Hi There,

We have around 1000 hosting accounts and quite a few being added every month. We're moving them all onto a couple of Virtual servers which will be more cost effective and scalable.

However, I'm having second thoughts as inevitably very soon we will be expanding to three servers and the administration and management becomes messy and difficult as customers phone up ask for a change and it'll take five minutes to log into the right place to get editing it.

If we could have one single point of management then it would make life easier and now's the time to do it if possible. I've looked at WHMCS but this seems a bit more like a billing system from what I can make out. Do any of you have the same problem and what advice would you give?

check out Interworx

Do you mean 1000 hosting accounts on single server?

No i was thinking more that we would have several servers but only have one control panel.

Ideally we'd be able choose where to place a hosting account on server 1 2 or 3.

What does your hosting control panel involve ?.

If you are looking at a complete Noc management, you can use hspcomplete by parallels.com

Well I was trying to avoid all the billing stuff as that's handled seperately anyway. Interesting you mention parallels I was originally looking at plesk expand which allows centralised management of plesk servers, but we were advised away from plesk in favour of cPanel. We've been managing it all in virtualmin up till now but our clients want more features and more control so we want a nice place for them to log in.

did you check Hosting Controller panel (http://hostingcontroller.com) from which you can manage several linux/windows machine panel in a single cluster.. And it allow to distribute servers roles (web/dns/mail/db) with each other.

Yes I checked that out as it looked pretty good, however, I think we're going to go with WHMCS after some internal discussions.

Do any of you guys know if it is possible to hook the Easynic Reseller API up to WHMCS?

WHMCS is a billing solution not a control panel to manage servers. You should use a control panel which have integration of whmcs. And hosting controller is about to release the integration in a month.

True but we can create a user with a particular package in WHMCS and have them automatically set up on the relevant cpanel installation can't we?

Yes you can.

But this is total opposite to your actual query, where you wanted to manage multiple web servers in a cluster. Using Cpanel you can't do that.

I don't think I mentioned a cluster. It's the setup and management of the customer accounts that gets difficult so I don't believe it's opposite WHMCS just has a lot of features that would be unnecessary (for our purposes). Some of them could ultimately prove useful like the domain registrar setup and the action hooks that we might be able to incorporate into our existing order system.

How about Parallels H-Sphere?

well reading this particular thread didn't inspire confidence in H-sphere: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=868031

Greetings:

While Parallels has a huge amount to learn about putting the customer first, and proactively communicating, H-Sphere still works for a multi server environment.

Thank you.

In InterWorx 4 there is a new feature that lets you run multiple MySQL servers through one centralized InterWorx install, as well as a clustering feature. It's worth checking out.

Greetings:

While Parallels has a huge amount to learn about putting the customer first, and proactively communicating, H-Sphere still works for a multi server environment.

Thank you.

I heard that Parallels closes their office in Lviv that was developing H-Sphere for last 9 years... :confused: Have you heard about it? And also support team will be closed as well :crazy:

WHMCS might help you with this. Go to there website and speak to one there support they will respond and have a answer for you.

All the best

But this is total opposite to your actual query, where you wanted to manage multiple web servers in a cluster. Using Cpanel you can't do that.

How about DirectAdmin, would it be possible to use DirectAdmin to manage multiple servers in a cluster?

I heard that Parallels closes their office in Lviv that was developing H-Sphere for last 9 years... :confused: Have you heard about it? And also support team will be closed as well :crazy:

Where did you hear that?

I would love to see this, but it's not ready now. Currently, it's supporting for external mySQL, DNS server (requires an extra DA license).

How about DirectAdmin, would it be possible to use DirectAdmin to manage multiple servers in a cluster?

with a bit of investment and some knowledgeable techs you could do a distributed cPanel setup. Host mail, dns and MySQL on seperate clusters and make use of centralized SAN storage for disc.

Finally, which one did you choose?