Lease Only!!

[stiller]

foolish

I do not understand how they can be so foolish. It is exactly the small to medium providers which they are hurting most that should be their primary market. Big DC's can afford to develop their own software and/or look at enterprise solutions. They doubled the price on Virtuozzo licenses, so now I am looking at Sun containers, Xen, VMWare, you name it. People will also start looking at alternatives to Plesk, so suddenly the market looks much better for competing products; Cpanel, Directadmin, etc.

Also, we had made preparations for a large-scale Virtuozzo roll-out, but now, with margins suddenly dropped by 10%, it's not looking so interesting anymore, since the price of a VE has gone up and the price of Plesk has risen insanely compared to the monthly cost of a VE. It's just not viable anymore, so we'll be looking at other products.

 

[porkchop]

I just want to add my voice to (and agreement with) the opinions expressed here in this thread. This is an utterly outrageous move on their part.

I do have a seemingly obvious question: If we "own" a Plesk license what happens on the SUS date ("key expiration")? do the sites and the control panel go offline? If so, then this action amounts to extortion.

ALSO: If the CP and sites do go offline on the expiration date, then it can be argued that we never "owned" the licenses to begin with, and SWSoft - or whatever you wanna call 'em - sold under fraudulent terms. If you own something, your ownership cannot be revoked. That's the cornerstone of the Western system, property ownership is sacrosanct.

In any event, I regard the Plesk investment as a buried cost. We're actively investigating alternatives at the moment. Under any other set of circumstances I would have suggested some grass roots activism, i.e. petitions, and the like. However, Plesk may have done us all a favor, albeit indirectly, forcing us to look for something else...less buggy, less prone to dying as soon as you upgrade it...and so forth.

In a nutshell - and please pardon the profanity; "**** 'em"

/porky

 

[nibb@]

I dont think your sites and panel will go offline. Just the admin side i think gets disabled. But dont wonder if all your sites have a "License deactivated" in the future.

The way plesk is build is very intrusive, they can even put advertising or deactivate all your sites remotely. You are on their hands. And yes, you never owned the panel. Why do you think you cannot remove those copyright marks all over the panel. You can that on other panels since you pay it. This is not violating the law, the one that has to know that Plesk is Parallels copyright is only the client of Parallels the owner of the license, why should your clients know about this, they did not paid for the panel. Simple, its advertising for them.

We all are looking for other solutions. Parallels just wants a big share of the cake from all our clients. Price raises are just a way to force us to raise the plans prices in a market that everyone is lowering.

Just do what hurts them more. Impact their pocket. Once they realize they had a major drop down they will want to change back but it will be to late. I think they dont care since imagine a big company that implemented Parallels products. It would costs them more to migrate then to just keep using the products. This is extortion but i dont care how much it costs us to move away, we are probably have the money back in no time with other solutions.

If they think this Zend encoded **** is so great they are wrong. Any 10 year old can decode the Plesk panel and make a custom clone of it and just keep developing it yourself.

 

[fusionhosting]

I just got caught by this when hitting their web page to purchase additional 30 domain licenses. The current promo and notice was extremely confusing, wasn't until I spoke to a sells rep it became clear what they're doing.

Even with the old purchases and SUS that was already pretty steep in terms of the product/service they were offering.

Now the only option they're offering in an unlimited plesk license which more than triples the monthly cost and more than quadruples the purchase price for an 'unlimited' license that my customers don't even need?

Basically they're just raising the floor on their monthly billing so you can't get away with a owned license unless you're paying them $200+/yr SUS ($16.6/mo per), or $30+/mo lease per license.

Only thing they really have going for their CP is usability and design, everything else about the product is pretty mediocre, and the Plesk upsell in your own CP along with inserting PPC ads into landing pages is just awful treatment of your own customers.

I looked at virtuozzo several years ago and the pricing them was ok to base a business off of, I declined at that time for another option, and now am pretty damn glad after seeing the price jump. With as competitive as our industry is especially on pricing I just don't see the reasoning for this other than Parallels trying to push some really high profit figures at the expense of squeezing and alienating their customer base.

 

[64bithost.com]

Sooo..

So I am totally frustrated with this whole process. The only thing to do with a problem is to solve it rather than to point fingers at the people who created the problem in the first place.

So I challenge Parallels.com to let the consumers come up with a better pricing stucture that Parallels.com will use from this day forward. I say this, and most people will think I am off my rocker but, it will help out the small business person if they do. It is a matter of mathmatics and it needs to be solved. something they did not responsibly do by asking us in the first place.

There was no survey as to if we wanted a new pricing structure or if we could even give our input for that matter. I do remember a survey on SaaS which 30% said that they would not use it and 70% said they would. Not historically good numbers for a software company but then again neither was Microsofts ME.

