hey everyone,

We provide our customers with a self-designed control panel, instead of a third party one. We designed the panel keeping in mind the kind of services that we offer and think that we can offer much better support and services to them.

what do you think? Third party or customised.. which is better?

id really have to see your customized one to say. we use plesk on our server, and it works fine for me.

It really depends on whther it would be high enough quality to compete with Plesk and Cpanel, and if it's easy enough for frequent Plesk and Cpanel users to use without much (if any) hassle.

It all goes back to Users. We all know Windows sucks the worst OS out there but more home users have it on thier PC then anything.... Why? They know how to use it!

As I don't agree with GMSmoothie's comment about windows being the worst OS (it's actually the best desktop OS) he makes a good point.

Many users are used to plesk, cpanel and other popular control panels. Your own customized one would have to be extremely easy to use provide all the same features.

Personally, I've never seen a customized control panel that I really liked. I'd rather use cPanel with rvSkin or something.

Do you have any screenshots of your control panel?

I've never really used those other control panels much. I have vedck on my host and I like it alot. Of course, I don't waste my time with browser FTP, but the other things it supplies are nice.

I use a custom skinned version of Ensim and I would not use anything else.

A friend of mine wrote it and it's awesome! http://www.interjuncture.com/software/ensim/

Well actually the reasoning behind going ahead with a customised panel was that, many hosting companies that use third party panels like CPanel, Helm, plesk etc. etc. and as these panels are basically as is, they do not really fit hand in glove to the services offered by a hosting company, you basically have to work around it and try and modify your services according to the control panel you use. Many times hosting companies are not able to answer questions regarding control panels as they do not have in depth knowledge of these CP's. They know only what came in the manual.

And if you are not able to solve a customer problem then you are as good as gone.

On the other hand a hosting company that makes its own CP shows that they have analysed the market and have accordingly made a CP that will suit the customers the best and will be able to answer any CP related questions a customer asks as they have designed the CP themselves.

the only reason it is a bad os is because everybody nows how to use it(including hackers) so that means all the viuses are made for windows(at least most of them) so if you have a good firewall and antivirus(like me) WINDOWS IS THE BEST

Originally Posted by GMSmoothie

It all goes back to Users. We all know Windows sucks the worst OS out there but more home users have it on thier PC then anything.... Why? They know how to use it!

I think cPanel is a great product. It would be hard to build something better.

Personally I'm used to both, cpanel and plesk. custom made panels merely have the problem of lacking features...

I work on a site that uses Globat for hosting, and they have their own custom control panel.

Up until a few weeks ago they didn't even have a thing to make new users, etc, so to me it royally sucks most of the time because it's lacking features. And, it really ticked me off when they turned Plesk off, and made their control panel the only one available to use.

Ensim or Cpanel.. or even Plesk are definately superior to any custom built control panel, unless you can make something to match them of course. It's not too hard to figure out how they work if you're providing hosting really.... but I do understand that the calls for tech support are going to slow down if they don't have as many "bells and whistles" to mess up .

exactly.. thats what i am saying... the point of making a CP was so that it could match up to other third party CP's

We custom built our own control panel in ASP.NET. We believe that it is better to build your own as a demonstration of your knowledge of technology, instead of using a canned hosting automation system. That is, of course, if you are a technology-centric host. For example, we specialize in ASP.NET Hosting. We also make sure that our website is programmed in ASP.NET as well.

Also, having a custom built control panel and hosting automation system powered by ASP.NET means that we can move quickly to offer new .NET technologies as they are released. Rather than, waiting for the third party vendor to do product development.

If you are not a technology-centric host (eg your focus is SME, designers..etc), then I would say using a third party control panel is fine - there are many to choose from: ensim, plesk, hsphere, cpanel - as mentioned in this thread. It will reduce costs and you can probably find support staff that already knows the control panel.

So what it boils down to is that it depends on who your target market is and if they will find a custom built control panel a value or not.

Our $0.02

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cPanel is still the best one out there

lol, i didn't want to use cPanel because i wanted something that was exact for me - i built my own cpanel using c# and .NET (asp.net) and i based it on the cPanel! It works fine for me and there is the occasional glitch but nothing to hard.



Sean

I like both cPanel and Vdeck.