Alternate control panels, clustering, load balancing

[JPC-Greg]

I think they're talking about a different kind of cluster, Ronny, not one of yours!

Gwaihir has the idea...

Please don't say it's H-sphere over BSD, and you're thinking about doing it here, otherwise you'll never get rid of me!

Hrm...

Goliath, eh? And, Apache 2.0.59?

Probably just wishful thinking, on my part...

If h-sphere and bsd are something you want we can do that. One of the vp's of psoft is an old friend of mine and been pushing me to use h-sphere for a long long time. If i thought for one second i could get tens of thousands of people to stop obsessing over cpanel Id make a change instantly.

Freebsd hosting is coming, 100% without question. Will it be h-sphere powered, well that wasnt the plan but its not too late.

[Vin DSL]

Will it be h-sphere powered, well that wasn't the plan but its not too late...

H-sphere has blossomed, Chief. I think it would behoove you to check them out!

It runs on BSD -- you can migrate clients from a cluster in one physical location to a cluster in another location -- they have VPS versions -- and even IIS modules, if you want to offer Windows hosting. The CP allows clients to do a lot more, which means less tickets for Tech Support. I think the license is a one-time fee of $4 per client, instead of having to pay monthly fees, and so forth, and so on -- WAY too much to list here...

[JPC-Greg]

H-sphere has blossomed, Chief. I think it would behoove you to check them out!

It runs on BSD -- you can migrate clients from a cluster in one physical location to a cluster in another location -- they have VPS versions -- and even IIS modules, if you want to offer Windows hosting. The CP allows clients to do a lot more, which means less tickets for Tech Support. I think the license is a one-time fee of $4 per client, instead of having to pay monthly fees, and so forth, and so on -- WAY too much to list here...

you sound like my friend Carlos .. its not me that needs convincing really though. Just the thought of starting a poll asking clients about switching to h-shpere would probably cost clients. People fear change mostly and maybe Im wrong but I think the majority of cour clients would cringe at the thought of not being powered by cpanel. I'll see if they will spot me some test liceneses to setup some demo's and things for everyone to view and weigh the possibilities.

[sehh]

i wouldn't mind moving to another product, away from cpanel. to me, cpanel looks like a very badly designed application (i am a software engineer and i can spot the ugliness a mile away).

how about plesk? i've never used it but i hear that it looks (graphical interface-wise) a lot better.

[AlexKall]

Defenetly better look wise, but not when it comes to features. They're like volvo, great car but everything is extra, very little is standard.

[sehh]

ah thats interesting, i didn't know that.

[Ron]

Don't talk to me about features of the product, talk to me about benefits to me as a client, not you as a webhost.

I get the impression that you think it's lighter weight, but
A) that's a feature, and
B) that's a benefit to you (you can house more clients on the same powered server).

Tell me why I'd want you to change panels, and why that outweighs the "negative" of limiting my site's portability to other webhosts.

Tell me about how clustering (or whatever other feature you'd like to sell me on) will improve my life as a webmaster, or as a reseller.

I'm not married to CPanel and WHM, so talk to me.

Tell me about how seamless the transition will be. Tell me about how I won't miss any functionality but how I'll be able to do more.
Tell me about how there can be a conversion back to one of your CPanel servers so that I can run pkgacct and make a move. (And if it will be seamless, why not make the front end look like CPanel, and just send a notice that it's going to happen tomorrow, just like the php upgrade)

If you can't convince me, you ain't got a chance with the unwashed masses. If you can convince me...

[JPC-Greg]

Don't talk to me about features of the product, talk to me about benefits to me as a client, not you as a webhost.

I get the impression that you think it's lighter weight, but
A) that's a feature, and
B) that's a benefit to you (you can house more clients on the same powered server).

Tell me why I'd want you to change panels, and why that outweighs the "negative" of limiting my site's portability to other webhosts.

Sadly this is probably the thinking of most clients Im afraid. If you cant see the inherent benefits of a system that reduces our staffs workload and/or allows accounts to be better balanced by automation then we dont stand a chance no matter what we say. If everyone prefers old fashioned one machine runs all type of setups and are happy with losing everything and hours of backups during a failure, thats a clients perogative.

We arent going to be able to move forward or away from cpanel as long as people keep the curtain pulled over their faces. Cpanels great , dont get me wrong. If you and maybe one or two servers worth are our entire client base....maybe. Still have the same risks of failures where half the business could be offline but hey with one or two machines one person could babsit that box like a hawk.

[JPC-Greg]

Tell me about how clustering (or whatever other feature you'd like to sell me on) will improve my life as a webmaster, or as a reseller.

I'm not married to CPanel and WHM, so talk to me.

Tell me about how seamless the transition will be. Tell me about how I won't miss any functionality but how I'll be able to do more.
Tell me about how there can be a conversion back to one of your CPanel servers so that I can run pkgacct and make a move. (And if it will be seamless, why not make the front end look like CPanel, and just send a notice that it's going to happen tomorrow, just like the php upgrade)

I broke your post apart on purpose , the first half is the negative and probably toughest midset to overcome. the rest is open.


This part is probably how we would have to do it. Without pinning out specifics and details just tell everyone we are deploying some new load balanced clusters which will...yadda yadda yadda. And they dont need to do anything, no changes, etc. just watch the uptime soar and just do it.

