Anyone familiar with Plesk7?

[daverozelle]

I have a client considering moving to a dedicated server that uses Plesk 7 for management or whatever. I am on my way now to educate myself with what the heck Plesk 7 is. Anyone here familiar, happy with, hated it, whatever?

[mfennell]

I also have a dedicated server with Plesk 7. I like it a lot, but I would suggest downloading the manuals and working with the demos before I got a dedicated server with it.

[daverozelle]

How would you rate the newer Plesk 7 against H-Sphere/CPanel?

[mfennell]

its pretty straight forward whereas hsphere can be confusing. Its still new to me (it just came out a couple of weeks ago) and I am still learning it.

I can't really offer a compare/contrast view of these panels at this time, I suggest checking out those demos and seeing if its something you can learn to deal with. No panel has been perfect for everyone yet and I doubt that there ever will be one.

But I can say... Plesk 7 is cleaner looking than any of the others at this point.

Plesk7 is geared mainly at a strict virtual hosting environment only. It is not suited at all as a Reseller control panel. There is no built-in billing system, and the setup can get a little tedious if something goes wrong. It does look very nice, but the underbelly of it is pretty scary if you ask me. Looks great, runs fine, just hope nothing breaks. I guess its not for the power users, but great as a very simple, easy to use control panel.

I do like the fact that it uses MySQL as the DB backend

But give me HSphere anyday. MUCH more control there.

[mfennell]

Having no built in billing system is a plus for me, The hsphere one billing is really screwy imo.

I do like the fact that it uses MySQL as the DB backend

I would have to agree. It helps give the extra flexability that I don't have with hsphere, but then again I have only been a reseller using hsphere, never on the admin side of it. So I don't know what can be done on that side.

HSphere users postgres or MSSQL for backend. I would NOT use MSSQL, but postgres is pretty stable. I just don't like postgres for the fact that the data files are numbers spread in a tree of numbers, and the syntax can be different from mysql at times.

[daverozelle]

Originally Posted by Bladesnitz

Plesk7 is geared mainly at a strict virtual hosting environment only. It is not suited at all as a Reseller control panel. There is no built-in billing system

So you mean that this control panel in your opinion is made for a person who is colo'ing their own domains and not setting up a business where the domains are customers.

So its kind of a two level (host/admin -> end user/webmaster) control panel whereas H-Sphere is more three levels (host/admin -> reseller -> end user/webmaster)?

That makes sense to me. So Plesk is something I might use if it was just for my stuff, but not if I wanted to setup a dedicated server that I planned to reseller to resellers, right?

I am so glad I am not really trying to do this, it sounds like too much work.

At this point I would like to thank Vortech for all their wonderful work in making my work so much less.

[mfennell]

actually thats not correct, you can create reseller accounts in plesk. Only from the admin account though.

If you are a reseller you setup a domain as normal in Plesk. You thengive your client access to that control panel by using the Domain User function. Their login is their domain name and the password you assign in Domain User.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showth...threadid=51683

[daverozelle]

thanks for that info.. i'll let my client know. I might be able to work out some indirect management for him

If he does what I want him to (and customers rarely do) he will be my first colo here at vortech

[Funnyhat]

I use Helm and Ensim on my dedicated boxes and I purchased Modern Bill for the billing. Its not as nice as Hsphere with the billing built in... but it works out well. I do not use the billing feature in Helm since I have moden bill setup for support/billing issues for linux (ensim domains).

[nelsonke]

I used Plesk at another hosting service for about 6 months. I thought however that it only worked with Unix servers. The dowloadable manual was pretty good and I found it easier to learn to use than H-sphere, but partly that is becuase H-sphere has more features, including the billing system which adds a lot of the complexity.

I am not sure if it was version 7, but the version i used depdended heavily on "nested" commands, which meant there was a lot of backing out and backing up to move between commands.

But it seemed to be reliable. Now the hosting service, that was another matter. I hate even remembering them.

In some way

[mfennell]

yeah.. that would have been an older version. 7 is a recent release. Plus its at this point the best looking hosting control panel yet. They have version 6.5 for Windows out (I have never used a Windows version), but currently version 7 is unix/linux only.

Their demos are located here: http://www.sw-soft.com/en/products/pleskwin/demo/ if you want to check them out.

[Funnyhat]

I have never used it for Windows either. I used Ensim for Windows but the way it makes a new anonymous user account for each domain kind of upset me and it is more spendy then Helm.

[mfennell]

Thats how windows works. It is supposed to create an anonymous user for each domain that is configured. Some domains may have different permissions set for its users, this is one of the ways that it needs to be configured to accomplish this.