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Where did they go up...? They added additional plans at the $5/month & $15/month marks just to help the community more. The $29/month plan has been there since the dawn of time.
The only change that happened is the DC pricing went away, but they admitted it was a non starter for them.
DA's good, I enjoy it. I think it could use more CRUD to cut out the need to break out to a shell, but it's getting there and I hope to use it a lot on Namecrane.
Francisco
DirectAdmin quality control is poor, especially when it comes to new feature releases or major upgrades. Clearly lack of proper philosophy towards testing (+ testing backward compat) before release is one of the major issues with that company.
The same crap goes for Hostbill. They just pump out new features and don't care about backward compat or simple primitive tests before release.
This is where big corpos shine - they hire shitload of HR where few people will work they ass out to do their job properly. Small companies (<50) doesn't have this.
DirectAdmin seems to be slowly losing the momentum it gained among its users after cPanel's price hike. The primary reason appears to be its UI.
They seem to have purposefully made the UI difficult for most people. The bigger problem is they seem to fail to acknowledge this fact.
Several people have suggested making a flat UI with easy-to-find features and navigation instead of nesting them deep inside. But in a bid to be different from cPanel, they lost a lot of usability. I would imagine a UI developer would consider that no less than a nightmare. Theirs seem to be doing fine instead.
As for stability, it still has a long way to go. Not every install results in the same. Something breaks almost half the time. The same is true for feature releases and upgrades. File Manager is still unusable. However, basic features are fine; once you have it running, it runs as expected.
It is still considered a work in progress and deserves applause for the features it has brought through.
But new players like Webuzo are closing the gap fast and perhaps exceeding with their pleasing UI and features. At that, has anyone used Webuzo extensively?
Like adding more PHP versions would be something hard to do - I miss this feature as well. Some providers added more PHP versions to DA themselves.
Their community explain like old PHP versions are vulnerable. So just remove an option to install PHP 7 at all then.
Managing DA is definitely easier than it was 15 years ago, at least for me.
Enhanced skin was/is the best, Evolution is complete mess. But everybody wanted a responsive theme, so here you go. And they even removed CustomBuild from Enhanced skin, making DA harder to manage.
It's strange to see such a negative attitude towards DA, when just a year ago many LET users were greeting every visit of DA employees into this place.
As for DA - I went through love and hate, but now I'm completely neutral. It's just a company as all others, with their own philosophy, own understanding, providing some product, which you can use, if you're ok with it.
It was inevitable. Opinions on LET change drastically. Many users switched to DA due to cPanel's price hike and made heaps of praise while at it. Those who survived the hike were critical of the direction DA was taking.
DA listened to the praises then and is now facing the consequences. The larger market is still out there, and untouched by DA.
Same here. I stopped making suggestion many moons ago.
Webuzo is created by Bangalore technicians. I would avoid it at all costs.
cPanel is the market leader for historical reasons. It was very popular when many small hosters were being set up in the US. This trend then spread all over the world.
The cPanel, Directadmin, Plesk and many other commercial and open source panels are mainly used by individuals and micro-businesses.
The big players in the shared hosting market always use their own panel solutions.
If you have a price issue, then DA is your solution. Give any enduser a choice DA comes 2nd.
DA is also boring. cPanel is easier to customize, tweak and make work as you want.
User feedback, DA has only from forums or some license holders to get a feel. cPanel is interacting with endusers, So endusers see their issue addressed faster with cPanel.
I like virtualmin and they offer pro. any thoughts on them?
Archaic. Stable, reasonably secure. Go for it if no clients will use it. Pro version... In 16 years of my career I have never seen anyone bought it.
just as capable, it is just a matter of personal choice imho
I don't understand why DA could not extract .tar file.
Interestingly, the comments I am seeing here do appear to reflect the wider feeling that DA has fallen back out of favor and cPanel is back in. Interesting because DA was the 'savior' for LET back when cPanel announced their price increase for the first time.
It appears 99% negative feedback are here for DA because they all want to see cPanel in it.
