What do you think of PLESK? How about cPanel?

Soon i'm probably going to be moving over to a managed semi-dedicated solution where i'll either be able to use PLESK or cPANEL...

I've had slightly more experience with plesk and have found that it is secure and reliable. cPANEL had looooooads of tools and addons - most of which i didn't really use!

Does anyone have any comments about plesk - or for that matter cpanel? If you love either one, what exactly do you like about it and which specific functions could you not do without?

Thank You!

p.s. i have added a poll with just the two options as those are the only two options that I have!

I use Plesk with my IXwebhosting and have had no problems. I think the stats are good and its easy to transfer files.

hate plesk, hate ensim, love cpanel

I've used all three over the past 5 years or so. Cpanel mostly. Ensim I used for about a year before ditching it for Cpanel. Plesk I hated from day 1.

Why is directadmin not on the list?

I'd never heard of it til you mentioned it, but I just visited their website, and they don't even have a price listed. Doesn't look like too professional a company to me if they don't even tell you how much it costs

You will be impressed once you see it. I can give you a demo if you like, through pm obviously.

Pricing options: http://www.directadmin.com/pricing.html

I would also have to give a few thumbs up for Cpanel. I have used Ensim in the past and dislike it. Cpanel seems much more stable, less CPU intensive, and offers a great deal of options for both the Webhost Manager, Reseller Accounts, and regular Cpanel users. I have not personally used Plesk, but I did go through a demo of it and wasn't really impressed. If I recall it seemed to have a great deal less options.

I'm surprised you guys never heard of directadmin.

Between the 2 mentioned, I would have to choose Plesk - though honestly, I would pretty much choose anything over cPanel...

I know cPanel has a huge following - however, it is honestly the most flaky, buggy, insecure system available - I mean sure, if you want to spend all your time patching it, and patching all the 3rd party add-ons - I guess its ok - I just have better ways to spend my time...

I tend to call cPanel environments - "all-in-wonder" servers - as everything gets crammed onto a box (cp, dns, db, http, email, clients, etc) - then when its "full" (variable meanings of full in this industry) - another one gets added.

I like Plesk because it contains inherent clustering abilities - not yet to the level of H-Sphere, but, its getting there - which brings up another question - no one mentioned H-Sphere (lol, I guess you cant keep everyone happy )

Deffo Cpanel. Ensim is aweful wouldn't really want to use one of those box's again. Plesk is pretty good but I like the ease of administration of cpanel servers.

cPanel is extremely buggy however has a lot of options that makes it easy for your users to do things.

If your just getting a dedicated server I'd suggest Directadmin over cPanel though. Less buggy, more secure and it has a great/easy to use interface too.


Plesk/Ensim I don't care for

hsphere looks good. Will be testing it out when we get our first windows server.

Hi John,

I think you will enjoy hsphere - the dual platform support and clustering abilities are awesome..

However, you cant run hsphere on windows - unix only. Having said this, you can install hsphere on unix, and then control and integrate several windows servers into your cluster (ie windows web, mssql, coldfusion,etc)

h-sphere creates logical servers within physical servers - so, you can have a physical server containing several logical servers - web servers (.nix &/or windows), DB (postgres, mysql, mssql, oracle, etc), DNS servers, email servers, etc or, you can have physical servers as dedicated resource servers (web, db, email, dns, etc).. However, the actual control panel server (be it logical or physical) - must be run on a unix environment...

Anyway - best of luck with your h-sphere experience - once we found - and learned - this platform, we simply couldnt even consider many of the others..

cPanel is is my favorite. However Hsphere, DirectAdmin and Plesk all tie in for a close second. One thing I would like to see added to cPanel is the ability to control multiple servers from the same browser session/tab. Instead of having to open a different one (window/tab) for each server. I know that Plesk has this ability and possibly Hspere. I did not see it in DA. Ensim and Webmin are in the same crappy class if you ask me. I would never use either of them again.

Am I the only one that likes Ensim? 4.0.3 isn't bad.

Ok ok, I have to admit... All my boxen use Ensim as the backend with custom frontends and most of the services are custom. I hate the out-of-the-box Ensim installation, but I had to use it for a while and got used to it (had a box with RackShack back when Ensim is all they had). Just had to hack the hell out of it to make it useful. I'm thinking about cleaning up my scripts and releasing them into the community, as I'm actually quite impressed with what *can* be done with it.