Possibilty of Offering New Control Panel!!

[Steven]

We have been looking at the possibilities of offering another control panel other than cpanel to our clients. The hsphere control panel from www.psoft.net is a very stable and robust control panel compared to cpanel. It offers many of the same features as cpanel does. To be honest, cpanel is a little more user friendly at this time, but the functionality of hsphere appears to be better and more powerfull. So we are entertaining the notion of getting an hsphere server, and we were wondering how many of you would be interested in possibly using this control panel. There is demo of the control panel at http://demo.psoft.net:8080/demo/servlet/psoft.hsphere.CP , and we have a username of steven and a password of testing setup so that you can login to the control panel there and test it. Just select the Simple Plan account so you can test the control panel.

-Steven

[SmackDaddy]

Interesting.....but for some of the resellers you have, their clients may have either gotten used to or prefer cpanel.......are you considering switching everyone to this or giving people the option to use one or the other?

I personally like the look and feel of the new cpanel themes you are using.......there have been many compliments on how professional they look by clients and potential clients....

I guess I do not understand how HSphere is considered more "robust" or "better" than CPanel........could you explain that or send me to a place that pits one against another in a "review" of sorts?

THanks Steven.

[Steven]

Smackers,
We are still keeping our cpanel servers, but this was an additional offering that we are contemplating. If you want to stay with cpanel, then you are more then welcome to, as we love it as well :) We will never take anything away, we will give you the option of switching to hsphere or staying with cpanel.

We have also received very positive feedback regarding the new cpanel themes, and they are here to stay.

The reasons why hsphere is more robust, is because it truly is an all in one control panel. It is integrated with many payment gateways specifically the one that we use, it offers domain registration, it has built in helpdesk support, better accounting for bandwidth, and other stats, and it also offers a site building utility called site studio. Not to mention the updates of hsphere are not nightly updates, so they don't have the ability to break anything as cpanel does (we have turned this feature off). It is more stable than cpanel in terms of bugs. A lot of this is on the admin side of things especially with the bugs that cpanel has, but one of the major advantages to hsphere is that it is developed by a team of programmers, unlike cpanel who is developed by 1 person.

-Steven

[SmackDaddy]

Sounds pretty "nifty"....I currently am using phpmanager with cpanel (phpmanager being a customer database, payment/billing solution and help desk all in one.....)....

But....I just might consider this hsphere if you do get a server with it......I would be interested in having one reseller account on each (seeing as I am about to upgrade my account).....

When would the planned "roll out" date be if you went this route?

Thanks.

[Ailish]

I used H-Sphere at my last hosting provider.

I like some things about CPanel better, and some things about H-Sphere better.

At least they way my last hosting provider had it configured, it used JavaScript to open extra windows that it didn't need to, and that was a pain. I have that disabled in my main browser to prevent pop-up adds. I had to use three different browsers to access all the features of the panel, since two of my browsers wouldn't see different parts of it. The H-Sphere folks apparently claimed that was the way my last hosting company had configured it, and it didn't have to be that way. That hosting provider shrugged, and said they didn't know any other way, which was pretty typical of them, and why I'm not there anymore. I can do everything I need, from any browser I've tried, with CPanel, and that is a big plus for me.

On the positive side for H-Sphere, it coped more nicely with multiple domains. I had both domains in the same account, and could access the settings for either from the same pages. Bandwidth and disk space were combined (but broken down so I could see how much each domain used, if I wished), so they could each use as much or as little of the total as they needed, without having to reallocate in WHM (which we didn't have, but I was in a non-reseller multi-domain plan, there).

So, I think I'd be interested in trying the IH installation of H-Sphere, on the theory that it will be competently set up, and if the problems I had at my last provider are gone, I'd be interested in using it. If it doesn't live to it's potential, I'd want to go back to CPanel, since I can do everything I need to with that, here.

Though the more I think of it, everything works so well here, that I'm tempted to declare it 'not broken' and not chance messing anything up by trying H-Sphere.

