Ramblings by A.S!

When you’ve been in the hosting industry as long as I have, you try and test stuff. This opinion is on Windows control panels for reseller hosting. I’ve tried everything out there, including Hosting Controller, Plesk, Hsphere and Ensim (and a few others). After helping customers (personally) through account setup and even issues on their dedicated servers, I’ve come to one conclusion. Each and every one of the previously mentioned control panels, suck, really badly.

Here’s why:

Plesk: Not nearly as expandable as it should be, lacks a lot of features but is definitely easy to use and I’d say thats the only thing thats good about it.

Hosting Controller: These guys should stop producing software. Has to be the glitchiest control panel in existence with the most unintuitive interface out there.

Ensim: Needlessly complicated, for no justifiable reason, breaks like Chinese cars.

Hsphere: Good product but very complicated, complex requirements and the prices simply aren’t justified.

Why I like Helm?

There’s a reason Reyox Hosting uses it. Not because I like it, it’s because it’s by far the most practical control panel which exists to date. Sure it has its own fair share of bugs, but Mark Hall and the WHA team are very fast in ironing them out. Their prices are fairly reasonable… and best of all, it allows for unlimited expansion. Meaning you can add as many servers in a cluster as you want.

How is this good for reseller hosting?

For a company which offers unlimited domains, practically speaking, I’m not going to associate my good name with anything thats along the lines of being oversold (like crazy, say 2000 domains on 1 webserver which believe me, happens in this industry all the time!). Expandable webserver clusters allow for my customers’ domains’ to grow infinitely (until they use up all their webspace) on multiple webservers. Helm allows for, using a separate mailserver, database server, webserver and control panel server. That means webservers can have minimal processing load unlike solutions where mailservers etc need to exist on the same machine as the webserver.

The only thing Helm has, is a learning curve for resellers, I’d say thats about 15 minutes at most if instructions are followed properly. Lastly, if anyone from SwSoft, Hosting Controller, Ensim or PSoft reads this: Your products have their own unique abilities but look into how Helm does it.

 ~A.S.