I work for a small software company, and we're realizing that we have a product that would integrate very nicely with a control panel. Our problem is that limited resources forces us to make certain decisions based on the size of the market.

Does anyone have any idea of the number of installations for the various control panel vendors? I keep seeing references to cPanel and Plesk, so I assume that they're the biggest - is this correct? Any ideas on how to get more information about the size of this market?

At Hosting business i think CPanel is the leading one, but this opinion is not based in any market study.

Regards,

Any ideas on how to get more information about the size of this market?


To gauge relative popularity, you could:


Survey WHT's shared hosting offers section.
If you list the last 100 different companies to make offers there, and note their control panels, you'll have some idea of the percentages. (among shared webhosting providers on WHT ;) )

or,


Call up several large datacenters, and ask them for the control panel percentages on their servers.

Yer i would say that cpanel is the biggy then followed closly by a couple of other companies.

To gauge relative popularity, you could:


Survey WHT's shared hosting offers section.
If you list the last 100 different companies to make offers there, and note their control panels, you'll have some idea of the percentages. (among shared webhosting providers on WHT ;) )

or,


Call up several large datacenters, and ask them for the control panel percentages on their servers.

Im pretty sure WHT already has this information available since they run surveys quite often. I would recommend contacting inetinteractive to see if they can provide you some stats. You might have to pay for that info though.

Actually since ll (parallel = pair of L's) owns almost all major control panels (hsphere, ensim, plesk, etc) other than cPanel now, I would imagine they are the biggest CP company. However, cPanel is likely the biggest individual CP.

I agree with Webdude.

here is an interesting archive thread: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-258629.html
I think WebDude is probably spot on with his comments

Actually since ll (parallel = pair of L's) owns almost all major control panels (hsphere, ensim, plesk, etc) other than cPanel now, I would imagine they are the biggest CP company. However, cPanel is likely the biggest individual CP.

That is probably true, but if this discussion were about which control panel is the best... :stickout:

I see more and more only want to order a specific hosting package if it comes with cPanel, it's very popular, but expensive. I think cPanel company is one of the biggest one in that industry although.

I prefer to use cPanel for our clients, we have never had a problem with it. Their support is oustanding and their quality product is unbeatable.

Agreed, cPanel has the largest share of the control panel market.

I would say cPanel, with Directadmin and Plesk behind it.

cPanel is absolutel leader in hosting control panels.

Plesk is popular in windows based serversonly and it is rather slow. Plesk will loose it popularity when cPanel would come with its windows based contril panel.

I have been using cPanel and plesk both and cPanel is easy to use comparatively.

smithsa, you must integrate your product with cPanel so that you can capture more of your market.

Thanks everyone for your help, it is very much appreciated.

From your responses and a bit more research, what I'm hearing is

1. cPanel
2. The Parallels family of products
3. DirectAdmin

Does this seem right? I know that 1 and 2 are possibly ordered the other way around, but for my purposes it doesn't really matter so much.

Anyone care to make a guess at #4? In truth, 3+4 are the most interesting to me right now since I can test the waters with them before going after the big guys.

Thanks everyone for your help, it is very much appreciated.

From your responses and a bit more research, what I'm hearing is

1. cPanel
2. The Parallels family of products
3. DirectAdmin

Does this seem right? I know that 1 and 2 are possibly ordered the other way around, but for my purposes it doesn't really matter so much.

Anyone care to make a guess at #4? In truth, 3+4 are the most interesting to me right now since I can test the waters with them before going after the big guys.

cPanel is #1 and the best around.

cPanel is #1 and the best around.

As far as control panels yes, as far as hosting "solutions", no. For publicly available hosting solutions, Hsphere is best. Where cPanel only runs a single server, Hsphere controls an entire cluster of servers of any size and almost any specs, both linux and windows.

So cPanel is exactly what it claims to be, a server Control Panel. Hsphere is a total solution for ALL your servers. I'd have to say right now as far as size, since LL has bought out the majority, that ll and cPanel are running pretty even.

Now.... ll seems to be starting to lose business because of poor management of all the panel companies they have bought out. However, if they get their act together with a combined product that is comparably or only a little more in cost compared to cPanel, then cPanel is going to have to do some scrambling. The worst thing that can happen to cPanel is that ll releases a multi-server panel solution that is comparable in price to cPanel. Hsphere alone blows away cPanel as far as features. We use Hsphere for our own virtual hosting, but dont offer it for dedicated servers, only cPanel now. The reason for that is the difficulty of Hsphere compared to cPanel..... and that is exactly the advantage cPanel currently has and why it got so popular, not to mention that while more costly over time, it is a far cheaper upfront cost.

Right now the future of Hsphere is unclear. ll is not good at communications, which is another thing cPanel excels at. This is coming from someone who once hated cPanel (chek my previous posts about it) because back when it was fairly new, it was actually junk..lol. It had so many problems that we lost too many clients due to it and almost closed our doors. But after recently trying it out again (due to customers wanting it on their servers) I see it has come a long ways in it's improvements. Interface still sucks as it always did, but at least it functions great :P