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I didn't think my question would bring such passionate responses and heated debate.
I was recommended to try Plesk. Wow! It is so much better. Sadly, it seems to be owned by the same buyers of cPanel, so the pricing may change.
Wish what people here were saying was true, but my own experience just says otherwise and I can't see myself stick to directadmin as it was pretty bad and it wasn't all just theory talk but real world test
Don't get me wrong, I hate WebPros, they are killing the industry slowly, their entire business model is fucked up and not sustainable and I think they should get some kind of a lawsuit, they don't earn extra money from the price raise as I know, since they are in millions of debt because they took a massive loan to acquire the companies and they need to pay it, and they are destroying everything good about this industry, same with WHMCS, it wasn't ideal before, but it was so much better then other alternative like Blesta, same with cPanel and DA, I just don't see how both are compared from my personal use.
One of the main reasons to switching to directadmin on the first place wasn't even because of the price, but because I wanted to "protest" against them, not only because of the price raise, but just because I hate the company that acquired them, and I heard so many good reviews back then, and I still hear people praising it, but my real world experience is just too different and I had to return to cPanel.
Directadmin needs years of development just to become cPanel alternative
Everybody has there own opinion. Saying its bad doesn't mean that its true. It just your opinion. My opinion is that Cpanel is horrible. How anybody can use it I will never understand. With all of the silly icons I had a hard time figuring out where to start. But that is just my opinion which is only worth as much as everybody else's.
I didn't start using DirectAdmin because it was cheap. I started using it because it was simple to use. Now with people pushing it to become more like Cpanel its starting to get complicated and bloated. I will probably write my own soon like I did before there were popular control panels.
Just fork vestacp and enjoy
As I read more, its more about how much you are accustomed with software, I can see here that those who started with cPanel they are more less cPanel fanboy, can't find anything better or equally useful. And since majority started using hosting services with cPanel, they tend to have favoritism for it.
I was introduced to desktop computer running MS windows, and to be honest I still feel home when I am using windows on desktop, I can do equally good with linux but find comfort on linux only. Similarly for server thing, I find linux comfortable, give me SSH for a server and I feel everything is under control. GUI like DA or cPanel gives feeling of a crippled as then we have to go their way but yes, they make things pretty easy to manage and speedy too. And for hosting business, they are must.
Yes, there were times when DA felt to be lagging behind cpanel but now I think over so many years, DA (almost 2 decades) , its mature enough and the debate for cPanel vs DA is futile .
Both are equally equipped to handle their purpose, use whatever software, as you get to used to it, you will find it more comfortable dealing with and above all, both will get job done and that too nicely.
Currently DA wins as its pretty affordable , but who knows future, they may come up with per core licensing (as with time there will be more cores packed in single servers than ever and space too).
One of my vps host, just dis-continued offering internal DirectAdmin licenses because DirectAdmin changed contract terms without notice. Is there any change in pricing for providers?
Here is exact wording..
Probably read it as price increase.. not sure though @DA_Mark
They decided not to offer lifetime licenses anymore. Its not a violation of a contract since there was no contract to offer lifetime licenses. Those who already had lifetime licenses can continue to use them with updates. So the quote from the host is misleading.
fyi, DirectAdmin is most likely to support CentOS Stream, not Cpanel
Both have their advantages and disadvantages, as well as ideal target audiences.
If you were trying to sell to people on this website, you're better off selling directadmin. Most users prefer it, it's cheaper, and those who prefer cpanel would probably make the sacrifice provided your service is good.
If you were selling to less experienced people, and were charging more, perhaps cpanel is the way to go. Sure, its more expensive, but more inexperienced customers tend to flock to cpanel. It's certainly still the "industry standard" for control panels, although i do not personally think they're the best.
It all comes down to cost and target audience. I would go with directadmin just due to price alone, but you may feel better about one or the other.
We are offering DirectAdmin to our customers for the last 1 year and 95% of customer doesn't really care about the cPanel if you provide them guidance. In this 1 year, we sold over 2000 accounts and only 10 of them asked about the cPanel specifically.
But yes am a bit afraid that even DirectAdmin will act like same as cPanel did because just after the cPanel price hike they removed owned license and now for the resellers they asking for at least $200/mo billing.
Going on cPanel's footprints
Owned license is equivalent to selling lifetime web hosting plans. Great for quick cash. In the long run, you lose money.
They didn’t tell life time users to fuck off. Continues to offer security updates for free.
Minimum commitment is extremely coming thing in any b2b contracts boss. It protects business from getting taken advantage of.
I recommend cPanel as it is user friendly.
Remember how Endurance International Group(EIG) acquired most of the web hosting provider companies and now all of them suck! Most of them are totally dead and the main source of customers for EIG are their affiliates...
If you don't care about the price, cPanel is always better than DirectAdmin.
cPanel > Plesk > DirectAdmin
infact directadmin don't lose to cpanel, alot of people use cpanel is because use to it. For the past year, directadmin have improve alot in user-interface and feature
ApisCP! I used to be a DirectAdmin fan, tried out ApisCP, and never looked back.
