Goodbye!

[ChipMonk]

Well, as per logics of this lonely universe, there are pros and cons of everything. even of being humanbeing.

i used almost everything in past 5 years, (i am not an expert in many things) but at finally i stuck on plesk.

in start it was a nightmare, but then i started relying upon myself, three times i crashed a server and all clients on it were trashed (half of them never came back) but ultimately things got settled up.

i learned one simple rule If it ain't broken, NEVER fix it.

CP is yuk, so is ensim. its always bad to see such GOOD BYE conversations

 

[HMIBarryLSalter]

Simple, I like Plesk and plan to stay

I’ve read all of these posts and none of you are wrong only there are a few things that should be considered.

1) Before doing any upgrades with Plesk, you MUST do a backup (that you can trust!!!). Our server is running raid 0 (that’s mirrored, normally two exact drives reading and writing the exact same information incase one should fail the system would continue running as if it had not). My admin breaks our mirror, re-mirrors to another hard drive and then starts the up grade process. IF (and as you know, it does) something goes wrong, he (CAN) simply mirror back and start at square one.

Recently, this became a very important issue. We tried to upgrade the capacity of our hard drives by backing up data using some kind of zip process (sorry not technical that’s why I have an admin ).

In the process, he forgot one option and the info restored caused failure on the new drives but the system ran enough to leave us bewildered for a couple days as we tried to find what had gone a stray and could fix it. The end result was to re-mirror back and wait for the customers to sit down again (not my way to do things but it couldn’t be helped, people where upset).

The point here is, this wasn’t plesk’s fault but those times that it has been (because it has been) by taking this approach, we have had the option of going back in time to what worked!


2) I am a long long time user of Plesk, and no I do not like the way they charge for things and I feel that it is abusive but I can not argue that they are trying to come up with new solutions and integration of releases and in the end they have done the following for me:

a) Saved me time and tech costs in integrating newer versions of PHP and MySQL and Apache
b) Provided me an interface that customers think is new and improved giving them the view that we stay near the edge but not on the bleeding edge (and because of Plesk we are).
c) Enough security that I can sleep at night believing that I will not wake up to a hacked box. Some of you may know better and maybe one of you may feel the need to prove that wrong but please don’t, I like feeling secure and I do.
d) The ability that I can hand out reseller plesk access and they can hand out domain access and they can hand out email cp access.
e) And name recognition is good too


3) As I said, I started with Plesk with like version 1.3 I believe. Before that, I had a Linux box and had gotten hacked twice and a windows box and it crashed regularly. One time, I remember running home from 30 minutes away as I was being screamed at for my server being down. Since moving to Plesk, the early Plesk that is, I was able to go to Mexico for a vacation and was confident that everything would be there when I got back. And even though I monitored my box from Mexico everyday, it never disappointed me. The reason I moved to Plesk was my current Admin Doug Worrell of FastQ Communications who said “look, you can move to Plesk and save money on tech time or you can pay me more tech time, which would you rather?â€. I told Doug back then I’d rather pay him. Doug insisted and so I made the move. I can tell you that the ride has been rough as most of you say but I remember what it was like before Plesk and I have figured the time savings I have saved using their mouse click interface and I tell you, I’d rather stay with Plesk and feel safe then move. And if I feel safe, then my customers who know me well, they will feel safe as well.


HMIBarryLSalter –

Ps. This is not a plug for Plesk and I don’t expect nor believe they’d even be kind enough to thank me for it. It’s just how I feel about it. And yes, I do feel a bit trapped as one of you mentioned, if I don’t pay the SUS than I can’t stay up with the latest without having to install everything through the back door.

Oh one last point, I like having the ability to make changes like to the vhost.conf file and if I want to setup software to read the MySQL database using PHP. So it may seem as a problem to some, but to me, who needs an admin to do my tech stuff, I still have the option of writing in things or changing things a bit and I like that. In fact that’s what brought me here to the forum today, I want to change the vhost.conf to bind both the secure and unsecured side of a site I have. And no I’m not complaining that the sides are separate and that this is not how things are normally done. I’m happy that I have the option of binding if I have to other wise to use them separate offers some extra flex-abilities.

 

[Cranky]

Re: Simple, I like Plesk and plan to stay

Originally posted by HMIBarryLSalter
1) Before doing any upgrades with Plesk, you MUST do a backup (that you can trust!!!). Our server is running raid 0 (that’s mirrored, normally two exact drives reading and writing the exact same information incase one should fail the system would continue running as if it had not). My admin breaks our mirror, re-mirrors to another hard drive and then starts the up grade process. IF (and as you know, it does) something goes wrong, he (CAN) simply mirror back and start at square one

Before I start, don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising you at all ... you have an admin looking after your server which is wise. I just wanted to clear a couple things up for you about RAID.

