Guys of ASL I wish to share a though with you.

Why don't you create a web hosting control panel from scratch ? I believe that you have done an amazing work with ASL and seems to me that you have more than the needed skills to do so. I would be more than happy to pay for a control panel of yours. If it is off course offered in a reasonable price for an end user to buy sole rather than getting it from an ISP with the server and combined with the Atomic secured Linux.


I am so sick and tired of plesk ... All we get from parallels is problems and bugs. Nothing more. Even when they create an upgrade which supposately solves problems they create new ones.
Also they charge every single thing their control panel has. For the love of god I cant even remove the banner of virtuozo and parallels because its not in my license ! How crazy is this ?

I hate to say that Cpanel has become better by far than plesk in my opinion. I have a box with cpanel 2 years now and never troubled my mind actually. When plesk comes to my mind I start having headaches.

Have they forgotten in parallels the reason someone buys a control panel ? You pay for it or get a server with it in order to actually not having to be "fully" the administrator of the server and you show them trust by giving them the power to actually in many ways administer your server. And not to break it. They ask for money for support in their webpage. Who will pay us the money for the hours we have spent over the servers trying to find ways if you find one to solve problems they have caused ?

Regards

That would be a step backwards for them since the are the Original Creator's of PLESK. I do agree that ParraHell's has been lack in quality but i doubt you'd catch Scott and Mike going back to the business of being CP GODS.

Why ? Why would this be a step back ?

I know that they created plesk and then sold it to parahells as you said.
Back then plesk was a good and pro cp. Now its turning every day more into a junk.

Who wouldn't pay for a simple fast and secure cp ?
After all ASL allready patches the system and the services. And exactly because of their experience with plesk I believe that for Scott and Mike wouldn't be that hard.

I want a control panel that I would first of all know what is going on into the server when I do something. I really have no idea what plesk does. The best part is that usually not even parallels knows what it does and this is why they cant even release a patch for simple problems that are resolved even months later. Or they simply dont give a damn about end clients of their control panel and only support specific ones.

I have seen problems with plesk that are just crazy. And the idea of a broken server with plesk on it freaks me out simply because if this happens and when it happens there is almost nothing you can do about it than bang your head agsainst a wall.

So why would this be a step back ? I think the opposite.

And I really dont care about resellers etc. Simple stuff. Administrator and clients. How hard can it be for Mike and Scott ?

Just ment that they've been there and done that, and with ASL and their other ventures it would probably be a stepback business wise. because it's not the direction they have been going since selling plesk plus starting a New CP from scratch would probably take away from ASL and their PG company considering the time and input it would take to go that route.

Its a lot of work Plus we're shareholders in Parallels so we'd kind of be working against ourselves there. I do see a lot of the right changes coming from Parallels in the last few years, smaller releases closer together and the way igor is handling the forums.

I only want to quote for parallels. I have a plesk server for almost a year. And that because some people ask for plesk. But I have suffered from parallels... And when I even read their user forum all I see is clients frustrated with them. And what bugs me the most is that there isn't actually support for Plesk. People are describing the same specific problem. They give out a reply that they will solve this issue and months pass by until they do so ...

Well the good news is that independent of plesk, we can solve some of those problems. Like updates to atmail, proftpd, spamassassin, clamav, etc.

I for one appreciate the complement. We did create the first multi-user CP (Plesk) and I know we could do it again. Something to think about. Its a shame that Parallels isn't keep you guys happy.

Regarding cpanel, we're working on a cpanel aware installer for ASL so we can make it easier for cpanel users to install ASL.

I think companies that create cp's have totally "lost" the image.
They are lucky just keep us hostages due to users prefer in a cp or due to the isp's deal with a specific cp company.
Wish there was a simple and efficient cp in the market today.
And you know what? I need to spend sooooooo much time to try understand what plesk does or try to understand up to a point what it should probably do that if you start from scratch you could create a simple cp of your own actually. And I really don't want to do either one of these 2.


Regarding parallels it seems they have focused on other products and have forgotten about plesk. Seems they keep on selling it just to say they are This is the image they project to me and many other people who post on the internet. But trust me when you get pissed off with a company you will for sure try to avoid like hell buying something from them again. Its worse according to my opinion to ruin their name with what they are doing to plesk over the last 2 years.
It's really a pity guys. Could you help out by giving us some executable fixes to run in shell for plesk bugs?

