Control panels?

[ice53ltd]

Hi everyone,

We are thinking of offering hosting and reseller accounts on a FreeBSD system and want to offer our users a control panel.

We could very easily write a decent system in-house but what value do users attach on a known control panel tool?

Since we're on FreeBSD our choice is limited, we have a couple of open source solutions to choose from, PSA and I believe CPanel.

I've spoken to Plesk about this licensing (I didn't like the fact that you'd have to buy either a 30 domain or a 300 domain license) and they suggested perhaps becoming a Gold partner would be better for us. This requires us to 'invest' (read: give away your money to some random company) $1000 :laugh: and pay a $1000/year renewal :laugh: and then buy a minimum of 30 licenses. (Discounts range from 20% when purchasing less than 10 licenses in one transaction to 35% when purchasing over 30).

Who else here uses Plesk? How are you affording such a product?

I'm in half a mind to set a few man hours aside to write something that kicks Plesks a**... we'd write it in SOAP so you can control multiple servers from one machine aswell as write your own client in anything that supports SOAP (Almost any programming language).... We'd also make it platform independant (Supporting BSD, Linux and Windows). And finally, we'd include some decent billing system. Any input from people here on this idea?

[markcastle]

Nice idea ice - but i think when you start to research what it would take to write a platform independant control panel you would find yourself looking at a number of man years of coding - not to mention the rest of the software development life cycle. Start simple and plan for new features with each release.
SOAP is without a doubt the way to go though.

[ice53ltd]

Yea, I agree it'll take a long time... we've got 2/3 developers around to help but its something I'd do as a pet project. I've got the Apache add/edit/remove host functionality so far, I'm working on FTP access next. I'll keep people updated as I go along, if anyone has any ready made scripts (PHP preffered, Perl ok) that I may find helpful please forward them to me.

[Karl]

HSphere runs on FreeBSD.

[ice53ltd]

HSphere looks good, and marginally more reasonable in pricing than the rest....

I spoke to CPanel... and I laughed.... They use a forumla to tell you how much you'd pay per license... it goes something along the lines of

(support level * 100) - (number of licenses * 0.2)

Support levels start at 0.6.... so you can see, you'd need to buy 100 licenses straight off if you wanted them for $40 (and people, that's per month)

Oh and lets not forget their conditions... can't sell external licenses until you've sold 100 internal ones, can't advertise external licenses for less than $100 and aren't allowed to sell them for less than $60.....

You'd think you were dealing with some big hollywood film production company, the sheer arrogance that emminates from these peoples a** is amazing.... DarkORB... you are only a software company, you don't make anything so unique or so special that it could never be done by someone else....

Anyway, I should stop ranting... its not good for karma. So far, Plesk have been the only people willing to make a good offer on their products. If anyone disagrees with me voice your reasons.

[Karl]

Well if you want some alternate pricing on HSphere licenses then please let me know

[ice53ltd]

Here's a small status update on how I'm getting on with writing an in-house control panel....

Its just me working on it at the moment, I intend to do most if not all of the coding with two colleagues handling the design side.

I started yesterday evening and so far I've got almost a thousand lines of code (including a debug console utility). I haven't started working on the SOAP aspect yet but adding that will be a trivial matter.

So far, it supports FreeBSD (can add/delete/modify users) and Apache virtual hosts (can add/remove IPs and add/remove virtual hosts).

The code is completely modular so loading a new module (say for Linux as the target system) will only involve writing one new file.

I've designed it so it can support custom extensions, cache updates (so those annoying resellers who are always adding and removing domains don't eat Apache), and you can support any HTTPD (Zeus, Apache etc..) by rewriting the module file for it.

As for software install, rather than package together a whole bunch of software, I've gone for installing from the FreeBSD ports with minimal compile time changes.

Here's what I intend to support initially:
+ FreeBSD
+ FreeBSD 'jails'.
+ Apache with suExec and mod_ssl
+ qmail with vpopmail
+ Cyrus mail server
+ IMP (or SquirrelMail??)
+ ProFTPd
+ GnuPG
+ BIND (is there a better DNS daemon around?)

Any input would be welcome, the only things I am working on right now is FreeBSD and Apache support so I may change some of the other software choices.

[jonny_b]

Sounds like you'd have been better off writing this ages ago instead of wasting time looking for an alternative

Bind tends to be the best DNS Server.....

Cheers,

[ice53ltd]

Well I didn't really want to write my own... I was willing to pay for a good system - I was not willing to pay through the nose for one. I charge a minimum of £30 an hour for consulting - a CPanel license costs $99 a month... I think over a year it is cheaper for me to write my own... over 2 years I make money back, and if it sells I make even more money.

I think, Ensim must be the cheapest of the bunch, but does anyone here thing licensing prices for Plesk and CPanel are fair? I certainly don't and I won't line their pockets because they happen to be considered the best.

I've looked at things like simpleCP and webCP... I think the code like most open source projects is a little messy and not grately documented. I always write my code such that someone can pick up where I stop (well at least, I begin with writing it that way ).

[dch]

Hi there,

You may also want to look @ DJBDNS (http://www.djbdns.org/index.shtml)

Personally I don't know much about it, but I have heard it is faster and more secure than BIND

Cheers

[ice53ltd]

Thanks, I'll check it out

[ice53ltd]

Hi everyone... just a minor status update on my control panel...

Apache + mod_ssl and SuExec works perfectly now. PHP is available as a module aswell as a CGI executable. A user is created from every domain name(that's 2nd level domain name.. subdomains are owned by the same user as the main domain). All web files have permissions set to 750, owned by the user but the group belongs to the Apache user - scripts in CGI-BIN are owned and executed under domains username.

I'm only just getting my head around BIND..... I've decided to go for BIND 9 since that's what ISC recommend.