[sehh]

It would also be nice if there was a technical description and why the new system is better. I know some of us would appriciate it.

[JPC-Greg]

we seem to have spawned a new and unrelated converasation, let me split the thread and go from there

[Vin DSL]

You could do the same as with VPS -- setup a beta program, and have a few ppl give it the 'acid test'.

If i thought for one second i could get tens of thousands of people to stop obsessing over cpanel Id make a change instantly...

I'm sure you've already thought about this, but I'll bet there are tens of thousands of people out there that would jump at the chance to get affordable H-Sphere web hosting -- clustered Unix, Windows, VPS, and Resellers accounts...

I'd launch a new startup company -- Jagisphere LLC, JaggedEdge, GoJaggy, or whatever -- get hooked up with Directi and H-Sphere and let the chips fall where they may. If it doesn't meet expectations, spin it off!

No reason to kill your 'cash cow'...

[Ron]

Sadly this is probably the thinking of most clients Im afraid. If you cant see the inherent benefits of a system that reduces our staffs workload and/or allows accounts to be better balanced by automation then we dont stand a chance no matter what we say. If everyone prefers old fashioned one machine runs all type of setups and are happy with losing everything and hours of backups during a failure, thats a clients perogative.

We arent going to be able to move forward or away from cpanel as long as people keep the curtain pulled over their faces. Cpanels great , dont get me wrong. If you and maybe one or two servers worth are our entire client base....maybe. Still have the same risks of failures where half the business could be offline but hey with one or two machines one person could babsit that box like a hawk.

OK, someone needs to hire a salesperson or take a course.

The customer doesn't care one whit about your staff time and your problems, s/he's concerned about what it means to him or her.

Here is a list of features:

XYZ panel is lighter weight, requires less oversight, is more stable, has an intuitive interface, is more extensible, enables faster backups, and clustering.

Who cares? Only techies like some of the posters on this forum care at all about any of that, or really are able to internalize what that means.

Here is the same list as benefits:

XYZ panel allows the web host to house more accounts per server, spend less time watching the server's resources, doesn't require your staff to intervene as often, and when they do they are able to fix it more quickly. Upgrades and third party addons are a breeze, Recovery time is shortened from a hardware failure and allows you to offer high availability setups.

Very nice from your perspective, but again, a customer doesn't care.

Here's the same list as a customer benefit list:

XYZ Panel will enable your sites to load faster giving your visitors a better experience.

Our technicians will be able to respond to your inquiries more quickly because we don't need to be watching the panel do ITS job, and its design will allow us to serve your needs better, making changes for you of fixing that less-frequent problem will be a snap.

We will be able to offer you all sorts of extras easily such as merchant gateways, ICANN registration reselling and much much more! Should the worse happen and a hardware failure disable a server, the new Panel allows us to get your site back online much faster, but the new Panel is even better than... itself! With XYZ Panel, we will be offering high availability clustering, meaning that even your shared site will be load balanced across two physical servers and in case of failure of one, the other will take over without missing a beat!

Of course I don't really know what the differences of the panels are, and I wrote this shooting from the hip in 5 minutes. All I did was take your list + clustering + ICANN (and negative attitude towards your customers, frankly) and turn it around into a list of things that a whole datacenterload of clients would want.

Like I said, Just tell me why I'd want it, and why it outweighs my first (possibly irrational) negative opinion about changing panels.

Sheeeeesh. Hire a pitch man.

[Vin DSL]

If you've got some free time... H-SPHERE Online Demo

[JPC-Greg]

OK, someone needs to hire a salesperson or take a course.

The customer doesn't care one whit about your staff time and your problems, s/he's concerned about what it means to him or her.

Here is a list of features:

Who cares? Only techies like some of the posters on this forum care at all about any of that, or really are able to internalize what that means.

Here is the same list as benefits:

Very nice from your perspective, but again, a customer doesn't care.

Here's the same list as a customer benefit list:

Of course I don't really know what the differences of the panels are, and I wrote this shooting from the hip in 5 minutes. All I did was take your list + clustering + ICANN (and negative attitude towards your customers, frankly) and turn it around into a list of things that a whole datacenterload of clients would want.

Like I said, Just tell me why I'd want it, and why it outweighs my first (possibly irrational) negative opinion about changing panels.

Sheeeeesh. Hire a pitch man.

Few things, I never said we get more clients per server in the other systems you did. In fact we would get less becuase you cant think of any of the other solutions as a clients per server anymore. You have different servers doing different tasks all to server x number of clients. The benefits to us arent more clients per server at all. The benefits are less downtime, which means less tickets, less stress when somethings down, less cancellations, increased signups from referrals for uptime benefits. things like that. finacially most other systems can be bought outright at a reasonable price, not the $2k cpanel wants or whatever it is per server vs a forced lease price setup.

As for what you said , thats just a pr spin way of saying the same things you said first that came off all negative.

I think Vins right here and the only way to do it is just do it, seperately. We dont advertise ourselves in ads or other things as a cpanel only host. We should start new signups and things on the new cluster setups and give them the option at signup to opt-down to a single cpanel server setup. And then just offer up the option to others to switch if they like. See how that goes for 6 mos or so and if the demand and feedback are overwhelmingly plesant we can discuss forcing changes in a positive manner. Maybe a spinoff brand is needed, who knows.