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My thinking (2c as the Americans say) based on my experience and feedback from providers and users:
From a providers' perspective
If you started 5 ~ 10 years ago and have been running cPanel, transitioning can take time and hassle. Depending on your profit margins and customer profile, cPanel costs can be quite manageable (for shared hosting it's still less than 50 cents per customer, per month).
There are no guarantees whatsoever that DirectAdmin prices will not go up, even drastically. It's capitalism, things change.
From a customers' perspective
Doesn't really matter much for most - though some are more used to cPanel and don't fancy learning the ropes of DirectAdmin. And yes - DA file manager still sucks.
My experience:
At this moment (years since "this is outrageous, we're all moving to DirectAdmin!") cPanel shared and reseller hosting providers offer better, more stable service. While I'm actively using both panels, most of my stuff runs on cPanel, especially the important stuff. It's down to hosting quality, not the panel itself. At this moment, DirectAdmin's pricing is more fair, and the backup and account import function is head and shoulders above cPanel, so I actually prefer DirectAdmin as a control panel. For some reason, however, DA hosting is more hick-up prone so to speak.
To avoid misunderstanding: there is a ton of crappy cPanel shared hosting providers, but I can't find any really good ones with DA. "Good" being what works well enough for my needs and criteria.
I'm not a great fan of both's backup systems, Jetbackup for rescue!
What about cPanel's FM?
It's shit too, Its something like out of style compared to Jupiter and PL themes.
Doesn't have dark mode either.
But in terms of usage, YES. cPanel's is better.
For me, a dummy user, cPanel is a lot more easy to use and understand!
Obviously anyone with average intelligence can create a new site from directadmin and get a backup or have an email account. In other words, directadmin also has a simple use as cpanel.
I too think cpanel is just a habit and an addiction.
sincerily I use directadmin I survivore for a couple months because you need to create 3 different type of client: admin, developer and user.
Everytime for me it's a mess.
I tell you another things...I prefer plesk
Yes, it's different from cpanel, but I don't think it's too complicated. Because it is based on a simple logic and I like it. For the end user, it doesn't matter anyway.
Plesk and cpanel are owned by the same. If the price of pleskin increases soon, the transition will be a nightmare. But of course plesk is the only best option for windows.
Why indeed - so stupid.
If we were talking a $100,000 purchase, people would balk. But you're talking in most cases a few dollars a month. A lot of people will say they'd rather pay an extra $20 or whatever a year and stay on cPanel rather than go through all the headache of moving it to something else, especially if they're not technically sophisticated.
I think there's a ton of people out there who've used cPanel for years and have never heard the name. "I don't know, I use ExampleHost and they have a nice control panel..."
It is disappointing to learn that I have below average intelligence. Repeating what I said, I am unable to backup anything from my MXroute account. There is no interface in the DirectAdmin control panel to do it. @jar from MXroute confirmed it.
-> Would you care to share with the class how I can backup and restore my MXroute account that has a DirectAdmin control panel? I am especially interested in backup / restore for the over 1,000 forwarders that I use. I am an end user, not a reseller. Apparently resellers can do it, but not end users.
Okay about user / provider opinion:
User: cPanel was eaiser to use, DirectAdmin used to have an editor where if you went off the tab, your force of habbit used to be click anywhere on the tab / browser to click to the page. This closed the editor. So you lost everything.
2020+, DA has changed their design, made the editor better and cPanel keeps uping the prices and taking away colour from their skins. So yeah DA in my opinion as a user and provider would be the way to go.
Plesk is owned by cPanel and also keeps uping their prices.
I'm also an Mxroute end user, please see the following video, it'll help increase your intelligence .
Well now I have to figure out how to exclude items from search that are excluded from menus. Never seen that interface before tbh.
At least most of the use cases I desperately don't want people to try, I've broken with custom virtual hosts.
Apologies to @stephfd21, @Shazan, and @thecreator_ - They were right and I was wrong.
There was a hidden backup interface in the MXroute DirectAdmin that I did not know about. It is shown in the YouTube video above. It can be found by typing "backup" in the search bar at the top. That search bar uncovers other commands as well. I assumed that the entire MXroute DirectAdmin user interface was in the links on the left panel. More commands are available, and I am not sure it was intentional. I hope access to them is not temporary - @jar?
I was able to make backups at MXroute using the backup interface. The forwarders were included in the backups. There are selectors to choose what to backup. I ran two backups - one with the entire Email section enabled, and one narrowed to Forwarders only. I did not try a "full backup" which would have captured website and other directories that are not part of MXroute's services.
I have not tested restore (which is essential) or seen how backup/restore operates fully. I won't do that until I can be sure that I won't damage my existing email accounts and forwarders.
I don't know, but I'm not sure I like it being exposed. I consider account backup to be a rare feature for an email provider, and access to the file manager is downright problematic because I've seen it abused a few times. When planning for capacity, it helps to know that customers are limited to executing functions that were intended for them to execute. One large account running a backup on the right server, at the right number of tenants, could result in unexpected performance issues. Especially considering I'm very likely running a backup at the same time.
Same DirectAdmin. Make sure you are purchasing the license directly from DA so that you get Pro Package with additional features such as that one.
The license providers include with their VPS is not the regular DA license, therefor... it has less features.
If you are referring to the web terminal.
I barely use the DA Backup tool though, I've built my own backup solutions via their api. @jar you can probably look at this if you need to remove the filemanager. https://forum.directadmin.com/threads/how-to-remove-the-file-manager.15030/
I can possible share the code with you that'll allow users to create and download backups.
Edit the default theme and change the layout to grid and then all new accounts will use grid which is close to cPanel.
They don't, that's an option you can set in Tweak settings...
I'm guessing that would only work for reseller accounts? I don't see anything like that in my shared hosting cpanel.
Whoever owns the server don't have it disabled
Restrict document roots to public_html [?]
This option mandates that document roots for all newly-created websites must reside under the document root for the account’s primary website. This option does not apply when you transfer or restore accounts.
I've not used cpanel for years however I'm using direct admin for the last few years
Cpanel is more expensive but it feels more polished, Yes you can do everything in cpanel you can do in direct admin from an end user perspective
From an admin perspective cpanel (when I last used it on a VPS) was more polished and a little more powerful
Direct admin still requires a lot of ssh access and modifying files manually to make it do what you want
The benefit of cpanel was that they had the dnsonly which was free and was easy to connect a full fledged cpanel server too and offload/share dns lookups .... direct admin has a "multi server" feature that's similar however you do need licences for all the direct admin servers (there's no free dns only version)
And at one point cpanel was so popular everyone was using it.... so as someone said changing everything to another control panel takes time
... however direct admin has a cpanel import feature
Chip
can anyone found a price for direct admin smaller than on their website, i have found a site licenceman and prices are great but i`m not sure that they are legit