RAID0 is not redundant whatsoever. It is striping, which means data is spread across more than 1 disk ... there is still just 1 copy of the data but it can be anywhere on 2, 3, 4, x disks. If ANY of these disks fail, your array corrupts and data is lost.

RAID1 is what you're probably thinking of, which is mirroring. This means disks are assigned in pairs. Each pair of disks hold an exact duplicate of the data so if one of the disks dies the other is still functional.

RAID10 is a combination of the above, requires at least 4 disks. This is where you have at least 2 disks with the data spread across it (1 copy of the data), but then there's another 2+ disks (same number as the data is spread across) which keeps an exact duplicate of the data so if 1 disk dies (or in some cases more than 1), data is not lost.

However, you should not think of any of these as backups, they're adding redundancy, but not backups as ALL data is current in RAID1/RAID10. You can only restore older data if you have created a backup of this using separate means such as plesk backup utilities, tar, zip, cp, or similar.

Hope this helps.

 

[superbock]

I don't think he mentioned RAID1 as the backup process itself. He did mention a split process, and *then* a backup of the offline disk (aka BCV - Business Continuance Volume). And that is extremely correct.

In fact, this is what is normally used in big datacenters to backup Oracle databases and such, although in this case we'd be talking about hardware like EMC's Symmetrix and HP9000 servers, or similar from other vendors.

So, in concept and practice, mirror split + BCV backup is best method, in both terms of safety and performance, and it is current practice in major business datacenters.

 

[HMIBarryLSalter]

Hopes of learning a better backup method

Dear Mr. Cranky,

You are correct, I looked it up in my mother boards user manual and Raid 0 is striping, Raid 1 is mirroring (what we are doing) and then Raid 0/1 is both and requires at least 4 drives in and as you said they did. Thank You for the correction (I’d rather be corrected than give a customer wrong info).

Mr SuperBock,

What is this backing up that you are talking about and is it something I should be looking into. What we have done traditionally here is simply broken the mirror and re-mirrored with a third drive. By doing this, we have an EXACT copy of the system as it was before the upgrade or changes where performed. We do not use any kind of backup procedures or software for the sake of having a backup copy, the mirror copy is then stored away off site in case of catastrophic failure, and we are able to return to the day that the drive was taken from the machine.

Problems with the above method are not going to be obvious to someone like myself but I am currently aware of them. The largest issue here is that the machine that the backup is placed into must be the machine it was taken from or very very close the same. Two issues are found, one the configuration of the OS to the hardware and two the first level of booting is going to be addressing the raid address and not find the drive unless the drive was mirrored into the machine that it was put into.

I’m being extra wordy hoping that I help someone like myself that is less knowledgeable then the rest of you. So please forgive my wordiness, it’s something that if I went back in time, would be exactly what I needed to know “to know†that I needed to look for more answers to questions I wouldn’t have dreamed existed.

And again SuperBock, (I know I’ve missed something) what have I missed please?


Jamesyeeoc, thank you for answering one of my other posts… You are appreciated!


HMIBarryLSalter –

 

[Jllynch]

We originaly came to Plesk because it had fewer features than Cpanel and had a good reputation for stability(we actualy wanted it simpler and more stable). We didn't realy want to have to support all the bells and whistles that Cpanel had. Imagine the support calls when you are offering 3+ versions of webmail for example, let alone the rest.

I only wish that Plesk focused more on stability to keep that reputation. I don't know if anyone would recomend Plesk as being Stable anymore - one has to basicaly expect as thandard that things will fall over with every upgrade these days. It seems that the plesk release schedule seems to be a bit more marketing driven than security and stability driven. Please focus more on stability.

 

[HMIBarryLSalter]

I have to agree, it was stability, less maintenance as my story reads and simplicity that had my tech push me into Plesk. Prior to plesk I was entering dns entrees (master and zone and who gives a rats) and I use to break the server often, Plesk was fresh air. I agree, Plesk does seem to be more SUS and Marketing SUS related then stability reach. However, I disagree that the upgrades are not better. When we upgraded this time from 7.5.2 to 7.5.4, the control panel button didn’t indicate what was going on and seemed to only occupy cpu time and we had to run the script but it still went better than in the past and I’ve gotten no complaints. This does not mean it’s right, it just means it was better this time than last.


ps. forgot to mention, I'm paying the SUS this year but will be considering the move also. I'm going to need more servers and unless they take care of the long time users, I will have to find a more afordable route. Also i don't like the Microsoft big brother approch to the date stamping. I don't pirate software so it shouldn't bother me but it does anyway.

 

[paulius]

I use Plesk because my datacenter does not support cPanel.

Don't get me wrong, Plesk is like Windows... It's easy to use, it has bugs and it's not stable. While it looks polished and sw-soft does great marketing, many things break.

sw-soft is ignoring commentaries and ignoring to fix their software.

