International reseller solutions?

[iohannis]

I've been a JPC client for about a decade, and a reseller for almost as long. The past few years I have closed a lot of client accounts because of the time it takes with support and other administrative tasks. However, I'm a very satisfied JPC client and wouldn't mind scaling up in the number of resold accounts I have.

It seems that JPC has released a number of new features the past couple of years, so I figured why not ask all the experienced resellers about that? So here are some thoughts and questions for you guys:

- A while (a few years?) back, there were discussions about JPC developing and providing a better alternative to CPanel for their clients. Is that available, and what are people's experiences?

- If I want to automate payments and account setup/deletion to some degree, what are my options there? Obviously I can integrate my own payment solution, so I'd like to hear if anyone else has some tips there? And can resold accounts be added through some API?

- I have customers all over Europe, and the main challenge to scaling my reseller activity is language - you have to have a certain level of English proficiency to use CPanel. Are there translations available of CPanel, or would it be possible to translate JPC's alternative? Does anyone have any experience with that?

- And the last thing; is there a way to integrate with JPC's support, so that people opening a ticket on my site get it answered directly by JPC's support? Such as an API solution or something? I am considering building a user-friendly interface for customers to easily perform frequently used tasks (DNS related, for example) which would then open a ticket with JPC, even while I'm asleep. The task could be performed by JPC's support long before I read the ticket, and I can follow up during office hours...

I'd love to get your feedback.

Thanks!

Calle

[Gwaihir]

@1: Didn't happen. Won't happen anymore. JPC does have two competing panels available. They are different. Not sure about "better". I also doubt they're available on a standard reseller account. I think they are sold for VPS and dedicated only.

[iohannis]

Thanks for the update, Wim. Good to know.

[JPC-NickO]

If I want to automate payments and account setup/deletion to some degree, what are my options there? Obviously I can integrate my own payment solution, so I'd like to hear if anyone else has some tips there? And can resold accounts be added through some API?

If your talking about automating account creation within your cPanel reseller account this can be easily done by any script that supports cPanel's API. We offer WHMCS and ClientExec licenses which are both billing and management products that support this feature.

I have customers all over Europe, and the main challenge to scaling my reseller activity is language - you have to have a certain level of English proficiency to use CPanel. Are there translations available of CPanel, or would it be possible to translate JPC's alternative? Does anyone have any experience with that?

While I don't think cPanel has native support for multiple languages there are "cPanel language packs" which are cPanel skins or you can just use rvskin which is included on our reseller server which supports multiple languages.

And the last thing; is there a way to integrate with JPC's support, so that people opening a ticket on my site get it answered directly by JPC's support? Such as an API solution or something? I am considering building a user-friendly interface for customers to easily perform frequently used tasks (DNS related, for example) which would then open a ticket with JPC, even while I'm asleep. The task could be performed by JPC's support long before I read the ticket, and I can follow up during office hours...

I do not believe we have a public API for our system or provide end-user support at this time. There are a few server management companies that will provide level 1 support while you sleep and forward tickets to us if need be.

[iohannis]

Thanks for the reply, Nick.

My reseller account is kind of outdated, I think, so I suppose I'd have to open a new reseller account? Right now I add new accounts through JPC's client interface.

I appreciate the feedback.

Thanks,
Calle

[JPC-NickO]

Hi Calle,

Yes, you would need to switch from the old "resold" style reseller setup we had to the new reseller package.

This requires migrating all your accounts to one reseller server.

[jason]

JPC does have two competing panels available. They are different. Not sure about "better". I also doubt they're available on a standard reseller account. I think they are sold for VPS and dedicated only.

JPC offers InterWorx and Plesk (and I think one other product though I don't recall the name), but they are currently only available on VPS servers. I run Interworx on my VPS, and I like it--the UI is clean and IWorx builds on top of standard OS distributed software packages, so updates and modifications are easy. On the other hand, however, customers that are used to cPanel's graphics-heavy UI will likely have a difficult time adjusting to the mostly text-based SiteWorx (the InterWorx package is divided into two separate interfaces "SiteWorx," which is analogous to cPanel and "NodeWorx" which provides the administrative Interface a la cPanel's WHM). There are also a couple of things missing from InterWorx, such as a mailing list manager, so if your customers need that, you've got to do a little more work. I also don't know much about internationalizing InterWorx.

I have pretty much no experience with Plesk other than using in as an end user on a couple of client sites over the years.

--Jason

[iohannis]

@Nick - thanks, I can imagine that with account settings, e-mails, DNS and all, this would be quite a project to move all resold accounts onto one reseller server?

@Jason - thanks for the info, I'll check out the possibilities for internationalizing InterWorx, and using VPS instead. I believe Plesk can be translated, but I've only used it from a user perspective before as well, and found it arduous to work with.

[JPC-NickO]

Hi iohannis,

It really depends on the accounts if you just have several small accounts (less than 1GB) it shouldn't be much a problem at all. cPanel backups make it fairly trivial to move accounts around.

No more difficult than moving to a VPS. Moving to Interworx from cPanel would be a complex move and one that we do not do for free because the source and destination control panels are not the same)

Main issue is that you will need to update your name-servers to our reseller name-servers.

[iohannis]

Hi Nick,

I only have 20 or so domains left on the account, so I wouldn't consider that a lot. Just to confirm, you're saying that all settings, e-mails and databases would remain intact after a move, without the account owners having to notice much of a change?

Thanks,
Calle

[JPC-NickO]

Hi,

Yes, that should generally be the case. Only time you might see a problem is if the customer has hard coded paths or IP addresses.

I do recommend that if the sites have user generated content that you disable them or put them in a read-only mode just before the migration to make sure updates aren't lost.

[Bell thorpe]

Just to confirm, you're saying that all settings, e-mails and databases would remain intact after a move, without the account owners having to notice much of a change?

Yes, that should generally be the case. Only time you might see a problem is if the customer has hard coded paths or IP addresses.

I do recommend that if the sites have user generated content that you disable them or put them in a read-only mode just before the migration to make sure updates aren't lost.

That seems a little glib to me. There is a distinct possibility, is there not, that emails will be lost because of different DNS propagation times around the world ...

[JPC-Les]

Nick's no longer with us but I think, when he posted this last year, he was referring to email's already received. Clients are told to check both old and new servers via IP Address to ensure no emails are missed due to DNS propagation.