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Enhance and Upmind - a marriage made in heaven?
meditatingsurgeon
Member
I decided to put this in reviews as it probably fits in this category the best. It wasn't intended as such, just my experience and its brief.
As a startup, I've played with many server control panels over the last few years. Relatively new to this field, I've been looking for something clean and intuitive that clients would like to use. I love using Runcloud for the ease of use, easy backup and the choice of stack: NGINX or OLS. I just wished it integrated with Hostbill (which I use) or WHMCS (which I would have been prepared to license. Then I came across Enhance, and I decided to install the control panel - and wow - so different and clean, easy to use and loads less cluttered than cPanel and even Plesk. I saw that they had a Hostbill integration - so a thumbs up. Enhance support have also been really helpful and responsive in the initial steps of setting up my infrastructure.
Enhance like Runcloud, Enhance lets you choose between NGINX and OLS, it also offers Apache and LiteSpeed Enterprise (paid licence required). You can also set up a backup server that takes regular snapshots of your website that clients can easily restore from the panel.
A couple of weeks ago, I came across Upmind, which is positioned as a competitor to WHMCS, Hostbill Blesta, etc. Again, it's the same clean interface. Easy to set up, and both Enhance and Upmind allow you to white label their products - Enhance on their $6 a month plan and Upmind on their free plan for one brand. The Upmind free plan allows you to have two integrations (i.e. one domain provider and Enhance, for example).
After rebranding both, I was amazed at how pretty and similar the interfaces were - like the same design team were behind them. I was also very impressed at how easy it was for someone like me to achieve a unique and modern look that breaks the WHMCS mould.
I just wanted to share my thoughts and experience with the community, which I believe includes members from Enhance and Upmind - good work!
(p.s. really hoping the Upmind team consider an integration for Fastpanel!)
Comments
Shill detector is kinda lost... Beeping, but the sound is not very strong. Hm.
@meditatingsurgeon
Just to clear away any doubts, you don't have any professional or private relationship with Enhance or Upmind, correct?
@LTniger - I really don't know what a shill is.
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Hi @angstrom - lol - not in the slightest. I am a doctor by day and this is my hobby. I just really enjoy using both of them and just wanted to share. Lots of debates on this platform about panels etc. Absolutely no relationship except as a paying customer
@LTniger - I had to look it up:
'an accomplice of a confidence trickster or swindler who poses as a genuine customer to entice or encourage others.' - absolutely not as in my answer to @angstrom. I didn't use ChatGPT either! In fact, I don't know why I wrote it except that I spend a lot of time here
Thanks for clarifying -- all is good
I've been testing Enhance for the last few months as a potential replacement for cPanel. It's tempting to be able to replace a stack of licenses like cPanel/Cloudlinux/Kernelcare/JetBackups with a simple 15 cents per account cost. I don't do "mass hosting" so the 15 cents per account doesn't affect me much, with 500 accounts I'd be looking at a total cost of $75 for however many servers I need versus what I'm currently paying for license which is around $600.
Beyond the cost savings, I like a lot of the features built in, like disaster recovery. In my cPanel disaster recovery plans it takes a TON of hands-on work and 3-4 hours to recover from a dead server, but if I follow Enhance's system I could recover in maybe 30-45 minutes... The downside is they currently don't have a way of "un-doing" a recovery, so there would be some data loss vs what I do in cPanel (when cPanel server dies, I do my recovery plans with backups on a new temp server, then when my dead server is fixed I can turn it back on). I'm hoping Enhance will build a mechanism to roll-back a server decommissioning.
I also like that Enhance is relatively new, so they aren't carrying a lot of technical debt and they're building to modern standards - like they have Redis built in and easy to use for object caching. They just rolled out ModSecurity recently which is cool, but it took me about an hour today just to figure out how to whitelist a set of IPs. Documentation can be hard to come by with Enhance since it's so new, so learning how to fix or update things can be difficult. I'm excited to see how well ModSecurity goes, I uninstalled Wordfence on my test site with the expectation that ModSecurity will be enough, I might add extra high security on the WP login page though just in case.