[Steven]

Smackers,
Well we wanted to test the waters to see if this is something that our clients would want to use or be interested in. Depending on the interest we would order a server within the next day or two, have hsphere installed and then start an alpha test with just the techs/admin and myself. Then after we are satisified that we know the intricacies of the panel, we will offer a beta test for anyone who wants to test it out providing that the site that will be hosted will not be one that is mission critical, as this will still be a beta. This will be on a case by case basis in who we select because we will require only the best communication between the beta testers and IH. We will run the beta for a while, to ensure that we iron out any kinks, squash any potential bugs, then we will offer it to the masses.

-Steven

[Steven]

Ailish,
Care to elaborate a little more on what the pros and cons are compared to cpanel. Also we would only have either hsphere or one of their authorized resellers install it.

-Steven

[ed_lynn]

Steven,

hsphere looks like a great control panel. i to noticed that there was the possibility of accessing help desk, billing, and domain reg and thought that it would be a great addition for all your clients here. btw is it to early to sign up for beta testing?

ed

[Steven]

Originally posted by ed_lynn
Steven,

hsphere looks like a great control panel. i to noticed that there was the possibility of accessing help desk, billing, and domain reg and thought that it would be a great addition for all your clients here. btw is it to early to sign up for beta testing?

ed

Hi Ed,
Yes those features that you list are just more examples of the complete package that hsphere offers. We are not accepting beta testers yet, but once we do, we will post here and also send out a mass email to our clients.

-Steven

[Ailish]

My impressions of H-Sphere, based on memory.

Cons:

JavaScript windows opened needlessly. This is particularly apparent if you try the Web Protect option to set passwords on some directories. The click on Web Protect opens a new, blank window, which runs a JavaScript to open yet another window to show the directory tree, which opens another when you click on a directory, etc. This is apparently the default H-Sphere behaviour, though they claim since it's template based the host could change that, but it made this feature unusable with my two preffered browsers.

The last hosting company claimed that H-Sphere prevented any spam blocking tools such as Spam Assassin.

It's ugly. The three skins it comes with are all uglier than any of the CPanel skins I've seen here.

Pros:

Multiple domains in the same account.

Ailish

[g808]

----- H-Sphere pros -----

- Ability to control multiple domains from one session.
- Bandwidth / Disk Space control without using WHM.
- Bandwidth usage vs. total (currently can only view total from WHM)
- Reverse Traceroute
- ability to change skins (currently it seems you can only choose the CPanel skin per host plan)

----- H-Sphere cons -----

- ugly skins

----- General Comments ------

I don't that support isn't integrated into the panel. CPanel at least links off to the support Helpdesk, which is fine with me. I guess this would be more of a benefit to IH support personnel.

I think it's great that IH is looking to improve it's already impressive customer service! :)

[Tal]

g808-
The only reason why the support links are there in the cpanel skins is because we editted the skins to suit our needs and we modified settings while deleting and adding others. I don't know if hsphere is skinnable but I would assume so.

Either way, we appreciate your feedback

[pete3005]

Last night I set a client up on an Ensim control panel. I must say it was very easy to use and presented nicely, although the control panel frontend was a custom skin and very nicely done.

Steven and Co.. have you ever considered Ensim? The only apparent downside is that it is stuck on PHP version 4.0.6 which mean't I had to add in $_POST = $HTTP_POST_VARS e.t.c... rather annoying and this particular host runs PHP in safe mode which meant I had to re-work my local time function... apart from those issues, I really like Ensim alot.

I just wondered if you had looked at it.

Pete

[Steven]

Hey Pete,
I have looked at pretty much every control panel out there, and to be honest people like eye candy. They love that perfectly layed out user graphical interface coupled along with the easy to use features that cpanel has. Hsphere in my opinion is next in line because they actually have a development team working on the product. They have come a great ways since their inception into the control panel market. I have taken a look at ensim, and I don't like the user nor admin gui for some reason. But more importantly than looks, we want stability. If there are bugs, we want a release, we can't have stuff not functioning 100% on a production environment server. As per your post, ensim uses php version 4.06 there are some nasty bugs with that version, one of which you have mentioned.

-Steven

[prim]

Well my 2c..

I didn't have much time to look into it .. but first impression....
It is ugly or at least uglier then Cpanel. Plus I dont know if its my browser /ie 5 on Mac / but I see it half in English half in French / And yes I did log in with english selected ;)/. So this tells me immediately that something hasn't been thought through completely, or I just found a bug.. Should I email them ;)

I guess the main good thing is the ability to control multiple domains.