When will cPanel get it right?

[Galaxy-Hosts.com]

After these last few days I have a rant I need to get off my chest.
[rant]
CPanel want to be considered the premium control panel on the market and the certainly charge a premium price for it. So why do they keep releasing bad updates? Do they think we pay a premium price for instability and downtime?
I have had this happen twice in the last year. A customer has their updates set to automatic and cPanel releases a bum update. Next thing I know the support tickets start coming in and the clients are not happy because their server is not working. These are unmanaged servers and the clients are responsible for the selection of their updates. Many of them pick automatic updates because they think it is the easiest way to go, so we really do not have to help them get their servers back up. But we do. This last time we had 4 server that had problems due to cPanels sh*tty update. They had varying degrees of problems. One fix was as simple as opening ssh and typing in the command to have cpanel update again. The other extreme was an amost completely crashed server. The websites displayed fine, but cpanel, ssh, and ftp were down. I had to get the data centers remote hands to look at this machine. The tech was busy and would look at the machine as soon as he finished the one he was working on, so I also dispatched a tech in the middle of the night to make sure this machine was brought back online promptly. This all costs money. Now I am stitting here after 30 hours of my time working on this and paying other people to work on it as well, and I am wondering why we pay a premium price for cPanel. I have never had this type of problem from DirectAdmin, ServerCP, or any other control panel, and they all cost less than cPanel.
[/end rant]


All that said cPanels support was helpful an did their best to assist us. But they should have had they bugs worked out before releasing the updates, these were not "bleeding edge" releases.

[sellwhm]

In my opinion, I have no idea why cpanel costs so much when the competition provides the same things for less. I think that the costs involved with cpanel costing too much shows that they like to pull the features and not the quality of the bugs and testing. If you have too much stuff to deal with, you can't focus on the problems with the control panel itself. I am running cpanel 11 at the moment. Its awesome but I know what you mean. I lost a client thanks to a bug in cpanel. Its really degrading for a small company to lose a good of amounts clients due to silly little bugs.

[Galaxy-Hosts.com]

Well this did not cost us any clients, but it was alot of headache.

[DavidsAwesome]

you can always choose "Stable" updates and wait for cpanel to be considered stable.

I agree though, its very expensive, and we shouldn't have to put up with this.

[Decker]

It's a choice, a lot of people prefer it and if they do go for 'edge' just once and set it back it goes a bit flaky, even unintentionally and then neglect the truth of the box/account. Not all the world is hit by the same so it's a trade off - feature against risk like everything else in the hosting business.

I did get the 'release' version version of 11 on one box (yep had auto silly me)and it's been okay so far (touch wood) just keeps updating which I'm a bit nervous about (yep my fault I missed it I know).

Maybe best to pull the newest if there is a prob before wracking yourself?

[Jordan Mclay]

Galaxy hosts , i agree with you here and cpanels support were quite helpfull with me too , So indeed were layered tech they gave us a command for shh and all our bugs in cpanel 11 seem to have cleared up. But i agree why should we pay a high price for a mediocre service

[Galaxy-Hosts.com]

o
you can always choose "Stable" updates and wait for cpanel to be considered stable.

I agree though, its very expensive, and we shouldn't have to put up with this. I have my boxes set to stable, but a client with an unmanaged server can set their setings to whatever they want. I also have my boxes set for manual upgrade only. This way I can ake sure the release has no reported bugs before I upgrade. yeah we are stuck on cPanel 10 for now, but at least I know it is stable.

[[JSH]John]

That's the same for me, I'm still on cPanel 10 because I know it's stable, I'd rather keep clients happy than have them angry because of some buggy software I could have avoided.

[AvailNetworks]

I know the feeling and this is pretty much why I chose to move from cpanel to hsphere awhile ago. I noticed a fair amount of quirks and compromises that are cpanel only. I've been using hsphere for about a year now and it has been near flawless.

As far as panel related problems and unmanaged servers, I would certainly charge for the repair or direct them to someone such as psm or serverwizards to get their server back in order.

Freebies are different from place to place but I know since I offer server management as well I only take it to Level I or II support and then start charging, of offer then the monthly plan option. otherwise they know it is no big deal for them to screw up their unit and then come complaining to fix it like it is somehow your fauly. Who knows what it will be next time that they will expect you to fix for free.

[tumble]

Once you run edge it is true you can never go back. It just does not want to downgrade correctly.

Granted though i have been running edge since edge 10.2 or something like that. And am currently at edge 11.1.0 as well as cpanel 11.5.24 Really not to much of a headache.

Never set that edge for auto update,because yes at times they do throw out bad updates.

Tumble

[Darknight]

After these last few days I have a rant I need to get off my chest.
[rant]
CPanel want to be considered the premium control panel on the market and the certainly charge a premium price for it. So why do they keep releasing bad updates? Do they think we pay a premium price for instability and downtime?
I have had this happen twice in the last year. A customer has their updates set to automatic and cPanel releases a bum update. Next thing I know the support tickets start coming in and the clients are not happy because their server is not working. These are unmanaged servers and the clients are responsible for the selection of their updates. Many of them pick automatic updates because they think it is the easiest way to go, so we really do not have to help them get their servers back up. But we do. This last time we had 4 server that had problems due to cPanels sh*tty update. They had varying degrees of problems. One fix was as simple as opening ssh and typing in the command to have cpanel update again. The other extreme was an amost completely crashed server. The websites displayed fine, but cpanel, ssh, and ftp were down. I had to get the data centers remote hands to look at this machine. The tech was busy and would look at the machine as soon as he finished the one he was working on, so I also dispatched a tech in the middle of the night to make sure this machine was brought back online promptly. This all costs money. Now I am stitting here after 30 hours of my time working on this and paying other people to work on it as well, and I am wondering why we pay a premium price for cPanel. I have never had this type of problem from DirectAdmin, ServerCP, or any other control panel, and they all cost less than cPanel.
[/end rant]


All that said cPanels support was helpful an did their best to assist us. But they should have had they bugs worked out before releasing the updates, these were not "bleeding edge" releases.
I would have to agree with you cpanel seems to have alot more problems than some of the other simpler panels

Thats why I usaly order DA or serverCP on my Servers :D
Why do you pay it? Well thats easy Its becuse its what the customers want!
But yeah Id never pay for it :}

[sng]

Software companies dont fix problems so they can rack in the support $$$. I worked for a software company and they always ignore fixing simple problems just to make sure people would call in for support.

