Hi,

I know licenses for hosting panels are expensive, but why don't you make a Control Panel yourself (or hire a programmer to do it). Is it so hard to do?

Jacco

something akin to what writing the first windows 3.0 was.

A panel is like a GUI that sits on top of the OS and allows you to preform multiple commands with the push of an icon so to speak.

Just as with dos you had to do 10 commands to get a list of files in a dir, where as in windows you can do the same thing with a few clicks of a mouse. A panel creates file entrees modifies Apache etc with ease. Where the same things might take you 20 minutes to do by hand.

Writing a panel is not that small a feat.

But if you have a year or two and are really a good programmer, the hosting world is ripe for a good one.

Monte

yes i beleive its so hard to do. its not just simple commands and stuff u know.

So it is very complex to do, and that's why there are only a few companies doing it? But isn't te Cpanel software made by one person?

Jacco

I'd do it, but I'm too damn lazy. :(

It's not so much that it's hard, but it's very time consuming and requires many months of development and testing.

I wouldn't put CPANEL or ENSIM or PLESK etc up there with writing Windows 3.0... a wee bit of an exageration!

But certainly the effort required to write one, even on a one off basis, is not something most hosters would want to take on themselves.

Some do however - Pair.com is one example, they have their own control environment for their all FreeBSD hosts and some 130,000 shared and dedicated accounts. Clearly for them it was worth it.

Also somewhat easier, when writing a control environment for one platform (FreeBSD) and one client (Pair). Not to trivialize it - it surely was a number of person-months of work.

I think that the main reason is time and experience. A control panel is a large project and can't be done by someone who just knows php or perl. They need to be well-rounded and understand the under-works of the system that it will frontend for. Usually a control panel is programmed by a team. Our control panel which is due out soon is done by this. We hired a team of 5 programmers who were well experienced in their fields.

I think that if you are going to do something like this. You need a big reason. Its not something that someone can just put together. Pair is a good example. Another example is Donhost :rolleyes:

Thanks

But isn't te Cpanel software made by one person?


That true?

It is not impossible for one person to create a control panel. I did :). Of course, more people working means the product will get finished more soon.

Neo3net: are you making a win or nix control panel ?

nix

... AFTER you written the panel. Ask Greg (Jay) from HostGUi... :)

hehe

Daniels (DONHOSTS) panel is cool (BSD / WIN2k) I am pretty sure he wrote it all himself as well.

Yep I wouldn't advise writting your own panel its a bit of BIG job. But I tell you something... You'll learn so much its untrue.

Cough!! ... NIX maybe 2k :cool: soonish Shh :D


Gareth

Originally posted by Gareth

Daniels (DONHOSTS) panel is cool (BSD / WIN2k) I am pretty sure he wrote it all himself as well.


Correct, he wrote his own Control Panel. It is written in Perl + requires mySQL. It works with RedHat I believe.

ME writing my own right now! :)

I'm also writing one for my servers. It now has all the basic stuff. Adding users, email aliassen etc. All changes are directly progressed by a PHP deamon.



Though I'm having 1 BIG problem. How do you people handle Datatraffic??

Originally posted by Starhost

Though I'm having 1 BIG problem. How do you people handle Datatraffic??

Good question, it had been discussed to death on some other threads before. But it seems that most control panels parse log files to obtain traffic information.

But is this also the way to do it?? Because when you prase the logs. What about email transfer and / or ftp.
You can log ftp traffic easliy but I don't know a real solution for the email. (I'm using exim).

Apache => TransferLog ?
FTP => depends on which one you are using... I am using proFtpd and it has log file.

With Qmail all the data is written to log files you just have to write a script to process that data. For sendmail incoming email traffic information is logged but the way this is done is NOT simple. Log processing for sendmail can be done and is discussed in the O'REILLY book funnily enough called Sendmail. As for POP I understand that the POP daemon used with sendmail and packaged with Red Hat etc requires a hack otherwise it doesn't log sufficient information.




Gareth

Originally posted by Monte
something akin to what writing the first windows 3.0 was.

A panel is like a GUI that sits on top of the OS and allows you to preform multiple commands with the push of an icon so to speak.

Just as with dos you had to do 10 commands to get a list of files in a dir, where as in windows you can do the same thing with a few clicks of a mouse. A panel creates file entrees modifies Apache etc with ease. Where the same things might take you 20 minutes to do by hand.

Writing a panel is not that small a feat.

But if you have a year or two and are really a good programmer, the hosting world is ripe for a good one.

Monte

Id have to say this is the most realistic and accurate post here so far. We came up with the concept of ours in Nov 2000, work didnt begin until sometime in 2001 and we finally now getting somewhere in 2002 with a viable product. If you dont have 2yrs and multiple hands on it, I would say don't bother if you intend to compete in the open market. If you are just writing up a few mods for your own use that you don't intend to sale, then go for it.

If you dont have 2yrs and multiple hands on it, I would say don't bother if you intend to compete in the open market. If you are just writing up a few mods for your own use that you don't intend to sale, then go for it.

It's real easy to patch a few modules , make a simple inteface and get the basic stuff runnnig. But if you're doing it commercially and want it work with the many various packages out that, well..thats the tricky part. Add in your basic reseller modules, and all those small little stuff ...it tends to get complicated. And not to mention very time consuming ... However, if this is something you enjoy doing and take it like a hobby, then this should keep you pretty much occupied for the next few years :-)

I've been working on automating hosting on our servers, it will probably be a while longer before I'm finished but I've already got 2 pretty cool features working in it.

The first one is simplifing how sub-domains works. Instead of having to add them as needed, you just create a sub-directory on your website.

Example, yourdomain.com/forum/ could also be reached at forum.yourdomain.com. Or even yourdomain.com/forum/category1/ at category1.forum.yourdomain.com. This could go as deep as required.

At the same time it searches for the domain requested in the database and returns what drive it is hosted on.

The second feature is that instead of using log files the server logs all requests to mysql, it even tracks what server served the file and if the client is a new visitor or not (just checks if the ip address has been on the site within a half hour or not).

Just thought I'd mention these features for people who are coding their own software and if anyone wants to expand on my ideas.

are you doing those subdomains with a cloaking technique?


-mat

Yes, I wrote a mod_perl script that runs in the URI Translation phase of Apache and sets the path to the requested file.

Works exactly the same as if the sub domains were setup as virtual hosts (not like those stupid hidden frame type solutions)

Also, the logging feature is a mod_perl script ran at the Log phase of Apache, which is ran after the request has finished and sent to the client.

I'm writing my own cp also. I kinda had to with mail and database hosting being on seperate servers. But I'm using mod_accounting (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-acct) for collecting inbound/outbound bytes of Apache traffic. For ftp, I'm parsing through PureFTPd (http://www.pureftpd.org/)'s logs.

Erik