I think I qualify to answer this since I was born with cPanel and still use it to this day. My first experience with cPanel was when I bought shared hosting for my crypto site several years ago under my mom's name from hostinger or namecheap (can't remember sorry!). As a kiddie, It was always fun to play with, mostly mess around installing and re-installing Wordpress, trying out all the features it had. Soon after when I got to my first VPS, I was able to install to cPanel on it and had to for at least a year when I decided to go for master reseller hosting from some company instead as it was hard to maintain and I often got stuck trying to do anything on the VPS. I even reinstalled the VPS few times in that time as it kept breaking (mostly due to my fault). I've tried reseller and shared hosting from Namecheap, iFastNet, hostgator, hostinger and quite a few others, additionally, I've tried master and alpha reseller from MisterHost and Skynet as well as 1 or 2 other providers.
In my overall experience with cPanel, I'd say, It sucks if you're installing & maintaining it yourself. Shared Hosting works great but the few times it has messed up, it has costed me hours on end to get everything back to working again. not to mention how half-ass the master/alpha reseller has been for me.
It had been late-2018/early-2019 when I started looking into alternatives since around december of 2018 I finally had lots of time off school and during that time, An issue occurred with my databases and I ended up spending all my holidays trying to get everything back up again. This was when I first started looking for alternatives because as anyone would be, You don't wanna ruin your last holiday of the session after which you'd have final exams. I started with many panels like VestaCP, aaPanel, zPanel and many more after not being able to find any good alternatives, I had been stuck with cPanel. Mind you, I had mostly ignored DA till this because people said it was old and I didn't wanna pay for something that had "bad" reviews. By the start of 2020, I discovered cyberpanel and even ended up using it for most of 2020 but it too had me very frustrated as the mail server would randomly stop working or the panel wouldn't load anymore once the uptime reached 1week or more, and the only way to fix it would be to restart the server, annoying at best but more like I didn't want something that was unstable. Tried several different panels in an effort to ditch cyberpanel and not wanting to go back to cPanel my last option was to finally look into a panel I had mostly ignored, ISPmanger!! and CentOSWebpanel. both were very fine and worked great but I found them not as user-friendly to use.
In june/july 2021 is when I got a vps from Nexus Bytes ( @seriesn ) and tried out DirectAdmin for the first time. The installation process was very easy and I was able to just leave it running on the vnc and it was finished installing in just a few minutes. I think the whole setup took 1hr (it might even take less time for people who've already done it several times, but it was the first time for me). It was easy to get my stuff into on the VPS and it worked well until I decided to cancel my service few months later due to financial reasons. I now have Shared DA from @WebHorizon and I have cPanel for a certain site that runs a small website from a local company.
It's not like I ever compromised anywhere, be it money, the vps I was buying or the licenses or be it even the OS release. I've always done everything possible to have a stable & reliable experience with whatever I used. I followed at least the minimum system requirements when I ran these panels and so far, DirectAdmin has been the most stable in almost my 1yr with it. I know some people might blame system memory for when I said I'd have to restart cyberpanel for it to work but I first started with 4GB memory and 2vCores and upgraded to 20GB memory and 8vCores (no, not from contabo either). Even after a few re-installations it didn't help me. (the reason I mention this, is because I'm still looking for an answer as to why it'd do that).
Anyways, That was my 2cents and my overall experience with Control Panels. So far, I'd say DirectAdmin has been the overall best. CentOSWP has been stable and good enough for just normal usage and Cyberpanel was the easiest to adopt to, and was the closest I could find to cPanel.
Thank you for the read!
Expect Cpanel price increase soon.
I'm prefer Cpanel
I'm just a lowly shared hosting customer who has been using cpanel for a decade, but decided to try out some alternate hosts in the past year offering both cpanel and direct admin for my personal email hosting. cPanel's certainly more robust in this area based on my experience (which may be limited by DA license/propack segmentation).
DirectAdmin (at least the non-propack version on most shared hosting here at LET) doesn't have the equivalent of cPanel's Track Delivery feature and combing through exim logs (what DAdmin offers non-propack) is rough, as a basic customer.
I also encountered one shared host using DA had a nice, prominent "enable DKIM" switch that another shared host didn't have, which makes for a bit of a headscratch around the already not-exactly-easy process of getting email security/validation properly setup and tested. I'm not sure which version was the default install and what may have been customized by the reseller, but cpanel seemed easier on that front with their Email Deliverability area.
Obviously, I'm coming from having had a decade of mildly learning one panel and then just months with a new panel, but I'm not impressed with how different my experience has been with a few DA hosts (and I didn't come across a cheap LET shared host offering Pro Pack-added features like Track Delivery tool).
In my experience, in practice:
DA as a panel seems to still be an inferior product to cPanel.
On top of that, providers seem to be still learning the ropes of the DA, so I suppose that some of the problems arise because of that (user error, on the provider level).
In spite of that, I've completely switched to DA hosting. I use reseller hosting, and because of the cPanel's pricing policy, too much money (IMO) would go to the very greedy corporation, instead of those "savings" being shared by those who've actually earned it: the hosting provider and Y T.
Haven't had any show-stopping problems, i.e. I can now get it all working (with more or less hassle) with DA. Until they change the pricing policy (or something good, and open source comes along - which is very unlikely), I'll be sticking with DA.
Money aside, I would say that cPanel is better. For hosting anything profitable, extra 30, or even 50 cents per month should not be a problem. In those terms, my switching to DA completely, in late 2021, was mostly a PMS decision - what cPanel does feels wrong.