I have been asked to include a reseller section to my control panel by many people. I was wondering if the reseller section is really that important. I was planning on leaving the reseller section out but adding it in a future version. Please let me know if its better to release the control panel as soon as possible without the reseller section or to wait till I have finished the reseller section aswell.

I think you should wait and write a reseller part.
Many people don't like Ensim because the lack of a reseller feature.
If they've added one I think much more hosts will start using Ensim, as offering reseller packages is pretty standard for webhosts.

Ofcourse you can always write an addon later, but don't make it thousands of dollars more expensive like ensim :)

Just my €0.02 :)

I think I will add it and get it over with.

Reseller functionality is a must if you ask me! Most hosts got reselers., Further more reseller accounts are very usefull for people that got more then 1 package with you. That way they can easily maintain everything.

vselvara,

Just a suggestion, but maybe add an advanced authentication system with ACL's and a heirarchical access structure. Then you can have accounts that can be "owned" by more than one user. As an example, I give you this:

Admin
|-- Joe (webmaster: domain1.com)
|-- Fred (webmaster: domain2.com)
|-- George (reseller)
| |-- George (webmaster: reseller_domain1.com)
| |-- Suzy (webmaster: domain3.com)
| |-- Brenda (webmaster: domain4.com)
| |-- Chris (webmaster: domain5.com)
| | |-- Paul (end-user: email, ftp, ~paul)
| | |-- Judy (end-user: email, ftp, ~judy)
| | X
| |-- Gregg (reseller! tiered!)
| | | Gregg (webmaster: reseller_domain2.com)
| | |-- Lenny (webmaster: domain6.com)
| | X
| |-- Frank (webmaster: domain7.com)
| X
|-- Jeff (webmaster: domain8.com)
X

Hope that isn't too confusing. Basically, the root of each node has admin control over everything beneath them. So admin controls everything, Joe controls his own site as do Fred and Jeff. George on the other hand is a reseller, controlling many sites of which his own customers also control. Gregg is a unique person, being a reseller of a reseller! Chris also has some end-users (Paul and Judy) tied into his account that have their own email, ftp, and web space.

Yup..

DizixCom,

Thank you for a detailed explanation. I have the database tables structured so each site table has a field for siteadmin id. I will have to modify this since one site can have multiple site administrators. By default user 'admin' is a siteadmin for all sites. I like your idea of the multi-tiered system (a reseller under a reseller).

My confusion is, how am I going to display a list of sites for the server administrator? Should the server admin see a list of all sites on the server. Or maybe a list of all sites followed by the username of the creator. I want to do it as simple as possible so it does not create too much confusion to the user.

-Vinay

V,

look here: http://mockups.dizix.com

Look at the first image, "view account" and then the next image "view george". This illustrates a little on how you can use a drill down approach allowing the highest level in the heirarchy to get into anything beneath it.

When George logs in he'll be presented with every one of his accounts, which he can drill into. But the System Admin account can drill all the way down into any account.

Based on the hierarchy I presented previously, when "Chris" logs in, he has only access to his sub-accounts "Paul" and "Judy" which are really just email/ftp/~<name> accounts associated with Chris' virtual site.

Dealing with heirarchies can be real confusing. I've been doing teleco billing for the past few years on a rather large scale so I have a lot of experience with dealing with these types of scenario's. If you need anything explained in more detail feel free to PM me, I'll try and put it into better words than I am doing here.

Good luck.

I think that was a neat suggestion (or demonstration) of a control panel. If the user has an option of a big-ass tree view (like DizixCom has) of the current setup, I think it would be more user-friendly if not good looking :)

Then again, I'm just a lame windows user :D

DizixCom:

HostFlow does that (www.starflow.com). It doesn't support infinite levels but that is very troublesome to administer.

It supports five levels:
-Admin
--Wholesaler(s)
--- Retailer(s)
---- Client(s)
----- Domain(s)