Cpanel and Fantastico

Does DreamHost plan to add this tools some day?:
cpanel
and fantastico?

Because it would be great if this tools were available in DreamHost

Regards...

Fantastico isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I, personally, don't like it. It requires one DB per application (meaning, you can't have more than one app if you're only allocated 1 DB). It doesn't use tablename prefixes.

Dreamhost has something like it, better and more configurable. It's OneClick installation, under the 'Goodies' tab. You can use an already existing DB, or a new one. And I'm pretty sure it uses table prefixes, but I hadn't used it personally.

I can say I'm pretty sure they will never implement cPanel and they already have their own Panel, the entire Dreamhost panel; https://panel.dreamhost.com/

What is it you like about Cpanel? We have our own web panel so we have no plans to ever use Cpanel ourselves but we may be able to incorporate some specific features you like about it. Is it just familiarity with the interface? We obviously couldn't add in that 'feature'. 8-)

Since we have 100% control over our own web panel we are able to add in features requested by our own customer base in a way that we think best serves you. We think that's worth the extra effort we have to put in to maintain it ourselves.


- Dallas
- DreamHost Honcho

I like Dreamhost's panel (I wont say better than cpanel, but certainly not worse) except for Speed.

cPanel changes (at least on my current host) happen immediatly, but Dreamhost's panel changes take time to propogate through the system.

-Jason

I40.com - Home Page
MP3Mystic - Personal Streaming Music server.
(Links to my sites are always appreciated)

///// Does DreamHost plan to add this tools some day?:
..........////////
I register in forums, and talking about this post I opened:

I see some good advantanges in cpanel because:
*You can use cpanel to install scripts very fast, or you can use phpmyadmin to edit or install new stuff manually (so, both features are available)
*There are a lot of Open source Scripts in Fantastico (about 47) and they already come with language Packs (example: spanish)...
*Cron jobs are just one clic
*Backups, Restores and change of host are pretty fast, so, if I use a cpanel hosting company, and want to move to another host with cpanel, It is just needed to provide login information of my cpanel, to my new hosting, and they move all very fast
*Uninstall of scripts are fast too

Now, about what you say:
"It requires one DB per application (meaning, you can't have more than one app if you're only allocated 1 DB)"

Of course I dont like a hosting that offer only one DB, I have seen some cpanel hosting companies, that offer unlimited DB (so, this is not a problem), but I have not found I cpanel hosting company with good bandwith and price like DreamHost, thats why I told It would be great if DreamHost could offer some day cpanel


Regards...

Offering Cpanel would take an enormous amount of trouble and expense. It's extremely expensive ($1250 per server) and has specific requirements with regard to how your systems are set up and what software you can run.

Cpanel is the kind of thing you have to know you want ahead of time so you can plan your system accordingly. You can't just drop it in to an existing setup (because, for example, it has to be installed on a fresh OS install).

Reducing the amount of time between making a change in the panel and when it is activated on the server is something we are working on. It is one of our long-term priorities at the moment. However, it would be very difficult for us to make changes happen immediately like cPanel.

cPanel runs directly on the hosting server itself (from what I understand) so when you make a change it can perform the action right then and there directly on the server. We specifically designed our own web panel and back-end system to be centralized with a central database that the hosting servers do not have access to for security reasons. Since there is very little important data on the hosting servers, each machine itself is relatively unimportant. We can very easily swap in a new piece of hardware in the event of a system failure and use our back-end system to configure that new piece of hardware as an exact clone of the old one using the information in our central database. That action can be peformed with or without physical or network access to the failed machine. All of your important data is hosted on high availability file servers so it is unaffected. Likewise, in the unfortunate event of a server break-in the attackers do not have access to any of the central data, and when we are notified of the break-in by our system we can replace the affected machine with brand new hardware and a brand new OS in about 20 minutes.

So, since our database is isolated from the hosting servers changes made from the panel have to be sent to the hosting servers and activated. Those activations go into a queue and take a little time. We have the time for the one-click installs down to always less than 10 minutes and sometimes less than 1 minute and we are working on getting that accomplished for the majority of our other services as well.

The developers of cPanel have done a lot of good things with it, but we very much like being in full control of our software as much as we can be and we believe the extra security and fault tolerance of our own system is worth some of the extra overhead and time involved in setting up services. We also don't like paying any per-server fees for anything we use as that would not allow us to offer the great prices we do now!



- Dallas
- DreamHost Honcho

cPanel didn't exist when we were first developing our own panel, or if it did we had not heard of it. It was definitely not as popular as it is today.

