Considering HostingController

Hello,
 
We are considering switching to HostingController and I was wondering if some of those who are using it can give me idea of the good and the bad. I am currently using DotNetPanel and they seem to have given up all customer relations which kinda stinks. I also am needing to bring my Linux hosting in-house and like the idea of having one panel to do it all. I have looked at cPanel and EnKompass but really do not want to partner with cPanel unless I have too.
 
From a distance, I love the ability to support both Windows and Linux. I think it looks simple for the end user.
 
Questions I have
 
1. Can you turn off the e-commerce support? We use WHMCS and have no need for that in the panel.
2. Has anyone added their own application packs? We have some custom packs that we use and DotNetPanel just yanked support for adding custom installs.
3. How do you generally feel about the product, support, etc.
 
Thanks guys, I love what I see and look forward to hearing from you.
 
Jerel

Hi-

We're an ISP / developer for plug-ins to HC..
Answer to your questions..
1. YES.. you can integrate into WHMCS
>> you can do just about anything via API in HC8

2. YES.. we have our own api scripts as an App well for provisioning vcloud VM's.. details at http://stalker.opticalcorp.com/vcloud_plugin.aspx
3. The HC people are good.. we've been a customer since 2003 or so.. no problems other than what you read about in the forums here.. as with all software.. watchout with those upgrades  ;-)

Notes.. good support.. but I'll say that we pay for support / ++services etc.. so.. others may howl and spew at paying for things.. my $0.02.. HC ++ services is great resource to have available..



Cheers

I have used different control panels , by observing past my experience I will prefer Hosting Controller.
The great advantage for us to manage linux and windows in a same cluster. We been using hc billing as whmcs still in beta release (looking forward for build6 ). And user has an option to chose HC billing or whmcs.

Regarding support, I always give them full marks. They entertain even those queries which is not related to Hosting Controller.

hostingtulsa

Hello,
 

 
Questions I have
 
1. Can you turn off the e-commerce support? We use WHMCS and have no need for that in the panel.
2. Has anyone added their own application packs? We have some custom packs that we use and DotNetPanel just yanked support for adding custom installs.
3. How do you generally feel about the product, support, etc.
 

 
Jerel

Yes you have an option to chose any billing system Whmcs or builtin hc.
In past we have upgraded wordpress  version as the one which come in hc installer was older. but didn't integrated any new application. I think they have some documentation for it.
HC support is much much better as compare to other panels.

there are a lot of bugs in the system and especially for linux there is one big mistake: your users cannot overwrite even basic settings in .htaccess files.

the htaccess issue should be resolved in the next release and depending on the other fixes this might give us a starting ground to actually start using HC in procution - Im hopefull.

you can control windows and linux at the same time as admin. It does not translate so easy to resellers and not at all to webusers. Thats a shame but well :) you cannot have everything it seams.

there are limitations in using it for combined dedicated/share hosting. We are offering our clients to get a dedicated server for www and/or sql but running mail shared. Or any combination. Something easy supported by HELM. Support said it would work but it did not. Its not a big limitation. Sometimes you also just need to ajust your offerincs to the system to gain advantage of the system you run.

there are a lot of limitations and some implementationdetails you really need to take a look at and consider if its something you think is ok for you or not. Im not confident we are making the right move, but ... we have bad opinion about Parallels and we have not found anything better yet to support both windows and linux. And we DO see a lot of potential especially if they do keep the prices low as they are now.

support: different, very different from person to person. Mostly we get good replys but often also not. Especially when we report bugs. WE have reported a lot of bugs and issues while testing and most of the time we first get a lot of nonsence from them (depending on the person writing back) and then we get "yes, we see it now and will get back" and then nothing from there on.

the QA when releasing new builds: we have only seen one and its not good, but hopefully it was a onetime mixup :)

We are missing a known buglist, a issue, featurerequest system, a milestone list and things like this to see that what we are reporting actually get into a list of things to do and to see what the longterm plan is for this.

we are still onboard... for testing...

agermose
there are limitations in using it for combined dedicated/share hosting. We are offering our clients to get a dedicated server for www and/or sql but running mail shared. Or any combination. Something easy supported by HELM. Support said it would work but it did not. Its not a big limitation. Sometimes you also just need to ajust your offerincs to the system to gain advantage of the system you run. 

 


What do you mean by this?   This is something that attracted us to HC.   We have mostly dedicated server customers. We aren't that far along in testing yet.

So far we have a dedicated HC server for central login,  dedicated mail, dedicated mysql, dedicated mssql, dedicated DNS.   I was under the impression we could add www servers and assign and lock a reseller to them.  This would give them a dedicated win/nix machine they have full rdp or ssh access to and a control panel, but leave the mail, dns and sql management to us.  Is this not the case?   Are we able to assign multiple nameservers so our customers can have their own nameservers?

@agersome I think you have saved above post text in a doc file .. I've seen same  text in different links lolz

@watson: that would make it easy yes but no I have not ;) just my views have not changed much yet


@renhack: We are also running one server, one service setup. One server is running just one service - IIS, apache, mail, dns or database. This is ALMOST no problem :)

We are also selling a "dedicated www" or "www/DB combo" or of cause "www/db/mail" to just one user or reseller. Often the "apache/mysql" combo, but they dont care that mail is not dedicated. This has turned out not to be possible and Im sure its supposed to because HC told us.
We had to change from using Linux as mailserver to windows, and maybe this changes things so its working again - have not tested it more. Our initial "test setup" was linux mailserver and when we tried to run a server with apache/mysql and dedicate it to a reseller the reseller was unable to create any websites because the system just would not accept to create mail on other servers.

all our servers have been setup by HC by the way and HC has confirmed this and ended up asking us simply to run mail also.

Let me add a new dedicated server this weekend if I find the time and test again now that we are running shared mail on windows and I will let you know what we find.

I hope thats the case.  We use smartermail on windows.   Most of our clients are marketing agencies that get one linux and one windows server.  They usually have little to zero experience managing something like mail, dns or db and leave it up to us.   HC seemed like the perfect candidate for a centralized login that gave access to both their servers without having to all in one each box like Plesk.   

We've spent a fortune on Parallels Business Automation, Plesk, Expand, Virtuozzo only to be crapped on by Parallels SAS licensing model that they introduced last year.   Not to mention the complete mess that expand has become.   Empty promises for years.  We just want a company we can trust.

If you can wait a little more, I recommend wait for Enkompass to be released.

but it only supports windows or? I think one of the main reasons for "renhack" to look into HC is that it supports both windows and linux in the same product.

Correct Agermose.   We're a mixed environment.  The showstopper for us right now is the htaccess and user directory on linux.  Once that fixed we'll begin to roll out some shared accounts and slowly move towards migrating our dedicated customers in.   Hopefully build6 will be out soon and be security bug free.

Thanks for the responses all. I am currently trying to evaluate the product under the free trial. I am hoping to geta single common control panel for linux and windows and hopefully make it all work great.
 
Thanks again,
 
Jerel