But DA is not cPanel, I find cPanel bloated and they are always pushing you to buy bloatwares (all those addons, example, cloudlinux, and then litespeed, which is self-boasting, self praising bot, its another story though) and what not. They think that all web hosters have lots of money and big margins and they want to eat all your margin by pushing up paid solutions and people are buying them.
Its obvious people will compare DA with cpanel, but try to see DA independently as see it from point of view of functionality. Its all good if you don't find cPanel in it.
And for some for doubt about Custombuild, try their UI for custombuild, its not that easy but you can do all from UI also without going to CLI.
@DA_Mark, if you are still around, let us know what you feel about fresh feedbacks on this thread.
We have both types of resellers for sale and we sell basically no cPanel at this point. We sell a plan or two per week, if that.
It's also probably due to targeted market. People have tight budgets these days and it's hard to justify cPanel.
Plugin wise, I don't think there's anything cPanel does that DA doesn't for us. I'm a big fan of
whmapi1, and wish DA had something that extensive to script away. They likely do via task_queue, but it's not as easy to work with.Past that, you can get Sitepad, Imunify, Jetbackup, Cloudlinux, Alt-*, Litespeed, etc, in both platforms. The only thing missing is ASSP, but maybe @jar can comment on how ASSP compares to rspamd.
Francisco
Not necessarily.
There are many control panels with better UI. Every one of them is not cPanel. I think this argument is what led to where DA is now today.
What folks are saying is the lack of usability in the UI. Usability comes before features to the majority of hosting users. if they can't use it, tons of excellent features are of no use.
A screenshot to tell the story:
https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/assp/screenshots/main1.JPG/max/max/1
Oh I've used ASSP, it's...extensive. Doesn't mean it isn't good though.
I haven't tried DA's default rspamd to see how it is.
Francisco
It causes tickets, because the SA config area for users stops functioning to the same degree that it does under SA. But it doesn't give the user any indication of such. They can still click the button to edit user_prefs even though it's disregarded, wildcards are even less accepted in white/black lists.
Largely this in your case. Your service is great, in fact, better than many charging more.
Never been my experience even in current times of tight budgets. If you move outside of the lowend market that is, consumers are not so price sensitive. Give them the choice of cPanel if they know and are used to it for $15 per month and offer them DA for $5 per month, they will stay with cPanel.
There are still many more DA offers on here for example vs. times before the initial cPanel price hike, but the number of cPanel offers has crept back up quite signifcantly since. So even on LET there is still a market for it, I would say, at least as much as DA.
If there was a whmeasybackup script for DA, I would move 1 of our reseller accounts to DA, but I can’t find one to automatically backup our reseller accounts and store them in our FTP storage.
In regards to GUI, the overall DA GUI could do with being more modern. The icons are a bit childish if that makes sense. The file manager isn’t very smooth to use either.
Getting to PHP versions without CL is a bit of a mission for example.
What is great is DNS management. Email management.
The Wordpress manager from DA doesn’t seem to have auto login.
Overall DA works, but could do with a bit more polish.
I just moved our VPS back to it from CPanel.
For what it's worth you can disable
route animationsor whatever they call them in theSkin Optionspart of your account. That should make things a lot 'snappier'.Francisco
cPanel and Plesk are at the same level, while other competitors can’t minimally reach them.
TBH, I actually love the DA standard theme. Truly hate the refreshed one. But yeah, disable route transitions.
We promote DirectAdmin heavily, and I love @smtalk and Mark. Guys are awesome. I also deal with them at a professional level.
The thing I miss from cPanel is the UI. I've tried to build a material template but wasn't able to, seems too complicated. I might give it another try and sell the template to providers. I wouldn't make it similar to cPanel, I'd make it look far better though and without the effects it currently has.
Learned it. Much prefer it over anything else.
I want to try Plesk now.
Since DirectAdmin is non-free, i'm not recommending it for you
Going right back to the Rackshack days I have used cPanel, well, other than a small diversion to Ensim. I guess I am just too familiar with it to use or recommend anything else.
I don't even mind the cost of cPanel even today. The pricing was stagnant for far too long and people were getting away with using VPS licenses in all the wrong circumstances. That is on cPanel and the management team of the time.
I just don't trust anything else in an environment that I would charge someone for.