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which one?

J

johnson4

Guest
What are the reasons to use Plesk 7.5.4 over C-panel?
We are running php database-driven websites on the servers
 
C-pannel. Have a look at their website. Their product, support, sales material, staff availability sucks.

SW-Soft is a international company with tech support 24/7

Plesk control panel is also one of the most superior products on the market for Windows and Linux hosting environments.

You should really be talking to sales on this one for a real idea on how things work

If you are interested in installing the system then download a copy and it comes with a license for 1 client and 1 domain. You can test until your heart is content. If you wish to purchase a license key either do it through SW-Soft or a partner etc.

Hope this helps. Reply if you want more info.
 
I agree, sw-soft is really pumping out some great products. Cpanel is a poo hole, don't mess with them.
 
Heh,

you must be new to the Plesk hosting expierence. =)

I'd suggest taking a stroll through the support forums here. Set the viewable messages back to about 60 or so days to get a good idea of what you can expect from support.

In my expierence over the past year or so, I've seen super shoddy updates and releases (I've never ONCE seen an upgrade go properly, sometimes forcing me to spend 4-6 hours to get a server back online due to quality of updates). In these cases, i've opened tickets marked URGENT as I had entire servers offline. EVERY time, I've had to resolve the problem myself, usually before they've ever logged into the server.

For simple issues (things you can usually fix yourself bysearching the forums), i've noticed decent turnaround time, although the 24x7 timeframe is a joke. Tickets get worked on during THEIR (Russian) daylight hours. I've had to wait up until 5-6 in the morning just to see a ticket response so I could respond back and pray that they didn't make me wait another day. If they can't respond to a ticket with a form response, you generally get the "We've sent this to our development team" response, which means it may be anywhere from 1 day to two-three weeks before you hear anything back, and whenever you do, it's usually "This will be fixed in the next upgrade" and they never give you timeframes for the upgrade. So you're forced to 1. wait and 2. deal with a gauranteed buggy upgrade and HOPE they actually include the fix in the update.

All in all, just set the timeframe back awhile on these forums and let the posts speak for themselves.


Originally posted by EnterpriseIT
C-pannel. Have a look at their website. Their product, support, sales material, staff availability sucks.

SW-Soft is a international company with tech support 24/7

Plesk control panel is also one of the most superior products on the market for Windows and Linux hosting environments.

You should really be talking to sales on this one for a real idea on how things work

If you are interested in installing the system then download a copy and it comes with a license for 1 client and 1 domain. You can test until your heart is content. If you wish to purchase a license key either do it through SW-Soft or a partner etc.

Hope this helps. Reply if you want more info.
 
Voodoo,

All well and said.

Support is not SW-Soft's strong point. But there is a way to get good support and a way not to.

Question,

1. have you paid for support or are you on standard support?

2. If you are able to call you are able to get immediate responce compared to delayed have you tried this?

Also. Why are you experiencing problems with each release. Everyone in the IT industry understands to give a patch a few weeks before installing it once it's released so you don't kick yourself in the head.

Might be an idea to slow down and wait for all bugs to be ironed out before installing.

One final thing. If you look through the forum in the past 60 days to 6 months you will see a lot of people doing some pretty stupid and un-advised things.

People install without reading the release notes and then blame the development team. Their notes are quite clear on what NOT to do and what you are able to do.
 
Originally posted by voodoochile
I'd suggest taking a stroll through the support forums here. Set the viewable messages back to about 60 or so days to get a good idea of what you can expect from support.

All in all, just set the timeframe back awhile on these forums and let the posts speak for themselves.

Actually I think making decisions based on a user forum would really be wrong! People tend to use a forum for some software when they have problems or need to find a solution to an issue they currently have.

But you don't hear from a majority of users been satisfied with their product in a forum like this.

I would guess - that for every 1 letter here complaining about something - there would be at least 99 other satisfied users not even looking in this forum.

That said - as most software developed for a majority of OSes and with the complex integration into many parts of the OS it's naturally that you'll find errors not discovered by a betatester. You can't develop bugfree software to solve that - nomatter how many ressources you throw at the development.

But ... if I have to mention some negative effects in the current Plesk development path, it must be the fact that Sw-Soft has spend to much time developing new (and - to many - really unusable) features - instead of cleaning up running versions, fixing bugs, improving already introduced features etc.

