I understand that most hosting company likes cPanel, but which control panel do the customers like? Do they care about it?

I started hosting just a few months ago and I'm using Ensim. I had 2 clients so far who cancelled their accounts because of the control panel. I'm just wondering if I could get more new clients if I could offer them cPanel. Since my first server is not even close to be full, I wouldn't really need to buy a 2nd one, but I would if I knew I could get some new clients because of it.

I think a lot of people like cPanel because it has many more feature...but I also think it has many more bugs and has updates extremly often. I did prefer cPanel, but now I have a Plesk 5 server and I truely prefer Plesk 5 now over cPanel :)

:emlaugh: CPanel...

When I was a customer I found CPanel very easy to use...

I believe customers like CPanel because it's easy to use and is feature filled. We just got a CPanel server to increase sales as we have Ensim machines but people seem to be requesting CPanel :)

What percentage of your customers are educated on panels (this question is for everybody)?

I mean if you are selling sites to the local businesses or some guy who wants to put up a site of family pictures and such, do they really request any specific panel. I showed Ensim to some people who don't know anything about hosting and they thought it was really neat how you could admininster your account online through a panel.

Also, what percentage of your customers are net savvy and request certain specs or panels, and what percentage really don't care?

Originally posted by JonL
I believe customers like CPanel because it's easy to use and is feature filled. We just got a CPanel server to increase sales as we have Ensim machines but people seem to be requesting CPanel :)

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about. I guess that people ask for cPanel, but have you actualy increased your sales with buying this new server?

Originally posted by 7out
What percentage of your customers are educated on panels (this question is for everybody)?

I mean if you are selling sites to the local businesses or some guy who wants to put up a site of family pictures and such, do they really request any specific panel. I showed Ensim to some people who don't know anything about hosting and they thought it was really neat how you could admininster your account online through a panel.

Also, what percentage of your customers are net savvy and request certain specs or panels, and what percentage really don't care?

Yes, that's a good question. However I think 95% of my customers like Ensim, or they don't care about it at all. The real question is how many potential client I loose because of not having cPanel.

it's not so much to do with the things the control panel package has in it, it's how it looks and how easy it is to use.

for customers that don't know anything about it, they really don't care. they just want to have easy access to it, and have the ability to get what they want done quickly without having to look at help documentation and try to figure out how to do something.

i would think that the best control panel package would be one that was very clear, simple to use, offered the client the ability to do everything they need to do (and have paid for of coarse), and i should also look nice.

We just completed a small study with several non-users that included plesk, cpanel, and ensim. we quickly found that people understood what was going on faster with Cpanel and liked it better. Enough that we're switching completely to cpanel. No information on experienced users. Gets muddied because people get used to a panel and will like it better a lot of times even if its worse.

Kind of depends on who your target is though.

How many people did this study include?

I've often thought of using Cpanel instead of Ensim, but I use Miva for my shopping cart and with Ensim it's just a click in the panel to turn it on and Cpanel doesn't support it officially. Miva also does not support Cpanel installs.

I know people have gotten it to work, but I don't like running a server that people are paying for accounts on that is run with a bunch of hacks. I'm worried that if I hack it up to get Miva running that when Cpanel autoupdates it will bring all the Miva sites down. I can't have that.

Originally posted by 7out
I know people have gotten it to work, but I don't like running a server that people are paying for accounts on that is run with a bunch of hacks.

Are you using your Ensim without any hacks? I think it's almost impossible :)

thats a good point about ensim and cpanel.


how many people did your study include skelley1? were they all 1 demographic?

Ensim without hacks?

I use 3.1.1 with the fixes installed by the datacenter.

The only customizations I have done to it are through apache.py which is supported by Ensim and these changes are not altered upon upgrading and do not pose any security risks. The main thing I did is add the ability to add subdomains. I also installed Webalizer for stats because the stats package with Ensim stinks.

I guess these are hacks though. What I was trying to get accross is that I don't want to offer anything to paying customers that I have hacked that is not supported by someone else. If Miva is going haywire, I have support from Miva.

I try not to customize beyond the point of having support for the customization. I just don't like to do anything that will be lost upon upgrades, or anything that will void my upstreams support of the panel. I guess I mispoke the first time, does this make more sense?

We asked a total of 12 people to try out different software and give us an idea of what they thought. In exchange they got free hosting. They could use whatever they liked best. Certainly not enough to be a scientific study, we just needed to have a direction to go with our new servers and wanted to know the best course to start with. We'll be doing more extensive testing later. This one was just to give us an idea of what we wanted to test. Kind of a test to see what to test thing. We are more familiar with Cpanel than the rest so we decided to stay there. Had we seen an appreciable difference in the learning curves of the other software above Cpanel, we would have looked more closely at this time into training and software. We found just the opposite.

Our particular target demographic is small business owners in their 30's-50's, particularly chosen because they were not very computer literate. All test subjects in this pretest happen to be male. They will not be in subsequent tests. Our next study will be scientific and methodized. We just needed an idea for now.

Another interesting thing BTW is that people had a tendency to like the first one they tried. We'll have to build in controls to compensate for that next time.

i would love h-sphere.

We were using Cpanel for almost a year and half, then we switched over to Hsphere. The customers love the new control panel a lot better then the old one. They like that they have control over what they want to add to their account and its instant.

-Chris

Just go to the Web Hosting Request forum and you will see the majority of requests require CPanel. We certaintly did not get CPanel just because WHT members like CPanel but because our own customers like CPanel better as well.

Plesk (specifically Plesk 5) is certainly the preferred control for the type of client we attract. Cpanel with its XController/Fantastico theme might work out well eventually as well, but Plesk gets our vote right now.

Cheers

Gary

We asked a total of 12 people to try out different software and give us an idea of what they thought. In exchange they got free hosting. They could use whatever they liked best. Certainly not enough to be a scientific study, we just needed to have a direction to go with our new servers and wanted to know the best course to start with. We'll be doing more extensive testing later. This one was just to give us an idea of what we wanted to test. Kind of a test to see what to test thing. We are more familiar with Cpanel than the rest so we decided to stay there. Had we seen an appreciable difference in the learning curves of the other software above Cpanel, we would have looked more closely at this time into training and software. We found just the opposite.

Our particular target demographic is small business owners in their 30's-50's, particularly chosen because they were not very computer literate. All test subjects in this pretest happen to be male. They will not be in subsequent tests. Our next study will be scientific and methodized. We just needed an idea for now.

Another interesting thing BTW is that people had a tendency to like the first one they tried. We'll have to build in controls to compensate for that next time.

And the result from the surveys was CPanel? :confused:

cpanel is the best.. Our customers love it, we were planning to shift them over to h-sphere about 8-9 months back but the customer feedback was in favour of cpanel..

Originally posted by progex


And the result from the surveys was CPanel? :confused:

"Had we seen an appreciable difference in the learning curves of the other software above Cpanel, we would have looked more closely at this time into training and software. We found just the opposite. "

Cpanel was easier for them to learn. Although if they started with another software, they tended to like it better. Not enough subjects for a real study, just tendency for cpanel to be easier but you could work with any of them.