There's still a lot on the roadmap that needs to be done for a really full-featured product, but they're building pretty quick. I couldn't put it into production until this month's roadmap items are done as it has a critical item imo (ability to setup a second server as the main-control-panel-node, so if the main node dies you don't lose access to your whole cluster).
I'm not too keen on their billing system, I never liked the idea of a managed billing system - it locks you in too much. I saw in their forums a few weeks ago that the upmind system crashed for most of a business day too, so no users/owners/etc could access their billing system or make sales... That seems like it's not ready for prime time to me, I will stick to whmcs for now, maybe switch to blesta in the future to reduce costs more.
Their forums are really active too, which is cool. Has a real good community feel.
OH, and to give their support a quick review, I had an issue installing a new server to my cluster a few days ago, their install script kept getting hung... Anyways, their support got on my ticket within 5 minutes and fixed it. They gave a sort of vague answer about the problem "my ssh session must have been timing out" and "next time I should use a screen", whatever that means. So I guess their support is pretty good, I mean they actually read my ticket and used the login info I gave them and went and fixed the server, so that's cool.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with Enhance in my testing so far. I'm currently having a real pain in the arse trying to get the staging site system setup. You can't use Cloudflare with their staging site system, you have to use the Enhance DNS system, so I had to buy a domain just to use for staging, then bought a couple VPS to run as nameservers for the Enhance DNS, had to set glue records pointing at my new nameservers, yadda yadda yadda - can't get the nameservers to propagate on my new staging-site-domain using the nameservers I setup in Enhance. Lol... Like I put before, many things take a lot of extra effort to config and setup in Enhance.
If I get staging sites working good, and then move on to getting a good backups system running, then I will prolly consider using my cluster in production next year. It will be SUCH a pain in the ass to move sites over though, really not looking forward to that. Because it's like for each domain I'll need to get a Cloudflare token (Enhance has a CF integration to manage the DNS and keep it in sync on Cloudflare with whatever happens in the cluster), then gotta copy the DNS from CF to Enhance, then gotta setup Redis in the site config (plus turn on all the other options like opcache, etc), then actually move the site to my Enhance cluster... It's a lot of extra steps. In the end, it will be a modern, fully containerized setup with modern caching and a nice clean UI, all the modern features like staging, really good backups system, and my licensing costs get cut dramatically.
I could write more, but I already did a lot so I'll leave this as-is. I can answer questions if anyone has any, though I'm not an Enhance expert - I do have a lot of XP with control panels in general, and I've been testing Enhance pretty extensively. No I don't work for them or anything, I actually learned about them on WHT earlier this year and it piqued my interest.
Wow @thane that was so much more of a review than mine! Really appreciate your experience. I've come from using Runcloud which was really easy but lacked the billing integrations. I like Plesk over cPanel but the costs, especially if you have several VPS's is really not worth it which is why I like the Enhance billing model. Which caters nicely for me and my teenie-tiny client base. With regards to billing automation, I played with a cracked version of WHMCS but my conscience got the better of me. I didn't want to pay their licences...with my teenie-tiny client base, so I gave Upmind a go on their free plan and liked it so much, that I upgraded to a paid licence this weekend. Anyway, thanks again for your reply/review - It's good to know in advance about the staging server issues you've had.
Thane is avid gpt user...
I'm no expert but that does not look like gpt - "real pain in the arse" and "yadda, yadda, yadda" for example!
The people behind upmind is same who owns stablepoint and and the other sister company.
Had a great chat with the owner when this was in preview and only stablepoint was using it.
Been using Enhance for the last 6 moths and really like the integration the ease of migration but there is a bit of learning curve.
Hopefully with the release of MariaDB support and custom NGINX config from the UI will be a great win.
RC NGINX is the best I have seen so far in SaaS solutions.
GRIDPANE is the only one I have not played with can't be asked to pay $100 a month. And the free one only works with Vultr.
Looking forward to November updates and hopefully will move some more sites to Enhance.
