I've noticed it has been a long time since a poll of all the Linux based Control Panels have been done.

We see plesk/cpanel/directadmin or cpanel/hsphere or plesk/hsphere but no one has done a poll with them all.

I'm curious as to see what people are choosing today and why.

Personally I prefer plesk. Less issues, easier to teach clients, less questions from clients, more intuitive, than any other I have found. And it's rock solid on my servers.

I do local hosting though so I deal with my clients directly in person so teaching them something is fairly easy.

But which one do you prefer and why?

Would a mod please move this to Control Panels? Sorry I put it in the wrong forum. :(

Originally posted by l.stevens
Would a mod please move this to Control Panels? Sorry I put it in the wrong forum. :(

Done. :)

Lois

One that isn't on there - Helm - is my choice for Windows hosting.

Ignore last post - didn't read it was a Linux poll :)

One that isn't there is Interworxx

Since switching over to Hsphere for our linux AND windows servers, we couldn't be happier. Steep learning curve at first, but we absolutely love it.

i tried Hsphere for a while - it reminded me of modernbill...way way way to hard to use :)

Greetings:

Out of the list, H-Sphere is the only one that provides complete hosting automation for the provider, reseller, and the end user customer.

Thank you.

Hmm .. Larry if you had offered the poll with multiple choices ;); I would have then selected DA, Plesk and Hsphere.

But as it is limited to one choice, my vote goes to Hsphere :)

Hsphere is the only that provides it as a single product. But it also limits you compared to using 3rd party products if you read up on it.

Personally my opinion is let a hosting control panel company do what they do best, make a control panel, then let the billing ones do billing, and support do support. You end up with each product being more robust than an all in one solution.

And I know for fact that at the moment Modernbill has more features than hsphere's biling system.

Greetings Larry:

The caveat is having multiple systems to maintain and learn; and then the headaches when problems arise where each product vendor points the finger at the other product vendor.

In terms of billing, we've found H-Sphere's billing system to be accurate and easy to use that we use it for all billing purposes including the managed services we provide to our clients.

Thank you.

Actually, I deal with Plesk and Modernbill. I've never seen a finger point and then point back between those two. When Modernbill has pointed there finger at Plesk they responded with fixing the problem.

And I have played with Hsphere's billing, it's lacking in Gateway support and Registrar support along with some TLD support and other areas I found. It would never work for me and wouldn't work for others.

I never said it didn't work though. But Modernbill is not that hard to learn, and neither are control panels in general for the most part. And you are still learning 2 things no matter how you look at it with Hshpere. The only thing you are not doing is integrating them, as that is already done. You still have to learn the ins and outs of it's billing system and then learn all the ins and outs of the control panel itself. Just because it is integrated does not make it any easier to learn.

Greetings Larry:

See http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation/devel/registrar_sdk.html and http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation/devel/merchant_gateway_sdk.html if the score (20) of merchant gateways and eight (8) domain name regisrar (aka OpenSRS, eNom, All domains, etc.) are not enough <smile>.

Thank you.

I have looked at them, took me a while to sort through it and actually figure out which registrars and gateways are supported, but I did.

I looked at Hsphere in depth originally and found it lacking in many areas.

I never said it isn't a good option for some, I am just pointing out the things I disliked about it.

Hmm, I really don't understand how we could be lacking in merchant gateways and domain registrars compared to modernbill.

We support 34 payment gateways, 7 online payment systems (like 2checkout & paypal), and 7 registrars (not considering email registrar).
We have way more gateways support then what Modernbill supports.

From dealing with customers wanting both of these control panels. I would have to say that cPanel is our most preferred control panel. Most of our customers use WHM Autopilot for their dedicated server billing software, and cPanel seems to be the only control panel that will work with WHM Autopilot, true???

Originally posted by NOCSmart
From dealing with customers wanting both of these control panels. I would have to say that cPanel is our most preferred control panel. Most of our customers use WHM Autopilot for their dedicated server billing software, and cPanel seems to be the only control panel that will work with WHM Autopilot, true???

Yep .. Its true ! Speaking in terms of any external or an independant billing software, I think modernbill is a good one as it is compatible with number of control panels.