Also, cPanel only handles the server management and does not integrate the accounting and billing side of things. Our web panel fully integrates everything together and we feel that provides a richer experience overall.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Honcho

Im not advocating cPanel, like I said your home grown solution is nice and I really don't have a prefrence between it and cPanel except for the delays.

(I'm not a fan of having every mysql database be a seperate subdomain, but I understand that was done for load ballancing, and it makes sense).

But there are integrated cpanel/Accounting/billing solutions. Client Exec, cPanel and windows host manager seem to work very well together. It would also give you the advantage of being able to sell reseller accounts...

-Jason

I40.com - Home Page
MP3Mystic - Personal Streaming Music server.
(No longer hosted with Dreamhost)

Ah, good to know!

Our own system actually does have support for reseller accounts with full 'private label' branding built-in but we decided to not offer them after we did a poll of our customer-base and didn't get much interest. That support was written into our software about 3-4 years ago. Little known secret!

Anyway, there is basically no chance of us switching away from our own web panel software. It would be extremely expensive in money and time for us to make any switch of that sort and it would not best serve our customers. This feedback is very much appreciated!



- Dallas
- DreamHost Honcho

I was with a cPanel host before I signed up here, and it was the fault tolerance issue that led to the switch. (Long story short, a hardware failure led to my site being down for 2 weeks.)

So, just out of curiosity, I went back and looked at what cPanel features I used that aren't available here. I did use the cron panel. Instant database creation was convenient, of course. I used disk usage viewer, but that's hardly an issue with the current quotas. (it's basically "du.") I never used Fantastico, because I was at the database limit. There was quite a bit more preinstalled software (Awstats, SpamAssassin, Horde, various Perl and PHP modules.) This was probably the biggest difference, for me. (I installed them myself, although it took some effort.) That's about it.

Yeah, I know cpanel is expensive, that is bad...

May be in a future it will be cheaper

My suggestion to DreamHost, is in a future to offer a second hosting plan (A cpanel one), and keep current plans also.

So, in this way, customers will be able to chose which one they want, and how much to pay fo it...

Just a Suggestion
Regards...

I never knew that... what a well kept little known secret.

I think I'll head over to the suggestions page and put that one in.

And for the record - I LIKE the web panel!

In reply to:

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I think I'll head over to the suggestions page and put that one in.

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and I'll vote for it :D

happylittlethings.com

In reply to:

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cPanel didn't exist when we were first developing our own panel, or if it did we had not heard of it. It was definitely not as popular as it is today.

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I can remember cPanel back till aprox '97/98 time frame myself. They've been around for a while. I know an old host of mine used it back when I was with them from '99-'02.

Besides, aside from the Speed issues of the current DH panel, custom built software is always better as you have full control over the code and you know exactly what you did and why (well .. if you used Perl, maybe not, but close!).

In reply to:

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Also, cPanel only handles the server management and does not integrate the accounting and billing side of things. Our web panel fully integrates everything together and we feel that provides a richer experience overall.

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This is true. Doesn't do any accounting of any measure.

Hi again

About:

In your Control Panel, go to Home/Suggestions.

Thanks for your detailed explanation, Dallas. This is very helpful.

By the way, I see that you have shown up more often lately. I wonder if it would be a good idea for you to wear an Admin badge or something. You ARE speaking in official capacity, right? Thanks.

I will add my feelings on Cpanel (coming from a Host that use to use it).. Basically I found Cpanel to be more than a tad limiting and was delighted that DH did not use it!!

My two major sources of concerns with the entire CPANEL concept was around the lack of any meaningful Site Statistics tools that I could never get to balance anyway. Under a CPANEL host it was hard to almost impossible to get access to your realtime raw logs, error logs via programs, if you had access at all..

Plus The cpanel concept of a subdomain is a subdirectory on your main hosting account *Shudder* which I quickly learnt to hate making organising a site just really horrid

The lack of real time changes is a limitation but for scope DH panel leaves CPANEL far far behind.

Oh as for Fantastico would not touch it with a barge pole, (and yes I have utilised it before).. The (installation) scripts tend to be a hack, poorly configured and I just hated the way they would pile all the applications into a poorly controlled DB.

I have found through many years of sometime hard hosting experiences that the better way is to do it yourself with a host that allow you to be in control.

Yes it means getting your hands dirty but you are in control, and not at the mercy of some thrown together cpanel change or some hacked installation script poorly documented / tested and mass released to the public.