Sigh

I agree with post #1

 

[superbock]

If you need datacenter support to run your web hosting business, regarding the control panel, maybe you should rethink the business you want to run.

The problem with all these control panels available now is that they attract everyone to the business, trying to make things easier for non-tech people. But they have to sell in order to further develop the product, so the marketing has to exist and people can't expect them to say "beware, this breaks sometimes in some non predicted situations". That should be already assumed by the client.

Me, as i consider myself a tech guy, experienced in UNIX admin, i think Plesk is very nice. It seldom breaks, because i know how to keep my systems neat and tidy, and believe me, that's the best way to avoid problems.

This is a recurrent topic in this forums.. "oh it breaks, has bugs", etc... Most of that people can't use a shell, and that is just.. wrong! Don't get me wrong, this is not me trying to sound "superior" or something.. it's just like everything, you should do something that you know you can deal with, whoever you are, wherever you work..

Best regards.

 

[paulius]

Originally posted by superbock
If you need datacenter support to run your web hosting business, regarding the control panel, maybe you should rethink the business you want to run.

The problem with all these control panels available now is that they attract everyone to the business, trying to make things easier for non-tech people. But they have to sell in order to further develop the product, so the marketing has to exist and people can't expect them to say "beware, this breaks sometimes in some non predicted situations". That should be already assumed by the client.

Me, as i consider myself a tech guy, experienced in UNIX admin, i think Plesk is very nice. It seldom breaks, because i know how to keep my systems neat and tidy, and believe me, that's the best way to avoid problems.

This is a recurrent topic in this forums.. "oh it breaks, has bugs", etc... Most of that people can't use a shell, and that is just.. wrong! Don't get me wrong, this is not me trying to sound "superior" or something.. it's just like everything, you should do something that you know you can deal with, whoever you are, wherever you work..

Best regards.

I have almost 5 years of Linux experience and run Linux on even most of my computers at home. I do all of my administration work via the shell and the panel is only for my clients.

As simply as it goes, it's an easy way to manage my people's bandwidth and ressource limits. Otherwise, I run very big sites on servers without a control panel to make them fast and reliable.

What I meant by "my datacenter supports Plesk" is that it provides Plesk for free with any dedicated server. That said, I don't feel the necessity of using an additionnal thoudsand or so dollars (which I don't even have) to buy cPanel or another control panel software.

I've also tried some free panels (yes, VHCS also) and none of them got up to my expectations.

But never the less, _MAYBE_ Plesk is improving little by little.

Only time will tell.

 

[superbock]

Well, i sure ain't here to praise plesk as a wonder.. There are things i can point at them, that's for sure.

Honestly, it pisses me off when i see them adding more and more features that i couldn't care less for.. Games, VPN, Samba, and stuff like that. Let's face it, those are not web-hosting feaures. It all adds to the complexity of the panel, and i find it a waste of development resources when there's a number of *basic* features that can be seen in some other CP's that should be integrated and they're not.

Things like: multiple FTP accounts for the site or a subdirectory (rw|ro), true domain aliasing (vhost and mail), allow e-mail only administrator, forced prefix on ftp usernames, support for non-local MySQL server, and some more... Those are way easier to develop than a Counter-Strike module, why aren't they present?

Hey, SW-SOFT, spin-off a GamesCP company, and stick with stuff that matters k?

 

[paulius]

Hey, SW-SOFT, spin-off a GamesCP company, and stick with stuff that matters k?

What's even worse is that their Counter-Strike module is outdated and does not work!

I run the world's largest community about setting up a Counter-Strike server... Too bad that sw-soft couldn't visit my website and look at the new method of installing and updating the counter-strike server!

 

[superbock]

Re: Hopes of learning a better backup method

Originally posted by HMIBarryLSalter

Mr SuperBock,

What is this backing up that you are talking about and is it something I should be looking into. What we have done traditionally here is simply broken the mirror and re-mirrored with a third drive. By doing this, we have an EXACT copy of the system as it was before the upgrade or changes where performed. We do not use any kind of backup procedures or software for the sake of having a backup copy, the mirror copy is then stored away off site in case of catastrophic failure, and we are able to return to the day that the drive was taken from the machine.

And again SuperBock, (I know I’ve missed something) what have I missed please?

HMIBarryLSalter – [/B]

Hi, sorry for not replying before.

I don't think you missed anything, i was just illustrating a concept of backup that relies on advanced storage hardware. In this hardware, which is like an huge array of disks, you always have 2 mirrors of live data. The split is done online, during which the database is writing a binary log, live data stays mirrored, and the third mirror is mounted on another filesystem (same machine or other machine connected to the SAN), and the backup is done on that filesystem. I doubt anyone uses this in the web-hosting business though..

What you say you are doing is for a different purpose, u want an offline disk mirror, and if it works, that's just great and i bet it already proved it's conveniency.

Best regards.