cPanel Alternative - DirectAdmin?

JasonSc

JasonSc

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The price increase that cPanel rolled out in June has finally trickled down. KnowHost sent out an email about the price increase that they have to passing along to customers starting Nov 1. While the cost increase is nominal its still more money out the door.

KnowHost is offering to wave the price increase if you switch to DirectAdmin. They did a nice post comparing DirectAdmin and cPanel, here. My entire IM career has been with cPanel, so I'm a bit hesitant to change, but sometimes change is good.

Anyone with DirectAdmin care to share their experiences using that platform?
 
I got that email this morning and immediately looked up DirectAdmin's website. Knownhost is going to eat most of the cost, they say. I know some hosting companies are trying to turn a profit on it while making it seem like cPanel is being super absurd.

Knownhost said it might be an extra $6 on most VPS / Cloud packages and $12 on Dedi's but I think it also matters how many accounts you're using. If you have 5 sites on a VPS or Dedi I don't think it's going to be a huge impact. But if you're a re-seller or hosting for 200 local businesses then yeah, I'd expect to get your head busted.

Each cPanel "rental" package gives you either (up to) 1, 5, 30, or 100 accounts. The only problem is... is any hosting company really going to monitor the amount you're using? Yes, but I mean they're only going to do that to see if you're now exceeding a "tier number" in which case they'll charge you more. But if you're only using 5 accounts, I don't think you'll be getting a discount or skating by. The only way this is going to work for these huge companies is to re-distribute the costs against everyone with a hosting package that allows more than one domain or account.

Word is, cPanel got bought by some venture capitalist firm and they're trying to 5x the value immediately.

I don't know anything about DirectAdmin but unless Knownhost can move all my accounts, keep my emails live, keep my nameservers going and all the A records and TXT records and CNAMES and all that... I'll just pay the extra amount. I'm not willing to go through all of that again. And I use WHM and that's probably married to cPanel. Yay for more expenses!
 
The thing with DirectAdmin and cPanel is they are just interfaces (GUI) to programs that you can directly access in the command line. So a transfer of the Admin Interface should have little impact or downtime. You guys should be good.
 
The worst part about cpanels is they each seem to do things their own way. A cpanel is like that friend/relative that can get things done enough to "do the job" but not much more (i.e. forget custom configs). As @CCarter mentioned, cpanels are nothing more than GUI interfaces to the command line (where the real power is).

Probably the worst part of working with cpanels aside from the fact that just about anything can be done on the command line much faster, is that once you commit to one, you can't really go on the command line and edit config files freely because they are now "generated" by the cpanel and your changes will be overwritten.

I'd highly recommend spending a decent chunk of time to learning the command line. It will unlock the ability to use hundreds of utilities that don't have GUIs and also the full power of Linux which will almost definitely enhance one's skills as a marketer because now you're not limited to things that have to fit in with whatever GUI/Cpanel you're using. Anyone that tells you otherwise is married to one or more cpanels.
 
SmokeTree said:
I'd highly recommend spending a decent chunk of time to learning the command line.
Click to expand...
I would love to, but time is the thing I don't have a lot of. I'm trying to teach myself Regex right now and that is going very slow. But, I agree, some of the stuff these server guys pull off with command line stuff blows my mind
 
Self hosted webmin/virtualmin is an option. I moved sites from Vesta a year or two back and it's been solid as rock.
 
Zpanel is totally free, as many others have said...the command line is where you want to be the moment your webapp is larger and you want maximum power, there are a lot of african/eastern european devs for $5 on freelance sites
 
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