It's you, not cPanel pricing

SCAM_DONT_BUY

@mhosting_in said: GoDaddy provide very cheap domain $1.5/yearly for first year so there plans attractive to new domain registration/newcustomer

And scammers. GoDaddy + ColoCrossing locations + LowEndBox = Black Friday yearly offers.

Shazan

The only reason why I didn't switch to DA earlier was just because cPanel price was fair compared to the quality, now it doesn't work half of its price at all, IMHO.

seriesn

@seriesn said:

@Lee said:

@seriesn said: Cpanel = Lexus. >Flashy, got some fancy addons. It works.
DA = Toyota Corolla. Almost same quality of product, half the cost (or less now), doesn't >have too many bells and whistles.

Both of those will take you from point A to point B and on the same local road, it wouldn't make much of a difference from a regular usage perspective.

Ok, but, if the cPanel pricing hadn't changed you wouldn't be using DA, honestly would you? DA was rarely mentioned in the years prior to the cPanel price change, only usually met with a 'just use cPanel' reply.

DA is popular here because the pricing fits, no other reason.

Nah man. I stopped using CPanel around 2014/15. Whm was too cumbersome to my liking with boat load of activation. I haven’t logged into any whm panel since that time.

It is true that DA recently gotten popular. But DA still a choice back in the early days and so were interworx.

Note. Not boat load of activation. Boat load bloat*

Francisco

@Unbelievable said: Compete on something else

This is pretty hard unless you're building your own ground-up platform. That gets quite costly since people expect a lot of features to be there.

Francisco

Saahib

@mhosting_in said:

@serv_ee said:
Who the hell uses Godaddy anymore?

Too many people use GoDaddy to buy domain there and also use web hosting.
GoDaddy provide very cheap domain $1.5/yearly for first year so there plans attractive to new domain registration/newcustomer

They are never cheap, simple marketing techniques by giving first year discount to get people onboard and it does work. They then save stupid addons and its their real profit.

smtalk

@sparek said:
The documentation, the reference material all just makes it a bit of a dull product when compared to cPanel.

May I ask you what do you miss in https://docs.directadmin.com ?

seriesn

@smtalk said:

@sparek said:
The documentation, the reference material all just makes it a bit of a dull product when compared to cPanel.

May I ask you what do you miss in https://docs.directadmin.com ?

I for some reason, always miss the pretty version and end up un the retro early 90s one.

SCAM_DONT_BUY

@smtalk said: May I ask you what do you miss in https://docs.directadmin.com ?

I will show myself out.

Lee

@seriesn said: Nah man. I stopped using CPanel around 2014/15. Whm was too cumbersome to my liking with boat load of activation. I haven’t logged into any whm panel since that time.

Is that you personally or you as a provider offering hosting?

Not making a thing out of it, just clarifying my earlier point that cPanel for the masses is still the most obvious choice. None of the providers here today that were around a year ago were offering DA, they switched because the pricing was right. Not saying that was a poor decision.

DA is a great panel, it has improved a lot in the past year, not taking anything away from Mark and his team and I hope they continue to grow their market share more.

debaser

Funny thing is that I've used Directadmin for shared hosting since 2005. The reason is that a lot of Dutch mainstream hosting providers use it as their panel of choice. This still true today.

I'm not talking about the low end of the lowend here. Mainstream providers with >10 EUR/month offer it too. Other providers mostly use PLESK or a proprietary board.

cPanel has only gained traction here in recent years, under pressure of the (mostly) US-based 'unlimited hosters'.

MichaelCee

@Lee said: Ok, but, if the cPanel pricing hadn't changed you wouldn't be using DA, honestly would you?

For me, BuyVM's announcements back then would make my answer a yes to this question. But in terms of switching to it? Wouldn't have been considered without my own gradual realisations.

seriesn

@Lee said:

@seriesn said: Nah man. I stopped using CPanel around 2014/15. Whm was too cumbersome to my liking with boat load of activation. I haven’t logged into any whm panel since that time.

Is that you personally or you as a provider offering hosting?

Not making a thing out of it, just clarifying my earlier point that cPanel for the masses is still the most obvious choice. None of the providers here today that were around a year ago were offering DA, they switched because the pricing was right. Not saying that was a poor decision.

DA is a great panel, it has improved a lot in the past year, not taking anything away from Mark and his team and I hope they continue to grow their market share more.

For shared hosting projects (mostly free and ultra budget).

But yeah, the whole DA movement started due to Cpanel migration. I think it is mostly due to DA never being aggressive with marketing.

MechanicWeb

@sparek said: I completely understand what you're saying... but in an effort to add a bit of perspective to this... this explanation is also one of the reasons why we didn't dive head long into DirectAdmin after the cPanel Summer of '19 fiasco.

DirectAdmin - in my opinion - just lacks some polish. The way it's setup it's got a lot of areas for customization... but it lacks a lot of standard ways to accomplish those tasks. The documentation, the reference material all just makes it a bit of a dull product when compared to cPanel.

Now, I could probably live with all of this with DirectAdmin, but I keep thinking an effort is going to be made to make it more polished and appealing. Or I keep thinking that another control panel is going to sweep in and take over the #2 spot on the board. All of that gives me pause to switch everything we've got over to DirectAdmin.

Then the issue just starts to snowball among itself. Why should I shove a lot of time and expense into a DirectAdmin switch when I may not be convinced it's the best alternative choice. It really only makes a lot of sense if we switch the vast majority of our infrastructure over to DirectAdmin (or some other control panel).

DirectAdmin just didn't seem to show a lot of ambition in wanting to compete directly with cPanel. But don't get me wrong, that's your choice to make. Undoubtedly it's going to cost you more money to polish the product into a better cPanel competitor. Perhaps the increase in development cost outweighed the expected number of new users, so it wasn't worth it to you. I'm not blaming you. I'm just offering perspective.

Now, all of that being said, our company will get team members together in the next week or so and discuss possible moves. And out of that discussion we may decide to invest more with DirectAdmin. But just speaking from after the Summer '19 fiasco - this is why we held pause after that.

I couldn't have said it more precisely. The feeling is mutual.