plesk suggestion for future releases...

[ptholt]

As a full time Quality Assurance manager i find it massively frustrating when a company releases bug ridden, ill thought out, poorly planned and shoddy releases, especially when they then expect the customer base to provide the qa functionality free of charge for them.

I spent many a year from windows 2.0 to XP suffering this form of customer abuse with Microsoft operating systems, before finally giving up and changing to mac / linux at home to avoid such a poor practise and general disdain against the customer.

How frustrating to now find i am doing that all over again but for your parallels product, my services currently are charged out in the region of $600 per day providing qa expertise and consultancy, could you please furnish me with your invoicing details and i will start billing you for providing the very same service that has seen me employed for the some of the planets largest companies over the last 20 years, which for some reason you seem to think you should have free of charge?

Alternatively, if perhaps you could at least attempt so semblence of Quality assurance in your products before releasing them onto your poor user base, that is of course unless you have purchased shares in direct admin recently.

Yours disappointed at the slow response, the lack of support and the weak excuse for quality assurance i am experiencing from your "company" as i use that word in the weakest possible sense.

 

[lhwparis]

nice story the part about switching to OS X to "avoid such a poor practise" is very funny i can tell you other things about that operating system and apple but thats another story.

i am with you its not your job to do qa for a payed product but thats just your 4th post in this forum so you can not have reported many bugs before this frustrated post...

i dont think a post like yours helps anybody without knowing what you are talking about so why you dont let us know which bugs you are talking about and then we can talk about solvig this problems instead of discussing windows vs. os x

 

[ptholt]

four posts, but a constant weekly stream of telephone calls which amount to nothing hence switching to posting here. Still no action, response or reasonable support, made me feel better though

 

[JaredF]

I feel your pain. Plesk 10 is a major fail in my book as well. I just installed it on a server for a small domain client. The new domain file structure is horrible, the interface terminology is more confusing than ever, it's lost tons of useful features including the ability to make bulk modifications to clients and domains. Personally, I'll be reverting the client to Plesk 9 even though it'll be a PITA. I honestly don't know what Parallels was thinking. As soon as Plesk 9 goes EOL I'll be dropping Plesk and finding a alternative solution.

 

[lhwparis]

have you ever read the documentation or thougt about the new structur? in my oppinion the service-plan / subscription structur is a big and great step! you dont need that "bulk editing feature" you can do that with service plans and synced subscriptions much better! which other feature is missing?
the new domain file structur is a good thing too in my eyes whats bad about it?
ok interface is little bit confusing in some areas but in my oppinion this was a problem in plesk9 too.

 

[JaredF]

Where to begin? Lets say you want to enable some hosting features on some domains and other hosting features on other domains for client. Nope that won't work, they all have the same subscription, if you change them then you wind up with a custom subscription, now you're just back to having lots of custom subscriptions, each of which you have to change one by one. It was far better in the older versions where you simply selected the services you wanted enabled on a domain by domain basis.

The directory structure is a total mess. At least with the older versions where things lived was predictable. Create two domains in one client? The second domain's config files will live where you expect, but the web files will live in a subfolder, under the same FTP user, in some directory that the user specifies, there is no rime or reason. If you want consistency you have to create multiple subscriptions for the customer (or is that subscriber? every other page the terminology changes). This breaks any existing scripts that check for vulnerabilities or do other useful things and forces you to either scan all of /var/www/vhosts or do have to hit Plesk and grep through configurations. Subdomains are just as bad.

I could go on and on and on and on.

 

[lhwparis]

Where to begin? Lets say you want to enable some hosting features on some domains and other hosting features on other domains for client.

create two or more different service plans for this? adjust a domain to the right service plan. if you need some special features for some special domains you can do it with addons. i love this new structur because i provide different hosting-packages so now i can create 5 service plans some addons and so on. if one of my hosting-packages get an "upgrade" i just have to change the service plan and i am shure all domains realted to that plan get the upgrade. in older version i have to do an "bulk update" and had to select the checkbox manually for each domain related to this hosting package. that was a real mess!!

i realy like that i can point additional domains and subdomains to any folder in main ftp directory in my eyes its an improvement many people ask for in plesk9 forums

 

[JaredF]

if one of my hosting-packages get an "upgrade" i just have to change the service plan

I can see how this is useful for you though I would have implemented it differently. It would have been as simple as creating tagging for domains and setting up a work flow to allow for bulk changes across tags. That would have allowed for much greater flexibility while allowing the admin to define their own language.

i realy like that i can point additional domains and subdomains to any folder in main ftp directory in my eyes its an improvement many people ask for in plesk9 forums

I think this is a valuable feature I just think it was poorly implemented. It would have been far better to do something like tossing the user into /home/username and then symbolically linking them to the various domains that user has access to while keeping the vhosts file structure sane.

