New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Why no love for InterWorx?
Recently I've been doing a lot of research about available hosting control panels. Almost every host uses cPanel, the odd one here and there will use Plesk and some go the full-custom route.
However, I have yet to see an InterWorx panel in the wild. Looking at the feature comparison, it seems like InterWorx is actually better than cPanel in many aspects - supports clustering, high-availability and full IPv6 support among other things.
Are there any problems with it, or is it just because users like to see familiar things - cPanel?
Comments
This.
back on the video era, VHS was the crappiest choice for home video, compared to betamax, video 2000 and cartrivision. All of the other choices were better on image quality and tech innovations, but the standard that dominated the home video world were the JVC's vhs because of mass promotion, internal agreements with video player manufactures etc...
It was an open standard and you didn't need to pay Sony to use it.
Which is completely unrelated to why CPanel won when much better tools, like Plesk, were also available.
I can not imagine to host my sites in a non cpanel provider. Took me to much time to figure it out so its ok for me.
Cartrivision* was also an open standard and it was started to be used (it bigger brother as similar format) for commercial tv stations for a couple of years before abandoned on the favor of the better u-matic. Video 2000 also was a format that Philips/Grudig wanted to spread without licensing, but the marketing tactics of the JVC giant then, combined with major agreements with video player manufactures (e.g. matsushita) lead them to the home video war (you have a point with Sony, they wanted licensing from other manufactures for the betamax system to be used, pity because it was based to their excellent u-matic system dominated the world and betamax was transformed in the '80s to the best analogue professional video format ever existed, betacam and betacam sp).Back to the topic, it is similar because cPanel is the nowadays standard for shared hosting after following similar practices (major agreements with big hosting providers to become a familiar panel to most of the new internet users).
* Cartrivision was not an open format, I forgot the specs, the VCR format (same era by phillips) was the open format that had a professional brother for tv statios and lasted till the end of the 70's
Thanks for the feedback, it's just as I thought. If I were to provide hosting, the logical thing to choose would be cPanel in order to attract the most people. However, would you like to see a provider with an alternate panel like Plesk or InterWorx for change?
It was porn that made VHS the standard. As soon as the porn industry decided for VHS, the race was over. I wonder what that tells us about cPanel...
Please.. never use this shit for production. Well i used interworx for 1-2 year, with 300 account. Well.. I always got problems, fails, errors. It was a fucking nightmare. I used cloudlinux for interworx. And when i realized there were too many issues, the cloudlinux team realized too, so they said not will support this control panel.
Well.. cPanel is a nightmare for a sysadmin, well for me. Not really liked Plesk, and well i tried Directadmin. Its the best control panel. I really like to manage it without any fucking problem. If there was a problem, i just checked their forum, and fixed by myself.
Well actually i use the interworx one domain for my personal sites. For 1 domain working very great. No custom, or it will fall.
With Directadmin not really hard to achive 3-400 day uptime without any major problem.
Thats my suggestion.. And now Directadmin has a great theme, so cPanel.. Just like WHMCS and Blesta. I use Blesta.
Well.. depends on your budget. They are great, but in different ways.
Only for shitheads trying to run their blogs/image dumps on $2/yr hosting.
Is the new theme for DA finally 100% finished? :P
Most customers I know who "tried" it went back to cPanel
Interworx is a refreshing design for a control panel. Beyond that, when you get to the meat of it, the panel is primitive and holds so little to compare to Plesk or cPanel that a comparison of features would look ridiculous.
It's Apache implementation is right up there with 2013 cPanel, has no significant third party development support, lacks optimizations, etc.
I'm rarely one to accuse something of just looking pretty, because I appreciate good design and I think it has value over function when function extends further than it's demand. Yet, I'll say this about interworx: it looks pretty, and that's all it has going for it.