So come on Parallels.com...let us decide the pricing stucture. Because I know I could solve it.

 

[nibb@]

That is a joke right?

Since when does Parallels asks something their customers?

If you think they will change their pricing structure they wont. Actually it will go worst. They are going to remove owned licenses completely eventually and you will only have the lease options.

And then they will eventually remove Plesk for Non VPS. That means Plesk running directly on the server will not work anymore. You will have Plesk only as an option inside VPS servers. And of course those will be Virtuozzo so you will have to buy Virtuozzo and Plesk inside it.

Be prepared for a couple thousands. Or if you are a small business they will negotiate with you based on a % of your incomes. Lets say 10% of your incomes is the minimum they deal i think.

 

[rr1024]

http://groups.google.com/group/server_vps_hlp/
founded a new group for plesk and cPanel

 

[renhack]

Thats it? 26 replies. As of next month we are migrating away from HSPc and Plesk and will offer Hosting Controller only. We will phase Plesk out of our offerings completely as our SUS's expire. Our main reason for using Plesk was for consistency across platforms. We can get the same functionality elsewhere. It's not like were losing out on fantastic support!

 

[porkchop]

Forgive me for asking this again, but I have an SUS expiring in May, so some fast decisions have to be made in the weeks between now and then....

WHEN the SUS expires - does anyone know definitively whether theAdmin CP and/or domains will go offline?
OR:
Will it simply be a CP installation that is ineligible for any support or updates (as would be the case previously if anyone didn't renew SUS)

I'd hate to wait for May1 and do nothing, only to find out that 300+ domains just became inaccessible. My mind can't get around the appalling consequences of that. It would also perhaps be the single most hostile thing any software company could possibly do.....but Parallels have proved themselves in that department [somewhat] in the past, so I'd believe that the possibility exists.

Folks??

 

[renhack]

Your sites will remain online. What they haven't mentioned is the future of SUS. I'm assuming they will phase that out since future versions will be SAAS only. This is the main reason why we are leaving. Since we lease VPS and dedicated servers to our customers we can't justify the expense of providing Plesk if we incur monthly lease fees for our entire install base. It's not like anyone has ever asked for Plesk by name.

 

[porkchop]

Your sites will remain online.

That sounds somewhat reassuring, although I'm still worried about the Admin CP also for fairly obvious reasons!

What they haven't mentioned is the future of SUS. I'm assuming they will phase that out since future versions will be SAAS only.

I'd say that's a fairly logical assumption.

This is the main reason why we are leaving. Since we lease VPS and dedicated servers to our customers we can't justify the expense of providing Plesk if we incur monthly lease fees for our entire install base. It's not like anyone has ever asked for Plesk by name.

Basically the same (or broadly similar) situation here.

/porky

 

[nibb@]

Same here. Nobody really asks for this products by name. We are not going to stop offering Parallels products for people that ask for them, but we are going to put them a very high tag price just like they pass it to us. So if someone wants a Plesk panel on a VPS or server he is going probably pay the double, and for the troubles and support time it costs us the Plesk products we are going probably offer it for 3 times the costs of other products. So we assure ourselfs that nobody chooses this products or if they do they should be willing to pay a high price for it. We are going to migrate our platforms as well and just give for free or with a very low price tag other solutions. We did the same with Plesk. We gave plesk very cheap and Cpanel very high. Now we are going to revert this and just incentive the use of Cpanel or the panel we choose for each solution.

We also cannot afford to raise the whole platform prices. And as this company Parallels is slowly sinking its best to run as fast as possible before the whole Titanic sinks.

One of the main reasons a company raises so much their prices is because they have financial problems. It would not surprise me with all the companies they bought. They need to cash the money back in somehow. Also the policies and products are getting worst and worst. You all see they dont even care to read their own forums. What can someone expect from a company like this.

But i just imagine their CEO Sergei saying "Let them cry as much as they want, still a very big % of idiots is going to use our products and we are going to make them so heavily complicated so they can never change, then we are going to ripe them as much as we can of all the incomes they made. Basically let them work for us and give us a % of their work each month"

This slavery really. I can see Parallels as a communist company that slaves their customers so they work their asses off to pay each month their licenses, as they dont do anything at all for the money. Just to collect a very big % of all our incomes each month, or our hard earned work. Hell.... Even the color is Red and the company is from Russia !!!!

We are moving back to liberty.... To the States....

Cpanel here we come....

 

[64bithost.com]

Owned Licenses

If you own a few licenses and are going to Cpanel I need the following items:


Plesk 8.3 inside Virtuozzo unlimited - as many as I can get
Vittuozzo 4.0 licenses unlimited - as many as I can get

I do not wish to pay retail so I will pay for what I can get.

Chris

 

[porkchop]

We're probably going to implement DirectAdmin.

