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Some have tried, but the target audience has been beaten down so badly by SolusVM they are both very skeptical and super critical of any new comers to the market and most are scared off before going live. I've invested quite a few weeks converting Wyvern over to make it usable by other providers but in the end I stop once I realize how much more stressful my life would be having to support it in the current hosting climate. Between the summer hosts who don't know what SSH is to the providers whose margins are so low that paying $0.50 more for a decent product would put them under, it's just not worth getting into this unless you make it your primary focus.
Yeah, it takes like 40 hours of Googling.
This is so true.
I can't agree, unfortunately. I am sorry. If the end aim is to have a couple buttons for reboot, shutdown and reinstall, maybe it's possible. Sure. However, if we're talking about a full solution, which will actually benefit the company, I can't agree that it's an easy task. And I have first-hand experience while working with some pretty big VPS providers in this market who are either in a process of replacing Solus with inhouse panel or already have replaced it. After all, we already have SolusVM, which mostly works fine and requires only a handful of fixes to be cleared, why are we even discussing a new panel if it won't bring anything new to the table?
OK, maybe 50 hours of Googling then to build something better than SolusVM. I went from "what's PHP?" to "Here's a better control panel than anything commercially available on the market" in less than a month.
sorry but bullshit, solusvm sold for millions, no one commenting here has millions, if you could get millions with 40 hours of googling and 3 years of hard work you would do it.
for you, but not better than solusvm for general release, there is a HUGE difference.
OK, maybe 50 hours of Googling then to build something better than SolusVM.
Why did Plesk bought it for 2 Million if they could have made their own with one worker within a week?
Pretty sure he is trolling around
.
Some day someone will show you a decompiled solus build and you'll realize that, at least up until the Onapp buy, the project had a half dozen outsourced dev's working on it.
It wasn't uncommon to find variables spelt wrong for an entire page, different formatting in each file, endless chains of if/else statements to validate fields, exploits all over the place because of poor variable escaping, not validating user inputs, etc.
It's possible when Phill started he wanted to do everything himself, but when the HyperVM dude died there was a sudden market shock from there being no real alternatives. There was some panel developed by the ISPManager guys but it was lackluster, had no billing integration outside of their own, etc.
I remember that SolusVM went from 'we are going for an enterprise setup, some basic clustering to start, etc' to 'ok scrap that lets make some cash' in a heart beat. No one should blame them for that. What should be blamed is there was quite a few years between that point and when OnApp took over and they made no real effort to address the problems.
I mean, the original "SolusVM 2" was supposed to be a pure C/C++ application. If their PHP is this bad, do you want them writing C/C++ outside of some basic setuid wrappers? I can taste the buffers from here.
Francisco
Market share. The code itself is worthless (and if you looked at the source code you would understand why it's worthless).
At the end of the day that's all that matters. Whatever is best for me and my clients is where my money will go. And this is exactly my point. People can easily roll their own solution with a little bit of time and effort that fits their company so much better than anything commercially available.
Nope, not even a little. If I wanted money I would get money and people would hate me, I'll stick with being happy. That being said, the software itself is not what Plesk purchased, they purchased the clients. If I was to make commercial software it wouldn't be for money.
well, I might realize that if I googled for 40 hours first
Sums it up really, I still have an email for a senior figure at OnApp stating v2 was complete and just the installer script needed some tweaks from the end of 2014
they just lied and lied and lied and lied and lied and then... after all that, they lied again, no one to blame but the OnApp directors and senior management, if they were a host on LET that lied like that they would be banned by now.
Ok we can agree to disagree, I just refuse to believe it is as simple as you are making out or else someone would have done it by now and maybe they even would have spent 100 hours and made it twice as good.
My coding skills are novice at best. Anybody with a background in coding or who's more intelligent than me (not hard) could easily knock out something equal to or better than SolusVM in less time it takes SolusVM to release an update. It's even easier if you create a list of features you need and don't focus on anything you don't need. I think the most time I spent on Wyvern was bandwidth calculations because I thought "let me do this better" only to find out that using iptables was one of the only things SolusVM got right. When I incorporated NAT into the control panel it did take some trial and error because it was my first time setting up a NAT VPS, but that's how I learn so I wasn't too discouraged.
yep, I understand your perspective, its just hard for me to accept that if that (quoted) was the case it would not have happened already.
Perhaps I am naive.
Well, people underestimate how much 100 productive hours actually is.
With 8 hours a workday that’s half a month, but nobody can be productive programming a panel 8 hours a day, so that’s more like a month at minimum if not two.
