Goodbye!

[Rocky@]

After over two months of nightmare, but with much hope to see the goodness at the end, I finally liberated myself from Plesk, and came to say goodbye. I realized that I couldn't continue to lie to myself that I could save time and do good business using Plesk.

In my opnion, Plesk builds its business on smart marketing and pretty interfaces. It also sucks you into dependency because they do things differently from the industrial standards. That's good for them, but not good for us.

It takes some courage to realize that you are trapped, and that you must let go the money you invested in it and leave. As I move my sites to CPanel, and everything sets up in much less time and easily, the co-dependent part of me makes me miss the torture of Plesk. But the real me says, "Boy, what a fresh air!"

I gave up on Plesk five years ago. This time I came back with much hope, but still have to leave with disappointment. Maybe in another five years I will come back and try again.

BTW, I am not a kid. I am over fourty with advanced degrees and a business owner. My advice is to keep the consumers needs in mind, not just the webhosts. Even though us, the webhosts, are the ones that generate profit for you, ultimately we have to look out for our end users. We have to switch to whatever is practical for them, and save time for them and ourselves.

My best wishes to Plesk!

Sam

 

[WebCTRL]

Well, I must say that I have just about enough too...!

We spend more time managing PLESK bugs and upgrade problems than taking care of business.

We invested all in PLESK products. The worst is Expand ( what a waist of money...talk about co-dependencies. nightmare - do NOT get Expand..even it is FREE......DrWeb no better.)

All our next servers will be CPanel and we are going to migrate our customer slowly out of PLESK...in the near furture.


Like you say PLESK is just pretty and that is IT!

 

[Cranky]

What problem(s) do you have with Expand?

 

[Rocky@]

Hi Cranky,

I knew you'd be here. How can I leave without saying goodbye to you!

Thanks for all your help and being a faithful defender of Plesk. Because of you, I gave Plesk a longer try. Unfortunately, as much as I enjoy playing the Plesk game, I have to tend my business.

I will come back for the game when I have time.

For the time being, best of luck to you.

So long!

Sam

 

[Cranky]

Lol... good luck.

 

[jamesyeeoc]

Yes, good luck Rocky.

What would life be without challenges? --very boring indeed.....

 

[Rocky@]

Bye James,

You know, I live in NJ, a very challenging place. I was from CA, miss there, and miss the weather.

CPanel is in fact a challenge because it doesn't break and is too easy to use. After dealing with Plesk, I am no longer used to something that doesn't break, and is easy to manage. Therefore it's a challenge.

Oh boy!

Best wishes!

Sam

 

[Cranky]

Originally posted by Rocky
CPanel is a challenge because it doesn't break and too easy to use.

Lol ... give it a few months.

 

[Rocky@]

Cranky, you really can make me laugh, especailly with your high confidence on Plesk.

FYI, I have used CPanel for five years!

Remember I told you that I left Plesk five years ago? I messed with Ensim for a little while and ended up with CPanel.

After using Plesk, I realized that I am doing a scarry thing with CPanel. One of my server is setup with a cron job that updates CPanel nightly. Nightly! I had that for a year now. OMG, dare I do it with Plesk!

It's like back home, or waking up from a nightmare.

Well, I have said all the goodbyes I need to say. I better leave now.

Sam

 

[Cranky]

Originally posted by Rocky
Cranky, you really can make me laugh, especailly with your high confidence on Plesk.

Well Plesk's right for me, CPanel's right for you, as I said good luck.

 

[philjohn]

I came to plesk having used the horror that was ensim Webppliance 3.1 - nasty doesn't even start to describe it.

I've had a few problems with plesk as well (nobody on here can argue that the autoinstaller/rpm is a nightmare if anything goes wrong - why can't sw-soft make the installer back out any changes its made and restore the system into an operative state instead of just going, whoops, can't seem to install, have fun sorting out the mess I left!) but as long as you know what you're doing it tends to be well behaved.

Good luck with cPanel, I've looked at the demo but have never been that enthralled with it and Plesk just "feels" more corporate (which when you're dealing with the kind of clients I deal with is important), to be honest though, we're not in the business of selling hosting, we create large bespoke sites that we host for clients, so for those uses plesk may be horrible, but for us it works perfectly.

 

[sieb@]

All the other panels I have tried have just felt like bloated webmin fronts. They bombard you with options and no easy logical way to change what you want to change. Hence why I chose Plesk, I don't need to read the howtos or help files in order to figure it out. I'm not saying I want it all candy coated, I am pretty intuitive and can figure everything out on my own, but if I'm going to use it everyday, I need it to be qucik and efficient to navigate and manage.

Everyone raves Cpanel, but its just too crowded for me to use every day across multiple servers. I also highly dislike their pricing structure. I also need the same panel on multiple platforms. I looked at Helm, but its just as crowed and costly as well.

I haven't had any problems with PSA, not anything that would cause me to want to switch. But then again, I don't keep my servers bleeding edge and put updates through their paces before applying them in production.

I tell you what, ever since I switched to ARTs repos, transitions have been for the most part, painless. I tend to trust the founder of PSA and his judgment on when its ok to make upgrades, not when a button in the CP tells me. Granted though, thats what some people want. I personally won't gamble doing a blind update on a production server hosting thousands of dollars worth of hosted customers.

Sorry your choosing something else, but I'm not going to side with you. People's milage varries. <shrugs>

 

[Rocky@]

Boy, I need to turn that notification off. Otherwise, I keep lingering around. Plesk is like pretty girl, hard to leave behind!

Thanks for stopping by Sieb. Good luck to you too! Looking at the kind of services you provide, you definitly don't need more than Plesk. Good for you.

