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Custom VPS Panel - Suggestions, tips and ideas
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Custom VPS Panel - Suggestions, tips and ideas

Hi everyone,

In the last months I've been working on a VPS control panel as I wanted to make my own to provide hourly billing and other features panels don't offer today. I'm looking for tips and suggestions how to improve my product.

Currently the control panel is only used in-house, but I might license it.

Features as of today:

  • Hourly Billing
  • Creation and destruction of VPS
  • Basic VPS operations
  • Snapshots
  • DNS management
  • App installer (Wordpress, LNMP)
  • Rebootless Scaling
  • Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling scales the server vertically depending on system load and RAM usage. Very useful for high traffic sites that don't use capacity 24/7

Apps are currently limited to those two, but we are constantly adding new apps. What apps would you like to see in a commercial product? What features would you like to see?

Screenshot: https://gyazo.com/eeaff6f05ed43109249943395bed4e73

Looking forward to your feedback.

Thank you

Comments

  • Looks very nice, clean and sleek. The question to ask yourself is what makes this vps control panel different from any other vps control panel? When I'm working on a project I usually ask myself that makes me think 100% outside of the box.

    The auto scaling feature should be quite nice though.

  • @IgniteServers Thank you for your feedback. I have not yet come by a VPS control panel that does Billing+Servers+Support in one package, and most VPS control panels lack the snapshot, easy scaling and app install features.

  • @keanu said:
    IgniteServers Thank you for your feedback. I have not yet come by a VPS control panel that does Billing+Servers+Support in one package, and most VPS control panels lack the snapshot, easy scaling and app install features.

    I guess this is on-top of OpenVZ?

    Unless I missed it somewhere in your description blurb, design looks good and clear.

  • Yes, indeed it is on OpenVZ to make rebootless scaling and auto-scaling possible.

    Thanks everyone for the feedback :)!

  • DamianDamian Member
    edited October 2015

    All this is good, except for:

    keanu said: App installer (Wordpress, LNMP)

    Will be a terrible hairy mess because each distro has different filesystem layouts. This works with things like cPanel, because cPanel only installs on Centos, and also expects to be the only thing installed on the server.

    keanu said: Auto-scaling scales the server vertically depending on system load and RAM usage. Very useful for high traffic sites that don't use capacity 24/7

    Not a good idea, unless there's a cap of some sort. Otherwise, you're throwing gas on a fire if you have a VM running out of control; giving it more resources will not rectify the situation. Additionally, you'll have a hard time selling resources that aren't used. If you hedge against that and sell the ability to "burst", there will be situations where two or more VMs are going to attempt to "burst" to the maximum resources of the server at the same time.

  • DerekDerek Member
    edited October 2015

    It looks good but you need to add a background to the load bars/login, it can be hard to see and figure out if a person has poor vision or has contrast set high.

    https://portal.elasticnode.net/account/login

    also, when I go to logout, it goes to https://portal.elasticnode.net/account/base_pages_login.html

  • @Damian
    We currently only install the apps on Debian 8. You can't install the app on another OS, the panel limits this.

    The autoscaling will go up to the highest package we offer, but we are going to add a feature so you can select the thresholds and the maximum package it will scale to.

  • @Derek

    Fixing this right away, thanks for the heads up.

  • @Derek

    Logout feature fixed and input fields made more clear.

  • DerekDerek Member
    edited October 2015

    Try to fix the remember me switch on login.

    In Support (https://portal.elasticnode.net/account/support), I'm already loggedin, it still asks for Name and Email, why not change it to a dropbox and ask for which department or escalation.

    When I goto the root domain (https://portal.elasticnode.net/) when loggedin, it shows me logged out. Why not just redirect back to the portal?

  • I have fixed the redirect. The support system is currently not possible as we use an external support provider (Reamaze). I'm going to use their API to make it better in a future release.

  • We have now added mobile support to the control panel , making it simple to manage your servers from your mobile device.

  • Vnc console/rescue management...good strong api ..shellinabox script etc...

  • API is being developed now, we will add Console soon.

  • Thanx...also...does it have charts? Load ram memory network etc...

  • We currently do not have any charts, we do have live statistics though.

  • VirMachVirMach Member, Patron Provider

    There's a lot of limitations we have with SolusVM and a large lack of features, so I'll go ahead and give you some suggestions on what would personally make us switch over to your panel - I hope the feedback helps.

    Billing Module - If the panel has a feature and you can add it into the billing module, make sure you do it. Make sure they're inter-connected pretty smoothly. This is a huge flaw in current panels - terrible modules that don't let you do much.

    IP/location Switch - I feel like this could be very useful if you could allow certain clients to swap out their IP certain amount of times. This would make it useful, for example, for proxies - if you're adding "apps" since a lot of apps could benefit from this

    Every feature - Make sure you do not forget all of the features that already exist on popular panels. If you add new features and take away some, then it's not really improved.

    Built-in Monitor - Have built-in server monitor that also lets you monitor a VPS easily, sort by usage, spot abuse easily, etc. Easy management saves companies a lot of time and in turn, they'd be willing to pay way more for your panel

    Anti-Abuse - Have built-in settings to shut off or throttle nodes that are going over what you consider fair use. Plus a robust notification system in case something goes wrong.

    Bill by usage - Hourly billing is a huge plus and it seems like your panel is leaning toward the "cloud" panels. So why not add an extra feature of calculating billing based on usage as well, as an option? Could be combined with Anti-Abuse to let customers possibly burst longer and bill them more if they're maxing out CPU, for example.

    Fair billing - If you're going to charge for this, make sure your pricing is fair for everyone. There will be a lot of hosts that use smaller dedicated servers, there will be some that have a lot more or a lot less VMs per server. There will be providers that have dozens or hundreds of servers that shouldn't pay thousands per month. There might be a provider starting out that wouldn't be able to pay a lot if you decide to go the expensive one-time payment route, and so on.

    KVM - Certain operating systems will not work on OpenVZ. You're definitely going to need to add this support, because some providers will not one to use more than one VPS panel. Huge bonus if you can get both KVM and OpenVZ running on the same server.

    Migration - Make it easy for someone to migrate from their existing panel to your panel. This will probably be the deal-breaker for anyone. If they can't move to your panel, then your customer base is limited to new servers.

    That's all I can think of at the moment.

  • Nice panel... Is the arrangement for the tabs (actions) copied from Solus? It looks oddly familiar (don't get mad at me for this, I'm just asking) :)

  • Hello,

    No copying has been done, must be a coincidence. Panel is developed completely from scratch.

    Thanks

  • @keanu

    I will script you a billing module as I am trying to make a billing module for opennebula for blesta or whmcs or both.

  • What is this panel developed in? (PHP,Perl,Python,etc)

  • @fanta8897 It has been developed in PHP.

  • @keanu said:
    fanta8897 It has been developed in PHP.

    I want to order your license

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