Eh, I don't trust Enhance enough to use an account-wide key lol. I have like 1k sites on my Cloudflare account, can't risk giving Enhance free reign to screw them all up. When using the CF sync addon on one site that I tested, it deleted everything on CF's side and replaced it with whatever was setup on the Enhance DNS. So before enabling the CF sync in Enhance, I have to manually copy all the DNS entries into Enhance, THEN turn on the CF sync - that way when Enhance "syncs" the DNS is correct (since Enhance deletes Cloudflare records and replaces with its own)... I have 100% Cloudflare use on all my clients, and 100% of them use 3rd party email services, plus people add all kinds of things to DNS like ownership verifications for search console, or DKIM/SPF for their newsletter provider, etcetcetc. Out of the box Enhance's DNS just rolls out a very basic skeleton of DNS - just the bare bones needed to run the site on its own system, it doesn't scan the existing DNS of added sites to copy anything that's currently/already live.
That's part of why I say it will be such a pain to migrate clients, just having to copy/paste so many records per domain will be annoying. I suppose I could skip all that hubbub and not have the CF sync with Enhance, but that would unfortunately kill part of the disaster recovery automation (when you decommission a dead server and reassign the sites to new server Enhance will update the DNS accordingly - as long as the DNS is all setup correctly, like with the CF sync for sites on CF).
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You have nothing intelligent to add to the conversation, go waste your time somewhere else troll.
Afaik, Enhance and Upmind are developed by the same company, so they have a similar design and business model.
Sadly, I decided to leave Enhance due to the postponed Nginx feature. I was hoping for Nginx and routinely checking their changelog, but there was no good news. I don't know about today because I'm no longer interested. I was an early adopter of Enhance.
The support from Enhance is top-notch and very helpful. I believe they have a representative here, but I can't remember the username.
Enhance doesn't allow secondary IPs or dedicated IP per user account/site or anything like that. You can change the single IP for any server in the General settings of each server, but that's it.
You can split up the various services to have them on their own servers which would each have their own individual Ip of course. I started my testing Enhance with the control (main control panel you login to "control" everything) and Application (webserver, eg Apache) and Database all on the same VPS server. I didn't initially setup the roles for DNS server or Backups server since it would be useless to put those on the same/one machine (for hosting your own DNS, you actually need 2 servers). My initial testing with Enhance was just to see stability, so I put a slow site that gets about 500 visitors/day on it and let it sit for a few months - uptime excellent.
Now that I started working on the more advanced features is when I've discovered the hiccup with staging sites. I had originally assumed that I could buy Cloudflare's Total TLS to set a wildcard subdomain *.staging.mybusiness.com and that would be good enough for Enhance to run the staging service. Nope, I was wrong lol. Enhance literally requires that the staging domain have its DNS controlled by the Enhance cluster in order to function. That really sucks, but it's livable and not a big deal, it just means we have to run our own DNS servers and have an extra domain name setup that's dedicated for Enhance staging site functionality. So I rolled out a couple cheap VPS's to run my DNS, I got some cheap little 1cpu/2gb ram/40gb ssd servers for $7/ea and rolled them out as my nameservers. I added glue records to my business site dns1.mybusiness.com dns2.mybusiness.com, those each point at the new DNS servers. Then I bought a new domain stagingmybusiness.com, got that setup in Enhance settings. So now when I create a staging site, it's setup in Enhance at client-chooses-name.stagingmybusiness.com.
It's all really basic DNS server setup stuff, and all the steps are really simple, and Enhance does make the process pretty simple. In my opinion, they just did it all in such a way that's really ridiculous for someone that uses Cloudflare all over their business. If I had simply hosted my main site mybusiness.com on my Enhance cluster and used my Enhance DNS servers to control my main site's DNS then it would all be branded under the same domain mybusiness.com and wouldn't have needed to go the extra step of buying an extra domain... But I'm not budging on keeping Cloudflare on my main site, and on all my sites. I just don't want to have to expose myself unnecessarily to DOS attack or exposing my domain's IP to the public + losing all the other features of Cloudflare... Using the dedicated domain for staging will still expose the IP of my main hosting nodes whenever a client uses it, but the exposure is slightly mitigated for the fact that staging sites are generally temporary (especially as they are now since staging sites get auto-deleted when they are "pushed to live", I think once of the next updates Enhance said they will add an option to allow staging sites to persist after pushing to live).
