Thread: Favorite Control Panel

We recently finished moving everybody away from cPanel, most of the people on the Plesk servers now love it for the ease of use any much cleaner interface

I've had many nightmares with the flat text format of cPanel, the developers should be shot on sight! Plesk may not be the most stable control panel, but we've not had as many problems with it and SWsoft are always there to fix it.

Originally Posted by Karl
But HSphere isn't a lowly control panel like the others, don't demean it by classing it along with CPanel/Plesk etc.

Plesk's going to be there soon.

Isn't HSphere a complete solution?

Plesk will never be the same as HSphere, SwSofts equivelant of HSphere is HSPComplete, which is a complete automation system (billing, control panel, vps, dedicated server) for hosting companies.

Oh and Plesk gets my vote

Nice new features in plesk 8 especially domain aliases and a lot of features that will be very handy.

Originally Posted by andrewjab

Isn't HSphere a complete solution?

Plesk will never be the same as HSphere, SwSofts equivelant of HSphere is HSPComplete, which is a complete automation system (billing, control panel, vps, dedicated server) for hosting companies.

Oh and Plesk gets my vote

Nice new features in plesk 8 especially domain aliases and a lot of features that will be very handy.

HSPc integrated with Plesk offers similar to what is offered by HSphere currently and is moving towards a more distributed setup at the moment. I think unless psoft/comodo add major new features to HSphere, SWsoft's HSPc+Plesk+Virtuozzo+SiteBuilder will offer a much more comprehensive feature-set by the end of the year. It's not cheap though, far from it.

We were put off HSPComplete because you have to pay per user. The actual product looked quite good as we primarily use SwSoft products.

The main problem was a customer only buying a domain name counts as one user and the cost of a user was about $3 on HSPComplete so that already meant a loss on that customer. I am not sure whether this has changed as this was about a year and a half ago.

I have had a browse around the online demo and they have integrated a lot more features into it than when we first checked it out. Does anybody have any actual experience in using it?

HSPcomplete is much more integrated with other SWsoft products since version 3.2, it is licensed at the number of users so it could work out expensive. However somebody with 10 domain subscription and 10 dedicated servers still counts as one customer to the license!

Both myself and Cranky have experience of HSPc, the future versions are looking even more promising

Originally Posted by PaulC

...the future versions are looking even more promising

But that's top secret.

Originally Posted by andrewjab

The main problem was a customer only buying a domain name counts as one user and the cost of a user was about $3 on HSPComplete so that already meant a loss on that customer. I am not sure whether this has changed as this was about a year and a half ago.

Don't forget the cost of Plesk, Virtuozzo, Sitebuilder are added on top of this too, then there's mandatory training, ongoing support and maintenance, implementation and customisation support.

That is a fair point. Although at the time we were getting individuals signing up for domain names and only domain names which would not have balanced up.

As I said the features were very nice. The automated side of it for dedicated servers and VPS were definately worth a look. Last time I looked you could deploy compelte solutions automatically for customers without any interaction. One of the draw backs was the CMS system that you had to use with the previous version which made all hosting companies using the software very generic - this could be a reflection of there ability to skin the problem. I did notice that on the demo it has changed considerably in terms of the front end with less generic features (although I wasn't sure if it were a new skin at the time).

Partners get the support free, so that was not the main issue. We pay for Plesk, Virtusso, Sitebuilder as standard and tie them into Modernbill so that doesn't really add to the equation - it is just the additional cost of HSPComplete and the domain issue that was considered.

To us it was the cost per user when the user was only purchasing domain names that swayed us to use Kayako and Modernbill.

Do they use Smarty templates now?

Originally Posted by andrewjab

Partners get the support free, so that was not the main issue. We pay for Plesk, Virtusso, Sitebuilder as standard and tie them into Modernbill so that doesn't really add to the equation - it is just the additional cost of HSPComplete and the domain issue that was considered.

To us it was the cost per user when the user was only purchasing domain names that swayed us to use Kayako and Modernbill.

You could push domains via another system if you're not willing to spend $3 of your profit on billing those. Support may be free, depends on your agreement with SWsoft, but with HSPc there's two types of support - technical support (same team as VZ) and implementation support (which I'd strongly recommend) - list prices they're both chargeable separate. There's also mandatory training which I am led to believe they impose on partners and non-partners.

If you're using Plesk/VZ/SB you ought to take another look at HSPc, it's the best product for SWsoft-only providers due to the excellent integration.

Feel free to IM me if you want any help.

At the time it was not feasible to allow the loss in domain name registration.

We did not offer reseller hosting \ Dedicated hosting \ VPS solutions meaning the costs would have had to have been balanced by shared hosting accounts. Especially factouring in we were a very young company when we initially looked in this would have meant a loss from the offset. As you mentioned there are additional costs which make the product extremely expensive - command center costs, training, implementation and when we factored that with how much development had to be done it just didn't evaluate as being the best step forward when we were only offering shared hosting.

Do you know if HSPComplte uses smarty templates?

Originally Posted by andrewjab

Do you know if HSPComplte uses smarty templates?

There's many different areas that can be customised - Reseller Control Center, Control Panel, HSPstore, Simple Store. Full details at:
http://download1.swsoft.com/HSPcompl...docs/HSPC_INT/

A PHP-based store is coming soon and should be easier to customise.

We were put off of SWSoft full stop, by the num-nut who kept trying to tell us that HSPComplete was perfect for us, when I'd pointed out about 30 times that it wasn't because it was lacking in a lot of functionallity and wouldn't allow us to integrate our own modules - What we'd contacted them about, was PEM, but they just weren't interested in selling us that, only in telling us that we were wrong, they were right and new our business better than us.