> By the way, I see that you have shown up more often lately. I wonder if it
> would be a good idea for you to wear an Admin badge or something. You ARE
> speaking in official capacity, right? Thanks.

Most of Dallas' recent posts have used the "DreamHost Honcho" designator on his signature (that means he's one of our company's 4 co-founders). Not enough? I think that makes it fairly clear.

I am happy that Dallas is dropping by here more often, though!

- Jeff @ DreamHost
- DH Discussion Forum Admin

> Not enough? I think that makes it fairly clear.

I guess if you would "allow" him to use your "A" yellow flag and color his name red, then we could identify him from afar. :)

> I guess if you would "allow" him to use your "A" yellow flag and color his
> name red, then we could identify him from afar. :)

D'oh. It's not often in life that you get to have better system access than your boss, and you just ruined that little perk for me. :>

As of now, Dallas has admin privileges, and any of his messages from now on should have that flag next to them. If he starts deleting your messages willy-nilly, though, don't say I didn't warn you. :P

- Jeff @ DreamHost
- DH Discussion Forum Admin

> As of now, Dallas has admin privileges, and any of his messages from now on should have that flag next to them.

On second thought, perhaps he could have something like an "H" (Honcho) flag instead of an "A", just like Nate has his "M". ;)

Hi
My suggestion is not to remove Dream Host Panel

What I am suggesting, is to have the cpanel options,
maybe have cpanel separately
or add some good things from cpanel, in DH panel, like Fantastico
Yeah, I know there is "One Clic Installation", but only with 5 scripts, vs 47 or more in Fantastico (including other language packs)

I know that is better to do everthing manually, but that is usefull at beginning, when you already know how all works, is a lost of time to repeat all steps installing all manually

Because if you are against these, you are against "One Clic Installation" too.

Well, as I said, my suggestion is not to eliminate DH panel, just add another feature, optional (cpanel), and who wish to use it, just could do it, and who doesn't, just don't use it.....

To have the option, is the suggestion

Regards....

Tenoch,
Are you willing to pay for the License for cpanel?

-Jason

I40.com - Home Page
MP3Mystic - Personal Streaming Music server.
(No longer hosted with Dreamhost)

Hi Jason

Like I told before, my suggestion is to have the option
If the cpanel option is going to have another price, so be it...
One would choose wich plan and wich options would be better....

"I am alredy paying for another hosting with cpanel"
but what I dont like about it, is the limitations in bandwith, and that hosting dont have upgrade options....

If my page grows and grows, I will have to move that site to another hosting, and it will be a lot of work for me, so, it would be better to find another cpanel hosting, with upgrade options...


"I am already paying for cpanel"

That answer your question?

Regards....

A one-time license fee for cPanel costs $1250 per server. I'm sure you would be willing to pay the extra $ per month to cover that, but I don't think there are enough DH customers who would be willing to pay the extra money in order to cover a $1250 license for each DH server.

So

I must pay for aditional services in dream host, to be available for all?
I must invest for improvements? myself?

am I going to get paid for it? am I going to get DH Revenues?
am I going to be part of Dream Host?

C'om !!!

I think what you are suggesting me, is a crazy thing, as are my questions above

I made a suggestion to DH, they will know if is good for them or not... but, what you are suggesting me has no sense

If DH offer cpanel, they would offer another price for that plan, obviously....
DH would analyze if is good, considering advantanges vs cost

But if I paid for cpanel for everyone, cpanel plans in DH would be the same price...

Do you want me to pay for programmers, to improve services or add new features in DH?

anything else you wish?

Regards...

Well, as for cpanel being an "improvement", I'm not sure I can agree with you on that. While "quirky" at times, and a bit confusing until you get used to it, the Dreamhost panel is sound, functional, and even a bit elegant. Often when something is new to us, it seems inferior to what we are familiar with. If we don't take the time to learn the "new" we will never really know whether or not it is "better" than the "old".

As for Dreamhost installing cpanel as an "option" or a "different plan", I very much prefer a single system for managing stuff on a shared server to having multiple systems trying to manage the same resources. While virtual server management may not be true "rocket science", it *is* detailed, and therefore, can be complicated and "tricky". The Dreamhost panel, while always able to benefit from incremental improvement, works well. If it is not "broken", please don't try to "fix" it a server where I share space. I don't need the extra aggravation. :-)
rlparker

> ... and even a bit elegant.

To be frank, I like CPanel WITH RVskin. That creates a REALLY professional look.

