, it may work will for what it does, once we get things smoothed out, but that can be a harrowing experience as all support seems to be done from Russia and with the language barrier, etc, things take quite a while, not sure how the large, thousand server installs they brag of get their support, could not possibly be through the same channels us pip squeaks get it through.

There, label me grumpy, ignorant or whatever, I did get it out.

-katz

Ok, back again, and to you who are reviewing HSPc / Plesk as a potential platform I feel obligated to share (in all fairness) an email sent to my sales rep at sw-soft today:

PS - If you think I exagerate too much, this just came across my desk, I had forgotten about the progress for a week or so:

----------quote from Cube------------------------------
Also, just got all vps packages lovely with plesk and added the 5.0

https://cp.sw.simplicityhosting.com/store/

I tested all of them and setup a test with every package and they all
installed perfectly with plesk. Man that was annoying.
----------quote from Cube------------------------------

So you see, in only around a month or three we got:

1. HSPc upgraded to current.
2. Some of the bugs fixed.
3. The ability to offer HSPc VE's with Plesk on as a default working and templatized.

Now we can actually think about finding clients who will need/want to use such a thing (oh yeah, that dream back there) while your thousands of clients and Major Partners are all marketing away with their $100K/month budgets!!! :)

Large corporation or not, anytime a major release of package comes out you will want to wait until they work out all the bugs before putting it in a production environment. Not their fault it didnt have all the features you wanted, and everyone wants bug fixes rushed out but that's not how they're found. :)

I do however see some bugs in panels that just never get fixed.... Kind of frustrating sometimes

neofree - thank you for the kind words but hardly the concern here if you read the thread and associate the dates and WHAT I was requesting...hehe. We know enough to always wait for a good while for things to be tested before trying to use them, and then a while before we use them on production machines. :)

neofree,

Could you please PM me the short list of the problems you've been faced with... I would like to take a look at them and make sure they will be fixed in a timely manner.

However, if you've submitted tickets regarding these problems, then most probably they will be fixed in upcoming release of HSPcomplete 3.1 (we are in the process of reviewing and fixing all the bugs reported by our customers in 3.1/3.2 releases).

olsh: apologize for confusion, i dont use hspcomplete, i use h-sphere