I dont think it would be right to compare modernbill and hsphere.. Yes it is a positive feature of Hsphere that it has built in billing system :)

Personally I am very fond of Plesk and InterWorx. However, having said that, my clients prefer cPanel so it’s what I use. I like both Plesk and InterWorx because of their clean interface, their ease of use and because they have all the features which I consider important in a control panel.

Also, I agree that the poll should have been multiple choice, and I believe you should have had the “None of the above” option since you have missed quite a few off your list.

Originally posted by A. Paige
Personally I am very fond of Plesk and InterWorx. However, having said that, my clients prefer cPanel so it’s what I use. I like both Plesk and InterWorx because of their clean interface, their ease of use and because they have all the features which I consider important in a control panel.

Also, I agree that the poll should have been multiple choice, and I believe you should have had the “None of the above” option since you have missed quite a few off your list.

Yes even I second that the thread should have been multiple choice.

The results would have been more crystal clear ... is what I think :cool:

Originally posted by l.stevens
Personally my opinion is let a hosting control panel company do what they do best, make a control panel, then let the billing ones do billing, and support do support. You end up with each product being more robust than an all in one solution.


I very much disagree with that. It just added more complication that what's worth it/needed. Take for example a support ticket. Sometimes, you need to login to customer CP to check few things. Or obtain the customer account name to check the customer root directory on the server.

With HSphere, customer can open a support ticket from their CP. The techs that review the support ticket can easily know which ticket the account belongs to and can easily login to the customer CP to start checking things or obtain the customer account name right away. Now, if you use third party support ticket, then customer will have to tell you their account name and domain name. If not, you will have to ask them first and wait for their reply. Or you can also try to search the customer name on your list of customers. Until you have the relevant information, you will then be able to login to the customer CP or login to your server and start checking customer files, etc.

Same thing with billing. There is not reason why there should be an added complications with billing. All the customer info/record and other activities (additional bandwidth, etc) are already recorded in the system. The best billing software would be what's provided by the Control Panel system. You rely on third party billing system, etc. What happens if the control panel developers (e.g. CPanel) chooses to start changing how customer database are written? It's not their duty to make sure ModernBill works. It would be ModernBill's duty to make sure their software works with the most recent version of the Control Panel software you use. For me, it's just relying on something that can very easily break. With HSphere, you know the billing system will work as they are the who provide the billing system for you.

Integrating Ticket and billing system to the control panel is HSphere feature. HSPComplete also have the same features. Regarding Billing, I love HSPComplete way of doing billing. One of the best around!

Now, I am not sure why after so many years, CPanel features are still so limited. Perhaps they are busy fixing bugs on their software. All other Control Panel is introducing a lot more than what CPanel does. HSphere seems to be the only control panel that supports Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and VPS. Interworx seems to be the only Control Panel that integrates load balancing quite easily (HSphere load balancing / fail over is done with NetApp and seems to be more complicated and costs quite a bit lot).

Talking about HSphere, not only it seems to be the only control panel that works under Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and VPS, upgrading applications under HSphere is very easy. Once they release Apache upgrades, for example, you can run the script and it will run the apache upgrades on all servers with Apache (e.g. web servers, mail server, CP, etc). How will you do apache upgrade with CPanel? Do you still have to upgrade your apache on your servers one by one?

Furthermore, HSphere also do clustering quite well. Adding more server (web, database, mail, etc) to HSphere is quite easy and the Control Panel seems to be very scalable.

For me HSphere saves times and money. We spent 6 months researching the many different Control Panels in the market back in 2002 and decided to switch from CPanel to HSphere. One of the best decision made and thus, one more vote for HSphere!

The polling is a little flawed for this I believe. Many of those control panels won't function on Windows and a couple can. That'll cause all Windows hosts to vote for either H-Sphere or Plesk.

This wasn't for Windows choices. There would need to be three polls all seperate to cover it properly, this was linux only.

There would have to be a Linux Poll (as above), a Windows Poll, and then a combination poll of the panels that run on both Linux and Windows (i.e. hsphere, plesk, ensim)