Some people complained about this issue a while back. I don't remember if there was a possible note for a future fix for it, I will probably post in the forums griping about it eventually - for now I'm okay with the limited exposure from the unprotected staging domain. Still lots of other things for me to get through testing - like today I just spent time getting the ModSecurity system beefed up and optimized.
Soon I need to get another Application+Database dedicated server rolled out so I can transfer my testing site away from the main control server and have it run on a full-fledged dedicated server. Then my Control server can "just" do the Control role. I'll roll out another dedicated server to fulfill the Backup server role at the same time. Then I can test the backups systems (which are great for using with a dedicated backups server, but garbage for using with external storage like S3), and test how well my optimized configs go on a big server. I already have great configs for big servers on my normal hosting setup, so I pretty much just copied the configs over to Enhance, plus some extras like setting innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit to 2 which really helped improve db queries/s. I haven't started on optimizing my config for Apache yet - actually I don't think Enhance has a solution available yet for modifying apache configs lol... You can only do php ini, php-fpm, and my.conf for db... Yet more reasons I'm having to hold off on putting Enhance into production, I need to make sure one of my big servers is able to run just as well, on just as low a load, with same or better responsiveness as on Enhance.
I'm not willing to move clients to Enhance if I can't get better performance, so I really need to feel confident that my configs in Enhance won't get overwritten on updates - which most configs WILL if you're not using the config editors in their control panel UI, which is why I don't just FTP into the server and start configuring Apache config manually.
I'm also testing Enhance, but cannot bring it fully into production yet.
I'll echo what's been said above, support is top-notch, they're moving quickly, and it's a great product, but there are still a few issues that won't let me take cPanel/DA offline - Eg:
How much ram enhance is consuming for around 10 low traffic wordpress sites?
Hi @thane - you may have seen this question in the Enhance community but was wondering if you knew the answer?
Not really understanding the 'DNS role' until you explained the need for Enhance to host the DNS for the staging sites, I removed the host role from a backup server and assigned it to a US server. As far I can see, there is no way you can delete the nameserver record on enhance or change the glue record, all the GUI allows you to do is edit the hostname.
Do you know if it is possible to change the glue record to the IP of the newly assigned VPS?
@meditatingsurgeon I think you might be mixing up some terminology as far as glue records and nameserver settings go. Enhance uses terminology in the panel settings that further confuses ppl I know = they mention 'glue records' in settings but those aren't really glue records.
The glue records should be set at your domain registrar, that's where you would update the glue records to set/change the IP of nameservers. Cloudflare doesn't support glue records, most other providers do - like Namecheap has glue records available in the Advanced DNS section of the domain manage section.
On Enhance side, you would set the nameserver settings in Settings > Platform > Nameservers. All this does is give Enhance the info it needs to map its internal settings and DNS records to match what your actual glue records/settings are at your domain registrar.
Once you've setup real glue records for your nameservers at your domain registrar, and set the settings in Enhance to match, then the next step is waiting for your nameservers to propagate... It takes a long time for custom nameservers to get recognized and go into affect, one of the things you can do to help is make sure there's at least one domain using the Enhance DNS. I'm on day 3 waiting for NS to propagate for my staging domain - it's propagated in a bunch of international regions, but nothing in USA lol... Waiting for new nameservers to get picked up feels like working with DNS from 10 years ago, wait wait wait.
@thane - When setting the hostname ns2.mydomain.com - to was assigned to a server with IP 10.10.10.3 one of the servers with the DNS role, I set A a record 'the glue record' ns2.mydomain with the value 10.10.10.3.