But as far as I'm told - this will change and Sw-Soft has realised that improving the robustness of already introduced features is more important than introducing new useless modules and features with a lot of bugs.
 
I agree to that. The system is a great platform. Give it a try and don't base your thoughts upon this forum.
 
Take a look through the Cpanel forums, then look through here. Every other software forum i've been a member of is an awesome reflection of the quality of the product. If it's relativley stable, this will be show as new posts in the form of people discussing new things to do with their software, ways to extend it and maybe fix minor bugs.

I would say that I'm in a lucky position. I've got the time in the industry and behind *nix boxen that I can cleanup just about anything that breaks. Now, when I use their automated installer to update to a new point release (We'll say 7.5.2->7.5.3) it should NOT trash databases, corrupt configuration files and trash user data. I don't care how inexpierenced the admin is, running ./autoinstaller should NEVER do that. This isn't a downfall of the admin, this is a utter lack of quality control in regards to the software release cycle. This is sw-soft trying too hard to support too many platforms at once.

I ask you compare the forums for Sw-Soft to C-Panel or any other server panel support forum. You'll learn very quickly that forums aren't only a place to ***** about the quality of a product, that's just here. =)

Enterprise/Whistler, how long have you been using Plesk and how many customers do you have on the platform all together? I'm guessing not too many. =)

Anyway, good luck in what you do and don't invest too heavily in a sw-soft solution. My .02.
 
Originally posted by voodoochile Enterprise/Whistler, how long have you been using Plesk and how many customers do you have on the platform all together? I'm guessing not too many.

I've been using Plesk for about 2 years now - started with 7.0.2 and has worked my way up 'till current release - 7.5.4patchlevel2 - I've worked with hosting since '98 and still think the most important thing you need to realize is that Plesk isen't your fullautomated serveradministrator that will magically fix everything with you pushing a button or two.

I've spend countless days, hours, and weeks upgrading hosting-environments over the years - compliling, reconfiguring, crying, throwing things around, etc. etc. and no matter what operating system I've used over the many years - I've never seen click on a button to upgrade work like magic at all times.

But I know - that Plesk makes it easy to my customers to understand how to enable, disable, create or remove stuff from their current hosting - they can do this by clicking a button - thats why I pay my Plesk license - not to expect Sw-Soft to run my server or even to push the administration over on their responsibility.

We have here a Plesk running 4.000+ domains on a P4 2,4GHz FreeBSD with 2GB ram - and it's running perfect - oh well, it takes apache about 8 minutes to startup reading the many many many configuration files - but its working and is not running slow.

So it can be done - but you need to know a little about hosting, servers and a lot about your operating system - hosting is not for kids just because we have products like cPanel, WebSphere, DirectAdmin, Plesk or whatever the systems is called.

I bought Plesk to save me the time and expence in developing my own provisioning system and have a "standard" webinterface to give my customers.

Plesk is by far not perfect and hopefully Sw-Soft has learned a thing or 3 over the last release cycles of Plesk - as I mention before - I've heard that the focus is moving from solely developing new features to having more focus on the basics and already included features - if this is true - I can't say - I diden't hear the conversation with the CEO but I must admit that just seeing Sw-Soft releasing two patchlevels for the 7.5.4 is new...

But I still think people need to understand what product they are buying and what they're not buying... specially the last thing - what your'e not bying...

I think Plesk can be better, more improved, faster, more robust, etc. But I've seen it come a long way in just the 2 years I've been using it - and (still) look forward to see where the next year or two will bring us. The day Plesk dosen't deliver what I look for - an easy webinterface for my customers to use - I'll change to any other product that will give me this - this is the most important thing to me - not if I have to spend one hour a week nursing my servers or if I have to spend 10 hours - as long as my customers find it easy to use!!
 
Well said Whistler! I've been using Plesk since the days of the old 5.0 Standard. And I've had my problems with this product, but it's getting better and better all of the time. I sure have had more problems with the Microsoft workstation than my Plesk servers.

The biggest problems that I see on these forums are kids trying to make a Mercedes out of a VW. Plesk is made for a particular function. Like Whistler said "an easy webinterface for my customers to use". Some people just have to toy with it until it breaks.

And an additional bonus is having people that support Plesk users like ART and 4PSA. They not only develop products to expand on Plesk, but they offer their expertise on these forums on a daily basis.