Its lame but thats how business is...

[Galaxy-Hosts.com]

As far as panel related problems and unmanaged servers, I would certainly charge for the repair or direct them to someone such as psm or serverwizards to get their server back in order.
That may happen if any of the same customers reset their update settings. I (or more correctly we) try to go the extra mile, so this time everything was fixed tree of charge.
Anyway, it is a new day now and I am pretty much over it.

[raversworld]

Yes too expensive. If I were you I would email them and ask for a month free (that is the least they can do)

[Yun]

Yes too expensive. If I were you I would email them and ask for a month free (that is the least they can do)

They'll probably ignore you.

[GlennBeforeTime]

I could do with cPanel costing less. But the thing with cPanel / WHM is it has so many more "sweetened up features" than these other ones. Now that cPanel and WHM are slowly using AJAX it is making the job of operating a hosting business on the other side of the world a lot less time consuming and for this I am willing to pay extra for. But does it have to be so resource intensive?

[AvailNetworks]

well that's why it is so resource intensive because of the ajax and other "visual appeal items" cpanel to me is fairly bloated compared to other panels out there and really does nothing that the others don't. For some reason it has just caught on to the hosting industry. Anyone not in the hosting industry could care less what panel they are using, and anyone who is really shouldn't care either (from an end user standpoint) how many times do you really go in there anyway?

[GlennBeforeTime]

well that's why it is so resource intensive because of the ajax and other "visual appeal items" cpanel to me is fairly bloated compared to other panels out there and really does nothing that the others don't. For some reason it has just caught on to the hosting industry. Anyone not in the hosting industry could care less what panel they are using, and anyone who is really shouldn't care either (from an end user standpoint) how many times do you really go in there anyway?

Excellent point. Well posted.
+1 Rep.

[Robert]

cpanel needs to rewrite their code from scratch. This would eliminate all the unused coding they have in there and would make it run faster since they can code it to run with newer systems and better commands.

[ganesh.rao]

I swear, if I had the powers and all, I'd start some anti-cPanel and change the whole look of it. Make it worth less than a cent a month.

Don't talk about cPanel 11! None of the services start when you reboot. I'll have to manually restart every single service from WHM, err. Pain...

[AvailNetworks]

thanks for the rep gfun.

Cpanel is a decent panel and has a pretty easy learning curve which is nice, unlike the panel I chose H-Sphere. From an admin standpoint it is pretty intense but as far as the end users go, the biggest cpanel advocates end up falling in love with it and get use to it very quickly.

When it comes to control panels most of them do about the same thing, it is just like installing a new skin, things are jumbled around for a bit and it looks awkward but you get use to it and all is well.

hmmmm, maybe i could make a cpanel skin for H-Sphere haha

[[ih]Demetris]

I swear, if I had the powers and all, I'd start some anti-cPanel and change the whole look of it. Make it worth less than a cent a month.

Don't talk about cPanel 11! None of the services start when you reboot. I'll have to manually restart every single service from WHM, err. Pain...

cPanel 11 has been working fairly well for me, no major issues that we have incountered, outside of cpsrvd not starting but ive always had that issue..other than that its worked out pretty well :)

[DavidsAwesome]

Don't talk about cPanel 11! None of the services start when you reboot. I'll have to manually restart every single service from WHM, err. Pain...

Rebooting works fine for me... maybe you should contact cpanel about that :)

[ganesh.rao]

Rebooting works fine for me... maybe you should contact cpanel about that
All they say is... Reboot, Reboot, Reboot! huh.

They say that this is a part and parcel of a current version. I'd have to wait for their stable release! When's that? June 19th I guess, not far off!

[Decker]

Spoke too soon, had one box where apache just died, no reason just fell over and will restart for a few seconds only.

Going through the options now and it is a WHM/cpanel issue. That's with release, my fault clicking the wrong box :/

[Galaxy-Hosts.com]

Cpanel has had alot of issues the last 4 days or so. Hope you get it fixed without much trouble. If it does give you problems let us know and we will share any ionformation we have come across these last few days.

[Decker]

WHM 11.1.0 cPanel 11.4.11-C13876

Had a real problem with. httpd would not start for more than 1 minute

[Galaxy-Hosts.com]

When you say had, I take it you have fixed it?

[James]

I recommend sticking to stable releases - I don't have issues ever since I switched.

[Richard]

James,

The bad update was on the stable tree, if your server was set to automatic updates and checked in the timeframe that update was released, you got the problems, thats why cPanel 11 was rushed out.

[James]

I'm on auto stable release and have had no problems. Stable is still on version 10 Richard.

[Richard]

James,

Have you installed a new version of cPanel in the last few days? If you did, you will see that the stable version for NEW and BROKEN installs is now cPanel 11 (Due to the problems with cPanel 10).

If you got lucky with the update, your still on cPanel 10, if not, your with cPanel 11 ;)

Luck of the draw, but it seems most people came out of this as cPanels fix worked.

[Decker]

Agree, not that talented James, cPanel push is going out, without warning.

Found a way round when it trashed one of our servers, killed apache totally.