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Cpanel :

Ahmmm... That would be nice but I am curious. Cpanel is a "wanabe" lets say, asl by itself. Meaning it patches its self and the OS - services and does things that plesk can't do. Plus it has support for about 100 more features or options if you want than plesk.
How will these 2 cooperate without being a chaos ?
I would really like to try this product if you make it.


In my opinion consider making a simple cp. . .

cpanel is barely functional chaos I suspect they spend an awful lot of time re-inventing things that other people figured out (redhat, fedora, debian, etc) a long time ago. Result being exactly what you noticed... integration with cpanel is very very difficult. They dont follow any standards, and they dont use any kind of package management.

So a lot of the really powerful things we can do on a normal box, we won't ever be able to do on cpanel.

If I were to do a control panel company again it would look a lot like Plesk does now. The big changes I would make would be in not encoding the web front end, and having a well documented framework for 3rd party modification like SugarCRM does. The back end utilities is where youd do anything that needed keys, etc. Basically exactly what ASL looks like right now, we want you to get inside the web interface and make changes (and send them to us!).

Yes, Plesk is a mess right now.

For an ideal hosting control panel, the gui should be a stand-alone thing, with a database back-end, all interfacing to absolutely bog-standard distro-supplied rpms for mail, web, etc. Parallels (or rather SWSoft) did lurch in this direction at one point (on Scott's suggestion, if I recall) and things improved massively. But the momentum was lost and they seem to have stopped progress and stuck with propriatary qmail, and non-functioning postfix, and whatever other things that won't let Plesk work with Apache 2.2.

Talking of Apache, I can see that the hard bit is to keep things working when (for example) a new version of apache comes out that uses different config files or commands to an older one. Webmail integration is probably a problem too, as is phpmadmin and so forth, but with a bit of thought surely it can't be too difficult to arrange for everything to work together, especially if you make sure the "configurators" were GPLed and therefore when something new comes out, someone can adjust or even create a configurator that looks at the standard install and config and adjusts it as appropriate.

Webmin is a good example of an OS-independant configuration editor, and there are "hosting control panel" plugins for it. But the gui is quite frankly awful and the facilities limited. The best thing about Plesk (to 8.6 at least) is that the Gui is very good indeed. I'm not so sure about 9.x.

In fact I have to be honest and say that with 9.x Parallels and its insane need to SAAS everything up really seems to have lost the plot. They have already lost literally $1000s of dollars worth of business from my company alone. And while that's not going to make a difference, when you multiply that by all the other companies similar to mine, it all adds up to a very substantial amount. Maybe that's why their QA sucks these days .

It is like what Dell is doing at the moment ... the RAID cards they are going to release from now on won't work with normal SATA or SAS drives. ONLY ones you buy from Dell. Essentially a lock in that makes your hardware potentially useless the moment the warranty runs out. Although it might in theory increase Dell's revenues, in practice it is going to put smaller and medium companies off Dell completely, and revenues will decrease. Parallels is kind of doing the same thing by pricing itself out of the small business market (not to mention screwing the product up completely).

Faris.

You know... I don't know why I didn't think of this before but the whole xmlrpc API system would let you create a control panel using the existing plesk back end. That does cut out a lot of the work

The API is the best thing with Plesk. It's very powerful. It would be interesting to build a new CP/interface by using the API.
However, Parallels Summit 2010 is next week. We might learn more about Plesk 10 (and if it uses the new intuitive SMB-interface). Maybe they have something up their sleeves...
If someone here is going to attend the summit, don't forget to report back! I want to know everything about the Plesk roadmap

My picture of Parallels is very clear, I actually have it on my harddrive... let me show you...

If you use the plesk API to create a new web interface this will solve some issues like the terible banners that you cant wrip off if you dont have a licence and make some things simple for the admin and the user ... On these aspects it will be very good.

But ... In the end of the day ... You'll still have parallels creating new bugs and issues in the system ...

But as the phrase in my country implies ... Better something than nothing. If you could do it would be fantastic !