But I also agree that the talk about even having CPanel as an option is not particularly constructive, esp. when you know these guys (whom I honestly admire their passion and "geekiness" in web hosting) have spent uncountable hours in developing their own control panel.

In reply to:

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I like CPanel WITH RVskin. That creates a REALLY professional look.

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From a web professional's standpoint, the visual design of the control panel is only relevant when giving a client access to it, which I never do anyway. Otherwise, I couldn't give two hoots what it looked liked, as long as it functioned properly. DreamHost's control panel offers almost unparalleled functionality, and is thus worthy of praise.

The existing control panel is very well specified indeed, but it does suffer from serious performance issues. The internet is a fast-moving world, and the control panel seems archaic in this context.

It occurs to me that it would be sensible for DreamHost to begin development of a complete replacement of the current control panel - one that blends the existing panel's functionality, with rival panels' performance. The task is a considerable one, but I definitely feel it is worth consideration if DreamHost wants to be a leader in its field.

With that in mind, I'm off to the suggestion box on the control panel...

> To be frank, I like CPanel WITH RVskin. That creates a REALLY professional look.

And one thing I like about CPanel is their private branding. And with RVskin, customizing "your own" control panel is *snap* - just like that.

> From a web professional's standpoint, the visual design of the control panel is only relevant when giving a client access to it, which I never do anyway.

LOL! Our posts actually crossed (I mean my second post here today).

This is exactly what I like about CPanel: now my clients could have their own control panel, so customizable that I can choose not only what functions they could have but also what info they could view.

With RVskin (hey, it sounds like I'm a RVskin salesman), you can even create new pages within the control panel on the fly.

You can also customize access according to your hosting plans. For instance, for entry level clients, I only grant them very limited access to e.g. stats or bandwidth meter; and for higher plans, they could even add an extra domain or two.

To tell the truth, I have been waiting for this flexibility, and my business is now taken to the next level with that. :)

> It occurs to me that it would be sensible for DreamHost to
> begin development of a complete replacement of the current
> control panel - one that blends the existing panel's functionality,
> with rival panels' performance. The task is a considerable one, but
> I definitely feel it is worth consideration if DreamHost wants to be
> a leader in its field.

I'd be hesitant to recommend a complete re-write, considering the sheer amount of work that went into the panel in the first place. You guys don't see it, but there's an immense amount of code in it.

While we geeks have a tendency to want to rewrite code to make it better, the true fact is that existing code is often far more stable and world-tested than new code - at least in a short term. Given that it pretty much took us 2 years and countless man-hours to get the panel to the usable state it's at now, I doubt that we would commit to a complete rewrite.

Fact is, we've actually already made pretty significant strides in improving panel performance. Since DH2 came out we have increased the number of customers we host by a factor of 10X (or more), and the panel actually is significantly faster for most people than it used to be. It's just that more people are using it (we've been adding hardware pretty consistently, too).

There are places where it could use improvement, but I'm willing to bet that just a fraction of the development hours it'd take to even get a new panel to do half of what our current one does would provide an equivalent speed-up.

On that note ... Usually, the panel is pretty quick in my experience (an yes, I host a lot of sites here - nice perk, free hosting!). Are there any specific places where it seems to bog down more than others? Can you provide rough estimates for rendering times in those cases? This sort of feedback can be helpful, for certain.

- Jeff @ DreamHost
- DH Discussion Forum Admin

As a hosting customer, I really don't have a prefrence between cpanel and DH's panel except for the delay from when I make a change, to when the change takes effect.

As a reseller, I LOVE the ability to give my customers access to a branded (rvskin) cPanel of their own. Add clientExec on top of it, and it's a nice little package.

It's also nice I can control their panel from my account, so if they need help creating an email account, or a database, or editing .htaccess I can w/o having to relog in.

But, the reseller comparison really isnt fair since thats not Dreamhost's market. There is no way, as a reseller, you could use dreamhost and hide that you are being hosted by dreamhost to your customers.

-Jason

I40.com - Home Page
MP3Mystic - Personal Streaming Music server.
(No longer hosted with Dreamhost)

In reply to:

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On that note ... Usually, the panel is pretty quick in my experience (an yes, I host a lot of sites here - nice perk, free hosting!). Are there any specific places where it seems to bog down more than others? Can you provide rough estimates for rendering times in those cases? This sort of feedback can be helpful, for certain.

