25 Mar 09 An idea – cPanel like host management

Recently for various reasons, specifically our acquisition of nxserve.net I have loathedly had to start working with cPanel which is what the users manage their accounts with. It’s a bit like installing some Windows based GUI on top of a Linux system. You can point and click your way around and actually get a surprising amount done, however as soon as something doesn’t workas expected, you’re absolutely stuck. Further to that, should you decide to log in to the console and make modifications as you would usually, you will either find that the entire system catastrophically fails, or that your configuration is simply overwritten by cPanel again. That said, whether or not I like it, cPanel is actually a fantastic system. How else would you successfully manage 1000+ user hosting accounts on a single server whereby you can just set up a logon and give it to the user, and he can do anything he should need? Installation is also incredibly easy. Install base CentOS and just ‘sh ./latest’ which you download from cPanel. The rest is done for you.

As much as everything within me opposes something like this, I actually love it. It’s a fantastic idea and it works so well. So much so, that I’m interested to know if there is any demand or even desire for anything like this.
(more…)

Tags: cpanel, debian, host management