Hello web hosting gurus,

I am a newbie on the subject and I would like to ask the never ending question of which could be better cPanel or Plesk. I have read a lot of forum threads in order to be able to ask a complete and consice question, and this is what I have noticed; From 2002 to today I have seen a swing towards Plesk as plesk matures. cPanel still comes out the winner in most threads, but not on all. And none of the threads I read talk about Plesk 8.

Mind you we have already painstakenly installed all the services we require manually, in our servers to support hosting, we do not have some sort of automation tool nor control panel. So getting our hands dirty hacking some of the issues of the control panel, is not a big big problem, it is a nuisance.


So without further a do, here are my concerns:

1. Which one can handle individual software upgrades. For example we run Apache 2 whith some specific modules. In the case of using a control panel I would like to be able to update the versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache, Postgresql, Tomcat independenly and so on.... Very often we decided over a hosting package (before our own service) because it had updated versions of the packages mentioned above.

2. Which one can handle the user account administration better. For example billing, quotas and so on.
2.1 This is a side question- but can anyone point me to some sort of tool that can bind to the control panels and have the whole registration process automated. Fill user info-> Add domain -> Pay -> Send Email to User -> Activate account.

3. Which one can handle a distributed system better. We already have our DNS servers set up, and a machine which acts as a mail server, and we would like to use these separately from the web server.

4. Security Concerns

5. Do any of the two handle domain registration? If not, is there any tool that does. We have already be been accepted as a registras for the top level domain .gr . And would like to handle domain registration.


6. Easy of backup automation

I hope my question is as complete as it can be, and I hope I am not being a complete newbie asking these.

Thank you for your time in reading


PS- Sorry about spelling and grammar mistakes

1. Which one can handle individual software upgrades. For example we run Apache 2 whith some specific modules. In the case of using a control panel I would like to be able to update the versions of PHP, MySQL, Apache, Postgresql, Tomcat independenly and so on.... Very often we decided over a hosting package (before our own service) because it had updated versions of the packages mentioned above.


Currently cPanel doesn't support Apache 2 in a "Released" version. Plesk uses all default packages available and they can be fully customized. When customing in cPanel for some specific packages not supported by cPanel itself things can become very interesting.

2. Which one can handle the user account administration better. For example billing, quotas and so on.

They both handle it about the same, although Plesk tends to support having more user information directly in the Control Panel. NEITHER of them is a billing system.

For either one of them I would recommend ModernBill, especially where you are evaulating two of them and ModernBill supports both.

2.1 This is a side question- but can anyone point me to some sort of tool that can bind to the control panels and have the whole registration process automated. Fill user info-> Add domain -> Pay -> Send Email to User -> Activate account.

www.modernbill.com

3. Which one can handle a distributed system better. We already have our DNS servers set up, and a machine which acts as a mail server, and we would like to use these separately from the web server.

www.atomicrocketturtle.com he has built a wide variety of items like this. In reality both should be able to handle it no problem if configured properly.

4. Security Concerns



5. Do any of the two handle domain registration? If not, is there any tool that does. We have already be been accepted as a registras for the top level domain .gr . And would like to handle domain registration.


Plesk does via Myplesk.com, but i would recommend using something such as ModernBill or another billing system for domain registrations.

6. Easy of backup automation


Both have decent integrated backup solutions. Plesk has 4PSA's total backup available and I believe there is now a 3rd party one for cpanel also (dont' quote me on the cpanel though as I'm not positive).

Thank you for your prompt and detailed reply, I will look into the billing system you suggested.

Does anyone else want to say something?

If i were you, i would take a good look at directadmin.

Is it really just a matter of personal preference ?

Thank you all for your replies, I do have one follow up question.

Which one is more complete to bind your own scripts to. For example mordernbill is a very complete package. But I would like to try and create my own customer forms and so on. So I would build, the information request, the credit card charge, the confirmation system, and then I would like to be able to bind to the panel and create the new account, is this possible? Or is it a non existing functionality. If it is, which has a more robust and complete API that we can use?

I'm not sure on cPanel on this one. I know it supports full account creation, same as plesk, except it requires the use of an encryption key.

Plesk has two different options, one being an XML based system the other being a shell based command system.

I know with Plesk you can do everything in plesk just about outside of the control panel using shell commands.

I'm fairly sure you could with cPanel also, but I'm not completely positive as they do not use a standard database system. They use multiple flat files to track everything. (unless this has changed recently)