Valorin.net_

Valorin's Thoughts

Less sense than many, but more than most.

An Epic Conflict is raging in our backyard...

There is an epic conflict which is raging right in our backyard. Some people are completely oblivious to it, and others have chosen their sides. I've chosen mine.

But what is this conflict?

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"Plesk or cPanel? Which is the best hosting control panel?"

I work for a webhost who offers both Plesk shared hosting and cPanel shared hosting. So when I was a Customer Service Representative (Support tech), I had to deal with both for most of my shifts. From an "I have to use this thing every day" point of view, I know which one I wish I could eradicate from our servers!

Here are a few reasons why I don't like cPanel (&WHM):

• Total lack of any design sense!

  Everything in cPanel is in the SAME level, all the options are mashed together onto one massive page which makes it hard to find things. Sure, there are groupings, but some of them aren't logical! It just looks really messy and is hard to use.

• Lack of continuity between the sections

  Each option/section has its own unique design, it feels like someone has taken a pile of independent scripts and mashed them together.

• Lack of useful features through customer end

  The big one with this is DNS management, the cPanel user has no option for this. Why not??! It'd save a lot of staff time if it could be enabled and left to the customer.

• All its configuration is done direct to file

  We have lost count of the number of times cPanel has stuffed up a line in the httpd.conf file, or rejected mail because it failed to add it to the localaliases file.

• and finally...

• The automatic updates always break something!

  Every time cPanel push out an update, something breaks without fail. Oh, and they keep changing the WHM DNS manager, each time we get an update, this interface changes to something with even more bad AJAX, which takes longer to load and is harder to use. Seriously, when you have a customer on the phone wanting a simple IP change in their DNS, you do NOT want to wait 10 minutes for your browser to finish crashing from some bad AJAX!

There are plently of things I don't like about cPanel, the above list features a few of them.

Here are a few things I don't like about Plesk:

• Everything is hidden in its own folder, and not found in a common location.

  This makes doing a restoration from a file-system backup very painful and time-staking!

• The Backups are in their own format

  For a novice user, it makes the backups useless. There are some programs to extract the data, so if you know what you are doing it is not too much of an issue.

• Migrations often have issues with appvault installed scripts

  Plesk comes with Application Vault which is their effort to fight Fantastico (cPanel's version). The problem is, it isn't updated as frequently and sometimes the scripts installed through it will break during a migration. When migrating an entire server fleet, this causes many problems!

• Jumping around between different sections within Plesk is a little clunky

  The interface is very 'Application based' where you are on a single screen. Opening multiple tabs isn't something Plesk is designed for.

There are some other small annoyances, but yeah. That is all I can think of.

The verdict... I completely despise working with and in cPanel. Give me Plesk on each server, and I'll be happy.

I know all the cPanel lovers out there will start crying foul (or just start crying for real), but I challenge you to use both Plesk and cPanel daily for a year, and then tell me which you prefer.

That is all, thank you for wading through my semi-rant :)

~Valorin

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:48:25 +1000
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