Hi,

Does anyone here use the VHCS control panel?

http://www.vhcs.net/
http://www.vhcs.net/vhcs/en/about/online_demo.php

Iv'e been playing around with a demo of it for the past half hour or so, and I must say it seems absolutely great! Especially for free! Iv'e been looking for any good free control panels all day, and this seems to have the professional touch. It looks fantastic and it's very easy to navigate.

It has many advantages over other panels, mainly it's free. It also feels as good to use as Plesk 7+, and makes CPanel look like they're conning us all out of our money (there's been alot of hostility towards CPanel lately, I've grown to hate it too, thought I may aswell add that).

However, iv'e never seen a host using VHCS before. What would be the down side of using it? Has anyone thought of converting over? Is anyone running it on their testing server? It's protected by the Mozilla Public License, is there anything nasty in that?

And my big question, how do they make money from it? I would feel alot more secure if they somehow made money, they don't seem to have an honour system or donation system. Does anyone else feel the same about installing a freeware app for something as major as the whole control panel running the backend (and frontend I guess) of your company?

It just seems so professional and great, I bet customers would think it's alot more professional than CPanel too.

Cheers,
Shockuk.

MPL doesn't seems like a problem to me, after all the GNU/Linux kernel and most of it's utils are licensed under GPL which is a more strict license than the MPL is.

In any case as long as you only use it you really don't have to be concerned about the license.

I'm happy to see it become a Free/Open Source Software as previously they only released the interface code but kept the source of the Engine to themselves.

The interface is really nice and it's really have a potential to get some market shares that WebMin (WebAdmin) couldn't get because of it's interface that was too complicated for many end users.

Are there any automated billing systems around that support VHCS?

Originally posted by shockuk
Are there any automated billing systems around that support VHCS?

Not any that I know about, however since (now) the full source code is available it's not a problem to do anything you need/want etc.

Originally posted by secureserver
Not any that I know about, however since (now) the full source code is available it's not a problem to do anything you need/want etc.

No, you'd need to get a custom coding job done to integrate a billing system with VHCS, as it seems they only support the more well-known, non-free CPs.

VHCS can be integrated into modernbill easily - I've done it before

its seems low in features but it seems good to..would it work with the Centos OS? and any long reviews to ready from any of you?

Shouldn't this thread be in the "hosting software" forum? It's not about dedicated servers...

Hey, just been researching VHCS today, looks VERY promising

They make their money on custom builds and custom developments for clients who can't do the modifications themselves.

As far as donations, they set a price for the new features they're going to put out to the public, and how much they want in order to release these new features... once the pool is at 100% they're satasfied for the recoup on development time.

Not to mention people like myself who support open source. Im in the process of setting up another box with fedora core 3 and testing out VHCS... if its good and i like it, i'd have no problem shelling out $100 or more in donations.... considering i was "willing" to spend $800 on somethign else.