Reasons: (as we see them so far)

1. Their licenses are flat fee, unlimited domains, which is as it should be. The pricing is nice, and from a European perspective, we also like that it's in $USD. Errr...[cough]...sorry about that. The license model is one we like. Monthly/Quarterly/Annual - or lifetime (but we see no reason to go the lifetime route, it makes no sense) Yes, it's a subscription - or a lease - depending on how you look at it, but it contains a bigtime value component altogether missing in Parallels, and the cost is sane.

2. Their tech support appears to be first rate - as far as we know from colleagues who are existing customers. WE polled those we know who HAVE experienced problems, all uniformly report that their issues were dealt with quickly and in a wholly professional manner.

3. Oddity: They perform the installation - free - although the licensee can do so him/herself should they so wish.

4. D/A personnel - both sales and support - seem eager to engage their customers and prospects. That's a welcome piece of news!!

5. The have the best help site I have ever seen - period. http://www.site-helper.com/

6. Forums: Chinese Laundry list! select what subject you would like to read about or blab about, it's out there on the forums. Plenty of expertise available for newbies to hosting or newbies to Direct Admin. Busy forums and lots of closed issues are good!

7. Forums for feature suggestions on next version of D/A "what would you like to see in there".

8. Oh yeah, we like the interface too, we (and the clients we've exposed to the CP thus far) can definitely live with the interface. It's flexible, and in some cases even more so than Plesk.

9. Skins: Plenty of 'em, or roll your own. What's not to like about that?

10. An open attitude in general: characterized seemingly as: "we would like to talk to you, so whatever it is; 'bring it on' and we'll air it out and see where we go with it". After the deafness of Plesk, we like that a whole lot. Plus, they are not going to talk to Parallels, so D/A isn't likely to get swallowed up by the leviathan. We Hope - We Hope.

Potential Downsides:
(either definite negatives, or questions which are thus far unresolved)

1. Migration: We've heard that there is a Plesk -> DirectAdmin script in existence which can act as a migration manager. If that's untrue, or the script has a high failure incidence then migration, simply put, is going to be a *****.

2. Exim. And we thought qmail was bad (hell after all the years of fighting with Plesk I was finally achieving something close to a state of peace with qmail).

3. No migration manager (yet).

4. Backup/Restore is nowhere near as versatile as Plesk (but to be fair it does what it has to, and a site or reseller =in toto= can be backed up and restored, just not as easily as we're used to).

I don't have one single shred of guilt at posting this reasoning in a Plesk forum, because Parallels brought this post in particular, and this thread - and the scenario in general - upon themselves. Predators invite bad behavior from their "prey" that got away. [/me disrespectfully sticks his tongue out at Sergei & Co].

/porky

 

[WaDavid]

Here is a nice MTA comparison: http://shearer.org/MTA_Comparison

I don't think you have to worry about exim, I am just uncertain with qmail not receiving anymore updates.

Currently though on most other servers we run which is not plesk, we use postfix and I feel quite comfortable with it.

 

[renhack]

So i called my dedicated sales rep last friday to vent my frustrations. Had to leave a message of course. I politely asked for a return call because i had some licensing questions.

6 days later and no response. Why is this not surprising?

 

[ArizonaSky]

I'm finally Free of Plesk!!!

I've been using Plesk since version 2 and I can say that no piece of software has caused me more sleepless nights and wasted more of my time than Plesk. I've finally decided after this last issue with the licenses that I've had enough and will let all my licenses expire.

I've patiently waited for a change in the attitude that Plesk treats their clients with and sadly it never came and it's another big reason I am leaving.

The constant buggy upgrades that leave me in dread every time I do an upgrade have been torturing. Every time I fix one of their issues they change things again and the process starts all over. The really stupid bugs too just show that there wasn't much common sense or testing of the software before it was released. If upgrades with Ubuntu, WHMCS and Webmin go so well why can't they with Plesk? Why should I pay even more now for such poor software?

So a few days ago I started looking for an alternative CP that supports Ubuntu and came across virtualmin and I installed it and couldn't be happier. It has so many more options that I need than Plesk has and it doesn't screw around with the OS nearly as much as Plesk either. The learning curve was a little bit higher but I'm mastering it pretty well after only a few days.

To think a control panel that actually makes an admins life easier, I could get use to this. I actually feel like they want my business, that's a nice feeling too...

 

[ladhani]

Virtualmin as alternative for Plesk

Are there more people out there who have switched from Plesk to Virtualmin?
And are you using the GPL or the Pro version?

Please help us drop Plesk, please share your experiences.

Thanks!

 

[renhack]

bump. Still no reply to this thread from anyone in parallels.

 

[faris]

This is a user-to-user forum.

Although Parallels staff may take a look from time to time, the idea of these forums is for users to use them to help each over.

Faris.