Interworx isn't bad, but it's not nearly as good as cPanel is. I reported a security issue with Interworx back in 2014, they responded with "I was able to reproduce both of these bugs and will log bug reports as well as alert the developers." Unfortunately as of the last time I used it (January 2017) the issue was not fixed.
To be fair, the security issue is extremely common in every control panel I've ever seen or used. cPanel fixed the issue back in 2016 I believe. I also wrote a fix for VestaCP back in 2015 so I know it's not a hard fix to code.
All of the other tickets I opened with them were handled very well though so their support is on par with cPanel's.
Now the Interworx API is a totally different topic... when I started working with it there was a hidden setting in the Interworx config file that had to be set in order for the API to work, it wasn't documented anywhere and nobody else on the internet could figure it out. I contact their support and they tried to figure it out also without any luck so they ended up getting in contact with a developer who pointed out the hidden setting that needed to be changed. It worked perfectly for 2 years and then all of sudden it stopped working, I couldn't figure it out for the life of me why it stopped, but at this point I was basically done with Interworx so I just manually provisioned accounts until I turned off the server in 2016. Towards the end I would get support tickets from clients regularly about services needing to be restarted because Apache, MySQL, DNS, and e-mail would stop working randomly with no apparent error message.
I ultimately ended up replacing Interworx with VestaCP which was a bit more stable (still no where near cPanel quality), the API was somewhat better, and it was 100% free (which is nice for a free web hosting company). VestaCP isn't without it's problems either, it's definitely not designed for hundreds of clients so I'm switching to cPanel eventually once I have time to come up with a migration plan for the current clients.
Think about it this way, by far the majority are on cPanel, so whilst you may get new to hosting signups who have no idea what panel is right, the likelihood is that you will lose the majority who are looking for a new host as you do not have something familiar to them.
To touch on this a bit, for paid hosting I only offer cPanel. It's what clients want. For my free web hosting service, I offered clients the choice of Interworx, VestaCP, and cPanel. A few people (less than 50) chose Interworx, some even told me it was to "try it out" and compare it to cPanel. So many chose cPanel that I had to close down new orders to our cPanel server. After I closed down orders, I would get a few tickets a day asking if they could PAY for a cPanel account... they came to a free web host and would rather pay a few dollars for a cPanel service rather than use a different control panel. It's also worth noting that in terms of money, I had more clients convert from free to paid plans on cPanel than Interworx and VestaCP combined.
Stockholm syndrome is alive and well in the tech field.
❤️
Ye! I use it without any big problem!
Nice :P
Interworx is a crap panel years back from cpanel, directadmin or plesk. Lack of focus to customer is the main reason behind massive product failure.
during creating tutorial for Interworx, I learned a lot about it and it have a different type of feature.
I think interworx need UI improvement instead of features.
Thanks for the input everyone, seems like going with cPanel means larger potential for success.
smaller client base , use anything that suits you .
if you want to have large number of customers , choose cpanel only .
According to one Plesk staff on WHT, Plesk actually owns a bigger market than cpanel in the rest of the world vs World...
However, that claim has not been proven.
Sure, but which planet?
who knows...
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1628488
I know there are a lot of small Plesk installations (think few domains at most), so by sheer count of installations, the claim could be true. If one would count it by the number of hosted domains though, I'm sure cPanel would win by a huge margin.
The easiest way to get a better picture is to just search:
Shodan: Plesk - 322k results
Shodan: cPanel - 2M results
Censys: Plesk - 434k results
Censys: cPanel - 1M results
Plesk also runs on Windows whereas cPanel does not so maybe that can account for the difference in market share.
Hosted domains for sure cPanel.
Imo Plesk has improved greatly compared to what it was a few years ago. I use it myself and recommend it over cPanel to clients who ask. It just has too many useful features (like Docker) that can come in handy.
Obviously someone could just setup apache or nginx and do that, but that ain't the point.
I'm pretty happy with Directadmin: not a resource hog; lets my customers add emails and such, if they want to; and mostly stays out of my way when I want to do things from a shell.