 

[lhwparis]

I can see how this is useful for you though I would have implemented it differently

yes thats the point i think you cant do a product best for all people. i think service plan / subscriptions is a good solution. dont wanna see "tags" for that. you think different and i can understand your points.

all i wanna say is that i dont think plesk10 is a big fail because they changed some things massivly and some people prefer a different way or the old way.

 

[geeza@]

lhwparis, do you know how Plesk 10 would handle multiple ip addresses, it appears that you can only have 1 ip per subscription yet you can have multiple domains per subscription? Is that handled by addons?

 

[JaredF]

The reason why its such a big fail is because they've basically abandoned everything that made Plesk what it was, a great flexible hosting solution. Every version up until now has added features and expanded functionality. This new version could have (and probably should have) been called a different name. They've basically forced everyone on this upgrade path and I think the end result is going to be less customers than more. Naturally that's their prerogative, it's their company, they can do as they choose. It's my money and I can do as I'll choose, which in this case as soon as Plesk 9 is EOL, I'm walking.

 

[lhwparis]

thats right what you say but you cant always let things like they are especially in software developement. sometimes you have to break with old things and introduce something new. nearly any software which exists over a long time has gone such steps.

@geeza@: i m not shure at the moment. maybe you are right. why do you need 2 ip adresses for one subscription?

 

[JaredF]

@geeza@: i m not shure at the moment. maybe you are right. why do you need 2 ip adresses for one subscription?

Probably for things like SSL on different domains or just simply because he doesn't want do to name based hosting. Again, this was easy in Plesk 9.

geeza the only way I see to have separate IPs is to setup a new subscription for the client / customer.

Another Plesk 10 fail.

 

[lhwparis]

for ssl you can use different subscriptions. cant see the need to do it with one subscription. if you need a user who can handle both subscriptions create a reseller.

other case: thats 1 user of many who needs such special things. i can see there are scenarios its needed and it was available in plesk9 maybe it will ne back in the future

 

[JaredF]

Hrm. So you need a new subscription for each SSL. You have to setup clients as resellers so they can manage different domains. Ya, that's so much easier than the old way and so much less confusing for the customer.

 

[lhwparis]

sorry cant understand you. whats the problem? in my eyes its a logical structured system. why do you want to put all your domains in one subscription? as i said. no software can handle the wishes of all its customers and sometimes a software evolves in a wrong direction like in your case. i know thats a bad thing for you but i cant understand why you say: big fail. say in my eyes this and this is handled the wrong way and because of this i dont wanna use plesk any longer. but i think many users like me are happy with new structure in plesk10.

 

[CatalinS]

Hi

Sorry to bug in .. just wanted to say a few words. Most people are afraid of changes. Working with the same file system for so many years and suddenly almost everything is changed is quite scary (at the beginning). You get stress out because you don't find the file where it should be, then you get nervous and start to blame people. Yes, you have right to do that because you are paying them but you won't solve anything. In my opinion if you want to loose Plesk and get another control panel it's the same thing as having Plesk 10. You will have to learn almost from scratch.

Plesk has done a good thing with the subscriptions, you have more control on clients then ever. Had some problems with domains that would just redirect (no physical hosting), the inability to add them as a client (not as an addon domain) and the inability to set dedicated ips for this "redirected domain". Maybe it will added as a feature later.
Also, cannot disable mail service for addon domains, and if it will be disabled for the client will it also disable for addon domains ? (had a request like this 2 months earlier but this customer wanted mail service disabled for all domains so didn't tested this yet, just came in my mind).

Nice job with the repair script, it helped me a lot fixing problems.

 

[geeza@]

I don't class Plesk 10 as a fail, I think it brings some nice new things to the table, smooth quick interface which i think is relatively intuitive once you get used to it, the new user permisions and partner storefront all seem good to me.

The new file system should possibly be a little 'less' flexible imo (maybe a dedicated directory for domains under the the main subscription domain rather than allowing the folders to be anywhere under httpdocs, can see this getting messy with some clients) based on my current light experience with it. The dedicated IP/SSL thing is the main area I'm not sure about however, with the way we offer hosting packages if we sell a 5 domain subscription we would hope to be able to offer 5 domain specific ssl's (so 5 dedicated ips on the subscription potentially), not sure how this can be tackled currently with the new subscription structure, would the ip's just be add-ons?