What control panel should we offer?
We will be launching our first shared hosting offer soon!
Looking for feedback on what control panel people are most interesting it 
Poll
- What control panel should we offer?59 votes
- cPanel15.25%
- DirectAdmin52.54%
- ApisCP27.12%
- Other - Please leave a comment5.08%
Thanked by (1)Abdullah
Comments
Fixed Poll
cpanel unlimited unlimited A++ something ...
I'll show myself out.
Poll fixed again, sorry it's my first poll
people are more comfortable with cpanel than anything else but with their pricing structure...i don't think many people can offer it especially with unlimited sites etc so DA is the option
and with a good theme, you can make DA almost like cpanel so onboarding is easy.
for end users, apiscp has steep learning curve and not many are interested in learning (because they want a quick solution to host and forget)
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congrats!
I'd prefer DirectAdmin if you're targeting normal LE users.
Also, Apiscp sounds like a unique offering.
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I would rather ask you, what control panel do YOU know best?
That is the CP to chose.
If you can’t manage it, the customers will find out and leave.
Often because bad performance or clueless response in tickets.
https://clients.mrvm.net
this is my opinion from the client side, regardless of the control panel,
I will see the completeness of the core shared hosting specifications such as Cloudlinux, Softaculous, Immunify360, MailChannels.
and the consequences are large monthly bills for new provider.
This is one of the reasons I really like ApisCP - you don't need any of that and @nem is super helpful
ApisCP looks good and was easy to adapt to.
Tbh, Softaculous is probably something I wouldn't want to miss these days. Got used to it, can easily create staging sites or push to live, backup and create sets of plugins that are automatically installed upon WordPress installation. That's just me, though
Aside from that ApisCP is great and @nem is doing an amazing job
Already seen it in action at @SGraf MyRoot.pw .
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Can’t answer the question when I don’t know
1. If you have experience with either of them
2. What your target audience will be.
@StuderSolutions make ApisCP offers soon. If you need more testing/help please ask.
ApisCP could be a good differentiator
People will gravitate to what they know, cPanel/DA. ApisCP may be an interesting alternative to you but you need to ask yourself what your audience wants. Don't be quirky just because, it won't get you that far.
If your target audience is LE* then you may get a few 'supporter' purchases, wider market with ApisCP, no chance I suspect.
DirectAdmin is the way to go.
Alongside DA, you could also offer slightly cheaper ApisCP plans or same priced but with slightly higher resource limits.
This right here.
APISCP is great product. Probably one of the most unique and awesome hosting control panel out there.
However, the problem is, most of your average Tom, Dick and Harry aren't tech junkies. Some don't even know the difference between a server and a webserver. They want a solution that is,
Easy to use
A) Proven
C) Can be googled
Just by not selling cPanel based hosting, you are going to miss out on a decent % of potential clients. The remaining might want to go with DA because, there's a decent chatter about them online.
It also depends on your target demo. Are you going to market towards hardcore techies? Or people who feels awesome knowing their host doesn't use Whmcs/cPanel/DA/Solusvm etc and gets the kick out of it?
Or are you going to target your everyday consumers? If it is the Later, cPanel still rules the market, followed by DirectAdmin.
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Michael
While I agree with that, when I first started with web hosting a lot of the hosts I tried were using custom panels - these may have been frontends that used cpanel backend or simply themes, but it wasn't until after I started playing with VMs that I came across cPanel itself.
A few of the clients we have have come from hosts with "custom" panels - so I think as long as it's easy to use it doesn't matter if it's a name people know as a lot of people haven't even heard of cpanel.
Very true. I used cPanel for maybe two or three years before I even knew I was using cPanel.
But I was also 12 so there is that.
Michael
My first "panel" I used was with servage.net - which was straight forward enough to use but I believe it isn't based on cpanel.
Most non-techy people I know who would want to try hosting their own site just want an easy way to do it, they've no "name" in their heads that the panel must be.
Agreed. It is the name "cPanel" that is almost associated with "control panel". Name means a lot.
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People have less tolerance for new things in the hosting industry these days. Especially when it comes to control panels and having to learn a new one. Sure, techies may but what does an end-user really want generally speaking? Familiarity. Not something new.
very true! I myself hate change to UX/UIs a lot.
but I think this is not really addressing the question here because this only applies to very specific group of people (those who are already clients somewhere, used to a certain panel and with some experience in hosting...)
This I think brings it more into the right direction...
The poll is simply flawed in the way that it is asking the rather wrong people.
I'd also say there are two possible approaches here (which already have been mentioned) but can't be addressed with this poll anyway.
1) directly go with something you are comfortable with and knowledgable about. if you can handle tasks and support for it easily and have confidence in it, you will find the right audience that does not prioritize on the panel brand at all or can and will adopt
focus on your unique selling point instead and grow your business without trying to make yet another boring cpanel reseller master best in the world shared host.
being a good provider is much more then offering/using the most common panels. (I am close to vomitting every other day, when I have to log into one of these ugly, unintuitive WHMCS client areas... just saying)
2) define your target audience first and find out what they want/need/prioritize.
as said before there of course will be a group that already has experience with webhosting and might know a few panels/providers. in this group there will be some, that prefer to stick with what they are used to.
so if you really want to target these people first (or only), then obviously you'd need multiple panels and have one for each flavour.
or you narrow down your target audience even more to only one panel and the target group for those who know that one and want it and hope for some bycatch later?
maybe you rather think out of the box and see that there are other possible (huge) user groups out there and a lot of them have not even had any webhosting before or do not prioritize on just the panel brand.
every day someone wakes up and decides they need a website. would one really think they all start looking at the panels first and base their decision on the brand of that? I don't think so...
rather focus on what these people need or are looking for and how you as provider can help them best and most likely you'll find that it does not matter so much anymore, which panel you use after all (but you still could try to optimise on that aspect later by asking them)
TL;DR; I can only recommend to either decide on your expertise and what you can really provide best or try to think inbound and define your future clients and what those want or need.
While the people around here have a lot of experience and maybe even heard feedback from their client base it will all be subjective to their target groups and USPs ans whatnot.
This includes me: I never really used cpanel but had confixx, plesk, keyhelp and a lot of others, even customized/whitelabelled.
my target audience never really cared for the panel, as long as they could change some settings on their own or easily had me do it for them. but again, that doesn't say anything about your potential clients ;-)
Don't care just for the love of all that is holy make the passwords consistent / sync'd. Don't want one for the home page, one for the management panel, one for the VNC and one for the SSH. Each with their own username confusing the hell out of password managers
One for website, one for SSH. No more.
This was my point. Most people I know who want to give hosting their own site a go have never heard of a cpanel/directadmin/etc. They just want to click some self explanatory buttons and their site works.
I'm more experienced with DirectAdmin so I lean towards that - but if it's a system we're managing ourselves instead of the client we don't even use that (we tend to use https://sympl.host unless it requires a custom stack) because from an end user point they don't care.
So, as a few others have mentioned - work out your audience. If it's first time hosters, don't ask techie people what they'd pick - go with a simple solution that you can theme/customise to make idiot proof.
And as @havoc says, reduce the number of logins. One of the reasons I don't push our DA hosting is that it requires a second login - at least VM management can be done within Blesta at the minute for us.
My vote is to give ispconfig a try.
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Sorruly. With cPanel We only offer Alpha Master Resellers yada
Yadaa...
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H-Sphere. But all the providers offering it are in times gone by...
The clients only demand for the Cpanel, so we should go with our client's demand.
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ApisCP is also an option.