Take the plunge johnson4, try it-you'll like it.
 
Voodo,

I do not host to the public on a huge level. We are a software development company and have developed solutions for international franchises and hosted them.

Our main focus is high end database solutions hosted on our servers and we needed somthing with easy functionality to Microsoft & Linux servers.

I am a 50% share holder and director in the company Enterprise IT so I've been involved in a technical level and a directors board level making decisions about this system.

I've been using Plesk now for 4 years and I love it.

Every product has it's up and downs. If you don't develop it don't complain as you are using someone elses product and someone has a vision for it which is not your own.

Voodo, if you like cpanel what are you doing here except putting down a great product?

You youself seem to be biased towards cpannel.

The size of my company again is none of your business nor how many customers I host. At the end of the day it could possibly (being that I own a national network engineering company and a Australia Wide Internet Service Provider providing DSL, ISDN & Dialup) be slighly bigger than yours.
 
Enterprise:

I've dealt with Plesk since back in the early days. I wasn't extremly impressed with it then, nor am I now.

My Bias against Plesk comes from having to admin and run quite a few servers with a good number of domains on them. I can't really give numbers, but suffice it to say, enough that I know that it's not just one or two problematic servers.

Consistently, time after time, I've watched Buggy PSA updates drop. I've applied them and watched them break every server the update was applied to in the exact same way. Mind you, these are servers built exactly as SW-Soft prescribes with a few workarounds for extending the amount of traffic the servers can handle (Workarounds moreso for the OS to deal with the higher loads and increased traffic, than modifications to Plesk or the way it operates). Currently, if I roll out upgrades to the servers, I have to alot a couple of hours for repairs. Some upgrades only require minor repairs, some require extensive work. The "Autoupdate" button in the server portion of the CP is a Joke to anyone using FreeBSD. Please feel free to search through these forums and see this for yourself.

I like the product itself, but Support and Quality Control have been horrid over the past year or so. Bug reports *MIGHT* see a fix if you're lucky. As an example an issue I had with PSADump and Memory Exhaustion was reported about 9-10 months ago. It *Finally* was addressed in the 7.5.4 update. During that time, I had to rework the kernel on all of my servers to deal with shoddy perl code. Btw, that was one that I had to argue with their Support for about two weeks to get them to admit that it Just *might* be a problem with their code. After that, it dissappeared to their developers and I never heard a thing again. This is just one example of at least 5-6 that I can think of off the top of my head. The only time I even bother opening a ticket anymore is if it's an issue that can wait to get fixed. If it's mission critical, I dig in and fix it myself. It's the only choice.

As to why I'm a proponent of Cpanel, I'll say this. We have one Cpanel server as of this time. It updates itself nightly, never drops and never gives me any trouble. Security updates are done on a nightly basis (Unlike Plesks which might be bi-monthly if you're lucky), they install themselves and best of all, I've never once had a Cpanel update trash a box. From an administrative standpoint, this means that as opposed to spending 12+ hours during off-peak times patching plesk servers and then fixing anything that breaks, I can sleep and the servers will update themselves. THAT is worth it's weight in gold right there.

While I'm on the security kick, I'll mention the difference between Plesks Application Vault and Cpanels. Plesk Application Vault updates only come with updates to the entire platform. Which of course *Might* be every couple fo months. Now, when these updates come out, Plesk only updates the package sources, but doesn't touch any applications that have been installed. So you're gauranteed to always have old, vulnerable applications on a Plesk server. Currently there is no functionality for updating installed packages. Cpanel does this all for you on a *NIGHTLY* basis should you want it.

SU Environments. Plesk implenets SU_exec on Perl applications only. Consequently, if you have php script being abused, or a php driven site being hammered, there is *NO* way to track it down. Coupled with the previous application vault issue, and you have 800 clients with insecure applications which are probabally being abused by script kiddies and you have no way of tracking it down. A good example would be on all the last go-arounds with PHPBB. Running top on my cpanel box showed me which users viewtopic.phps were being abused and let me take care of them within a minute or two. I had to write some scripts to spider my /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts directory, search for Viewtopic.php scripts, check version information in the header of the file then chown/chmod as appropriate. That's not fun. It's time consuming and it's a PITA.