I have now removed the DNS role from the server and assigned it to a server with an IP address 10.10.10.7. However, you can only change the hostname with Enhance, the IP address doesn't automagically update and you can't change it.
So the glue record ns2.mydomain.dom still points to 10.10.10.3 even though there is no longer an associated DNS role at that IP address.
I hope you understand the issue I am having
@meditatingsurgeon mkay you changed dns role to another server and need to update it in Enhance with the new IP... Okay wow, I see what you mean, I tried editing my NS and the IPs are locked on mine as well.
That setting seems to inherit the Server IP of whatever server it has been assigned to, so it technically could be updated by going to Servers > click the server > open General Settings > change server IP (then whatever you put there will be reflected in the nameserver setting for new IP). I don't think that's a correct way of changing the IP though. When you unassign the role from one server, and assign it to a new server, then in the server role settings assign the nameserver to that new server, then it should inherit that new server's IP. Like when I was testing just now, I unassigned the DNS role to my NS2 server, then when I added the DNS role back on to that server I then also had to assign a nameserver setting to it, did you do that part yet?
@thane - Yes there at the moment! Similar methinks. By nameserver, I guess you mean the hostname, that bit is fine as long as you create an A record pointing to the correct IP but if Enhance doesn't change the IP when moving to a new server, what to do?
For me, the issue isn't changing the IP of the server, but the fact that nowhere does there seem to be a setting to remove NS records (I have 4 but could manage with 3) or to change the A record of the 'original' server with the DNS role.
Hi @niceboy.
Enhance recommend a minimum of 4GB for any server.
Ubuntu recommend 2GB for 22.04 and the installation of Docker takes up the initial overhead. The installation is the same irrespective of the server role which is determined and can be changed later.
Both the control panel server and the backup server consume just over 1GB of RAM
Docker containers won't take up as much overhead after the initial installation.
I'm running a 16GB server with the LiteSpeed Enterprise stack, Redis, DNS and Email server and around 10 sites coming in at 4GB but I'm no configuration expert!
I see what you're saying, when you change DNS role to a different server, can't update the IP in the Settings>Platform > Nameservers... What Enhance seems to be doing is once you set a server as having the DNS role - it stays that way in the settings area for Nameservers. What I did was change the "nameserver hostname" to something like "nodns.mybusiness.com" which then freed up the name "ns1.mybusiness.com" to be used on the other new DNS server... If that makes sense.
I have 3 Nameservers in that section:
nodns.mybusiness.com xx.xx.xx.x1
ns1.mybusiness.com xx.xx.xx.x2
ns2.mybusiness.com xx.xx.xx.x3
You can't change the IPs, but you can change the nameserver hostname's to match however you want per the IPs configed in your cluster. I'm not using the nameserver nodns.mybusiness.com, for all intents and purposes it's a nonsense entry. Not sure why Enhance won't let me delete it, but I don't think it being there should cause any issue.
Honestly, kind of sounds like a honeymoon phase. I'd be interested to hear how you feel about it in 6 months.
It feels that way as a user too lol, everything bright and flashy, lots of fun new ideas and tools to play with. I'm still waiting for a couple critical features to come out before I could seriously use it in prod. Like right now you can only have a single server as the main control node that controls everything, and if it goes down you're fukt (other servers like hosting would keep working, it's just you and all your customers wouldn't have a panel to login to). There's no way of restoring the main control panel node either, Enhance just tells ppl to take block level backups using their infrastructure provider, which is a real shite thing. This month they're supposed to have a system coming out that will allow for having a secondary server setup for the main control panel server, so you aren't totally screwed if that server goes down.
There's a few more things that need ironing out before I'd be ready to switch over, I hope Enhance team can keep up with their roadmap and user submitted feature requests and bug fixes. If so, I might be able to roll it out into full prod in January. I'd love to be confident enough to start making money on the panel, it's a really slick setup, fun to use, fast, and I think my customers would love it.
@jar - you may be interested to know that I discovered Enhance via MX Route as you both have an integration with WPEmail manager!