You have some good points about CPanel, being too crowded and hard to find thing around, etc. And that's why I came to Plesk. But my tasks are a little too complex that I can't do it with Plesk without frequent use of vhost.conf, root access, etc. to work around. It's just time consuming. On CPanel, it's like everything set up exactly for the tasks like what I usually need to do. I just wish I can combine the power of CPanel with Plesk's interface.

You also said, "Everyone raves Cpanel." I didn't even know that. If that is true. Then I rest my case, since everyone can't be wrong.

Bye,

Sam

 

[Mr.Yes]

When i choosed Plesk was 1.3 version and we had 10/15 buttons only. At that time we had an horrible layout, slow updates but solid software and a good support from Plesk inc. on this forum too. 2 years ago i was thinking to switch all my box on Direct Admin Control Panel (nice price and expecially solid software with excellent comments from all users) but i liked to have same CP on our win and linux based server (maybe i was wrong). Now we have a Plesk with hundred of options, good layout, too much updates and no official support on this forum. No upgrades is bug free, all of us are terrified performing every upgrade .. do you?
SW Soft should concentrate themself for example to a solid and better backup and restore utility with GUI then Game module or other inutility like this.

This is only my opinion

 

[WebCTRL]

Originally posted by Cranky
What problem(s) do you have with Expand?

The Expand just does not fully work as PLESK claimed to be and here is why?

No documentations:

1- There is no documenation for Modern bill API to Plesk expand provisionment.

2- Moderm did not implement all APIs for Expand to work properly... and what ever is implemented has bugs and hosting packages are not provisioned properly

3- The Templates to create hosting packages in Expand are never in sync with either Windows or linux Features. This means that everytime a package is created you have to check it and reset some features that for some reasons do not get set correctly.... for the chosen package plan.

The dependencties:

3- Here is an example : check the new release 1.1 see this note...
"NOTE: This version of Plesk Expand does not support Plesk for Windows. This functionality will be added in the near future."
http://www.sw-soft.com/en/products/plesk/expand11/reqs/


4- The centrelized login is a joke.

5- DO NOT install Expand on the same server as ModernBill or Kayako support ( just not compatible and Plesk could not figure it out why.... we had to installed it on another linux server with Plesk CP.

6- Everytime you upgrade Plesk CP on a server that has Expand installed, BE PREPARED TO re-install Expand installation - again.....


And the worst is: that you CAN NOT fully trust the management interface. For some reason sometimes, it corrupts hosted domains/clients information and does not syncronized it back. SO, you are just waisting time and better off going directly to the Plesk Control Panels to do all your day to day work....

I could go on and on but I thing you have the big picture.


BTW: last month we upgraded PLESK CP linux to 7.5.3 and had to upgrade Expand also ( no where this was documented...and we lost all our templates) anyway, since the upgade....we are now having problems with MySql which going down everday on the server ---- Plesk Support can not figure out....neither can we.....


We have been using Plesk Expand since September last year. And I must say, it was not what we were expected.

The only good thing is, it is less complicated in ModernBill to setup all your hosting packages. However, you really have to keep every package to a minimum set of features to have the provisionment working.

 

[admin123]

Webmin/Virtualmin

So the prophecy says Virtualmin will be going commercial by months end. Although they will keep supporting the free version. They say feature wise will be well above Plesk and many more features than Cpanel. And of course bug free ..Ya, of course. Also they state with walk you through documentation on installing on clean system, very simple and easy to understand interface- and will work when you click on modules to initialize any features, unlike some other cp's out there-- 'cough', 'cough', Plesk. And everything is up and running on first attempt. We'll see. You can call them to test it for free when it comes out. I've gotta see what it can do so I'll jump on that. They were very excited talking about its release since their research in the forums of other cp's told them what folks are just fed up with about other cp's - 'cough', 'cough' , Plesk...so hopefully good things.

 

[MrBafner]

Sorry to see you go Rocky. Have thought about the big change myself, Plesk is so very time consuming and the answers are never an easy solution.... hack this, rewrite that, edit linux commands, reboot no login for admin, MySQL faults every other day... I hear you.

I have been using Plesk for the best part of 2 years now, and regret ever getting it. We spend more time fixing the darn thing than selling hosting spaces.

Plesk is so patchy, upgrades never are good and causes weeks of grief for not just one person, and then attempting to fix all the scripts in all the hosting accounts is a nightmare.

Remember when Plesk decided to kill everyones webstats by adding Plesk-stats... what a nightmare. One third of our clients left because their stats appeared to be reset. They continually do this **** to us all the time and I am sure they only listen to the linux gifted people that do have a very high level of unix / linux understanding, and not thinking of the middle user or end user of the server.... the guy that doesn't want to hack into linux boxes but rather use the control panel which they pay for in the first place.

Anyway all wound up now..... have to get back and kick this plesk panel again otherwise it wont work.

Let me know how CPanel is going.... will definately switch soon I think.

 

[kark]

Yeah I hear you fellows, if anyone knows the trickyness of how Plesk operates, it would be me

A year ago orso we changed to DirectAdmin and it was great. For some reason I slept better during working hours .. err ... during the night. Ok, it has it downsides also but it was FAR more stable and easier to maintain then Plesk. Too bad Plesk still looks better, cos that seems far more important to the clients then security and stableness. Damn those clients

Anyways, I sold the company and am now trying to decide what to do with the 10 dollars it was worth ....

 

[jamesyeeoc]

That would be enough money for a single pull on a $10 slot machine in Vegas!

 

[PixyPumpkin]

I don't now I have been working with Plesk from PSA5 and still it's not letting me down. I hear and see very bad things about cPanel too. I think it's a bit like Pesi en Coca Cola they have some good and some bad things