That person has to eat too. You can’t do it yourself and not have your current duties suffer because of it. You also can’t hire <$25/hr because the good ones that don’t need babysitting already have their hands full with better paying gigs.
@KuJoe is a prime example of somebody with a passion for a problem to educate himself, dedicate the time and focus and make it happen.
Look at the BlueVM guys, they were passionate, not amazing programmers but they created something usable (Feathur) but nobody wanted to pay for it, even as open source nobody was really interested.
Even if the market desperately needs an alternative, you’re still going to incur costs (or just A LOT of time) branding your product, marketing it to your audience, making them comfortable with the idea that that software would be responsible for their revenue.
Exactly. That's why I do not switch to virtualizer. Too many bugs, and most updates contains new - often critical - bugs which needs to get fixed later.
Older people might remember Plesk had (and partial has) VM solutions... they were generally extremely custom and shady (like shared Windows kernels). They never worked right and caused issues left and right.
I would not expect too much, and absolutely nothing fast/asap.
Plesk nowadays is solid, secure(?) product which I enjoy using. If same devs will run Solus - expect quality, new features and of course price increase to justify all of this.
I personally hate modular approach to software features (Plesk packs), hope they will not transfer this shit to Solus.
I'm closer to @KuJoe's perspective on this. Multiple people have written panels by themselves: Wyvern, Stallion, Feathr, etc. The guts of the thing are pretty simple because it's just a graphical shell around some system commands. The prettier you want to make it, sure, the longer it'll take, but to replicate what Solus does is not hard.
Wyvern is better than Solus ;-)
I'm sure it's not packaged for distribution, full docs for newbies, easy installer, etc.
Really, Solus is not anything special. I don't know about 40-50 hours by a novice, but it certainly wouldn't be like recreating Linux from scratch or anything. WHMCS would be a pain because of all the integrations, but you could get a good coder to knock out a Solus clone pretty easily.
But you wouldn't make millions. @Francisco has posted some analysis of this in the past. The market (hosters) have seem multiple Solus replacement products and never embraced them.
is it time to start a new panel. open source with community support. start with some code already out there, make it secure, then add necessary features
there's a few "open source" projects. but most are just companies who dont allow open development on it. not ideal when others want to fork it
maybe wyvern ?
Feathr is/was open source and nobody cares.
People have tried but they never amounted to much. There was one panel I used to use that worked well but it's not suitable for hosting.
OpenVZ Web Panel
It's not hard to get the basics working. It's that last 10-20% that people need that takes 80% of the effort to code.
I think Solus is excellent for OpenVZ but I do not like their KVM implementation. From what I hear Virtualizor KVM implementation is much better. If I don't see any work being done on Solus KVM in the near future I will be moving to Virtualizor as I migrate from OVZ to KVM.
The issue is normally people don't trust the coder enough.
If I brought most of stallion to market at a fair price it would likely take a real bite out of Solus since people trust me and know I've been around since the dawn of WHT.
Softaculous had been around for ages but I see just as many people move to them as move off.
Francisco
virtualizor KVM is not without issues
Having looked at the source code for Feathur, I can see why nobody cared about it. When it was abandoned I considered forking it and maintaining it because I thought it had potential, but the code was a mess to follow and a lot of the functions I couldn't understand how they worked they were overly complex and convoluted. It also lacked a lot of key features that I required in a control panel, features that SolusVM didn't have or didn't do correctly.
You wouldn't want to admit but wasn't stallion written over decoded SolusVM only (minus all the licensing)? Over the years you might have have rewritten/added/improved a lot of things in it but I always felt that it was incepted out of Solus.
Only the frontend templates were in the very first stallion.
The stallion that's running at this point was a complete rewrite I did years ago of stallion 1. I'll be rewriting it later this year to rebase it to a new framework and hopefully a new frontend too.
Francisco
You mean re-base it?
Put some laravel on that shiiii if you are staying with PHP.
Are you going full Angular 4/5/6 ? Vue? React? Or staying with the good ol jQuery?
Laravel is what we'll rebase to
I've had to write a lot of things for Codeigniter that doesn't really work nicely just because of how CI works...and then laravel has it built in anyway. Once I'm done my tour in Vegas and head home i'll get block storage fleshed out in the current code base then likely start the rebasing soon after.
As for the front end, probably still JQuery. I'm not quite webscale enough to dabble in Angular.
My main issue is going to be finding a UX designer. If I get a good starting block I can usually build pages from there (like I did on the current stallion) but I'm not creative enough to do it from scratch.
Francisco