I could go on with my laundry list of problems and suggestions if you really want, but I don't think it serves a purpose at this time. Most of them have been brought up and discussed in these forums many times by many people, which is why I suggested taking a look through in the first place.

My support plan is 24x7 Ticket based support. We didn't purchase the phone based support due to the quality fo the ticket based support. Honestly, if you buy a clunker from the carlot, do you go buy a more expensive one from the same place and hope it works itself out?

I've been doing Systems Administration and Coding for about 10 years now on just about every OS you can think of including Solaris, MANY Linux distros, Free/OpenBSD to Win2k/2k3. I've assisted in the upkeep, maintanence and managed services for upwards of 3,000 servers, some remote most local and built several hosting companies from the ground up (Technical wise, not so much the biz aspect). I'm not a "noob" admin by any stretch of the imagination.

From what I've seen of Cpanel in action and Plesk in action, I've gone ahead and made the move to start offering Cpanel to our customers and Phase out Plesk. I've done the math and I don't see any way to do large scale hosting with Plesk, it's just too labor intensive to keep up and when you need the help, it's generally pretty shoddy in my expierence. I'm a big fan of automation, and due to the unreliability of the Plesk product and it's updates, I don't feel comfortable automating any aspect of PSA Adminstration.

I suggest you draw your own conclusions based on your own expierences and from the problems listed in these forums. This is going to be the best place to actually see and read about the problems that you can expect from Plesk. You'll read about other peoples support issues, time to resolution of said issues and the quality of the Support and the product itself.

Personally, I think if SW-Soft can get over the quality control issues with their software, it'll be a HUGE step in the right direction. I like the interface and the direction their moving in, but over the course of the past year, I've seen no big improvements, only minor bugfixes and the introduction of more problems. YMMV though. Anyway, my .02 has been offered here, I'm not sure what else I can really say. I'm not going to argue the quality fo the product with you as it doesnt' change anything and honestly, I've got better things to do. To the original poster, I'd suggest checking out the product on a trial basis if you can, and do the same with Cpanel. Play around with each one as they both have pros and cons over the other. If I had to chalk it up in short, I'd say that Cpanel appears to be a much more refined and production ready product than Plesk. Maybe down the road, this will change though, hard telling. =)

Edit: As to the size of your company, I could care less. I was curious how many of these boxes you have as I assumed not too many, and you probabally dont' have a "large" number of clients on them. Plesk is just fine if you've got a dozen domains on it, that's dandy. I put around 7-800 domains on each box and I've got quite a few boxes. :) I'm in the business of Shared Hosting. It's not a value-add to other services my company offers, it's our prime source of revenue. As to being biased towards Cpanel? Yep, I imagine I am at this point, but only because of my expierences with Plesk. SW-Soft Virtuozzo support is solid however, and that's something I should have clarified. It's the Plesk department that is pretty shoddy all around. I've got nothing but compliments for the VZ Team.

Originally posted by EnterpriseIT
Voodo,

I do not host to the public on a huge level. We are a software development company and have developed solutions for international franchises and hosted them.

Our main focus is high end database solutions hosted on our servers and we needed somthing with easy functionality to Microsoft & Linux servers.

I am a 50% share holder and director in the company Enterprise IT so I've been involved in a technical level and a directors board level making decisions about this system.

I've been using Plesk now for 4 years and I love it.

Every product has it's up and downs. If you don't develop it don't complain as you are using someone elses product and someone has a vision for it which is not your own.

Voodo, if you like cpanel what are you doing here except putting down a great product?

You youself seem to be biased towards cpannel.

The size of my company again is none of your business nor how many customers I host. At the end of the day it could possibly (being that I own a national network engineering company and a Australia Wide Internet Service Provider providing DSL, ISDN & Dialup) be slighly bigger than yours.
 
Voodoo,

I don't think we will agree with each other on who is right and who is wrong.

I don't beleive you should continue using a product you have lost heart in, nor do I sugest you go out and role out another system of another platform before you think about it.

Planning is the greatest asset you have as a Data centre. correct role out of infrastructure and software is something that all hosting companies are always working towards getting better at.

I hope you are able to find something that works for you and something that works for your company.

We have found SW-Soft and will continue to use it as we have found our solution in their company structure, as you have not.

I wish you the best and I ask for an end to this conversation etc.

Cheers,
 
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