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Actually, my comment about performance is probably not completely accurate. With CPanel, changes like "creating a database" and "adding a domain" occur instantly. With DreamHost's panel, these happen in a matter of minutes (and sometimes hours), which leads me to think that the tasks are not fully automated (they are requiring human intervention).

> Actually, my comment about performance is probably not completely
> accurate. With CPanel, changes like "creating a database" and "adding a
> domain" occur instantly. With DreamHost's panel, these happen in a matter
> of minutes (and sometimes hours), which leads me to think that the tasks
> are not fully automated (they are requiring human intervention).

Actually, they're fully automated as well - if they weren't, we'd probably have a few hundred employees, highly skilled in the art of pushing buttons to make things happen. :>

The reason why there is a delay in some changes/additions is because of the way our system was designed (and would be unlikely to change even with a full panel rewrite). With tools like cpanel, a copy of the administrative interface is installed on each and every server. This means that (relatively speaking) changes are rare, and updating things immediately after someone clicks a button isn't going to be a huge deal. It also means that it's a bit more difficult to keep track of things if you have a few hundred servers, and that if the machine goes down your panel goes down with it.

On our system, there is a centralized server (actually, a pool of load-balanced servers) that is responsible for nothing but the web panel and pushing out changes. When changes are made, they are recorded into a database and - periodically - services go through and make all of the changes as needed (basically, it's a periodic batch operation of sorts).

If we do this too often, there's significant chance of causing load/stability problems on each of the individual servers. If we wait too long, people get annoyed.

I guess the assumption on our part has been that most people aren't going to need to actively use most of the services that take a while to come online, and that in a lot of cases other unavoidable slow-downs (ie. DNS updates) will mask those delays anyhow. Obviously this isn't always true - I know that I for one have used my Super Duper Level of Access™ to manually push out updates because I'm really impatient as well (Yes, I can hear the cries of "cheater" from the bleachers!).

Of all the small and not so small delays that you have to wait through, which ones do you all think are the most annoying? Of those, how long do you think is an acceptable amount of time to wait for updates to occur? There are technical considerations that could make it impossible for us to speed those processes up (to the degree you want them to be), but I'm still curious as to what you all consider the most maddening of delays...

- Jeff @ DreamHost
- DH Discussion Forum Admin

In reply to:

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Of all the small and not so small delays that you have to wait through, which ones do you all think are the most annoying? Of those, how long do you think is an acceptable amount of time to wait for updates to occur? There are technical considerations that could make it impossible for us to speed those processes up (to the degree you want them to be), but I'm still curious as to what you all consider the most maddening of delays...

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I only have one...changing passwords on email accounts...my 'not-so-brilliant' clients keep forgetting their emails when they go change them themselves and I have to go reset a new password for them...they complain that they need their email up NOW...

Yes, it's their fault...but I get to hear the complaints...

mostly, I think the services are relatively quick here...I mean I can set up a database, and by the time I have the info in my config file and the file uploaded...my db is up and running.

In reply to:

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Of all the small and not so small delays that you have to wait through, which ones do you all think are the most annoying? Of those, how long do you think is an acceptable amount of time to wait for updates to occur?

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Well, I don't think I should have to wait for anything. </sarcasm>

On a serious note, I think that anything related to password changes should be more or less instantaneous. Nothing should really take more than a few minutes, in an ideal world.

Now. How much is a Super Duper Level of Access™ going to cost me?

I think the one thing about the speed of the panel that I don't like is how long it takes to get a mysql database up.
I wouldn't mind waiting 10 or even 15 min, but for the few database I've set it up takes closer to a couple of hours. At first that was really frustraiting, but now I know to set up the database, go to sleep and finish the install in the morning.

(I was just informed that my fiance set up a new mysql database earlier this week, and it was functioing in 7 min or less, so maybe this isn't even a issue any more)

The new mysql panel is nice, much easier to handle than before. I really like that part of it.

Another thing I seem to be having problems with, is that I have set up an other account to log into my panel, but they don't get announcements and newlestters sent out to their E-mail address. And yes, I have doubled checked that the user is set to recieve all levels of stuff sent out by DH. I even changed the E-mail address that was set up with the account, and recieved notices of the change, but still nothing else. All in all it's still a cool feature though.



-Matttail

Changing email passwords takes a long time, for sure. There are technical reasons and they basically come down to a sorta dumb design that hasn't scaled well. We will be redoing the back-end that handles that to make fast (within a few minutes, probably) later this year.


And mysql databases should actually be fairly instant now with the new MySQL area in the panel. I believe it creates the database right then and there when you create it.


We love feedback like this!

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder