cPanel vs DirectAdmin

[Jordan]

As end users, most of you would have used cPanel. As it was the industry standard with almost every webhost out there.
Now, DirectAdmin has been coming up a lot with the price hikes of cPanel

Has anyone used DirectAdmin?

I'm looking to switch all of my servers over from cPanel to DirectAdmin, as it could very well be worth the cost difference. Just want to know if it would be worth it.

 

[Shortie]

I had heard about DirectAdmin but I can't say that I have used it myself as of yet. I always used CPanel and that was what I was used to.

Is this something we will all be moving over to eventually?

 

[Jordan]

Is this something we will all be moving over to eventually?

I wouldn't say everyone would be moving over to it. However, more and more web hosts are switching to it, so it will become more and more common.

 

[MrChris]

I've been using a direct admin reseller for a few months now it seems to works nicely. If I were to get this for a dedicated or vps server I'd get cloud Linux as well

 

[Jordan]

If I were to get this for a dedicated or vps server I'd get cloud Linux as well

Well cloud Linux in a shared environment is a must yes.

If the server was just your website, wouldn't be needed.

 

[Tyrsson]

was just your website, wouldn't be needed.

Why not? What percentage of Site "Admin's" would you say are experienced/knowledgeable enough to be considered server administrators and command line proficient enough to admin a server only through ssh?

 

[Jordan]

Why not? What percentage of Site "Admin's" would you say are experienced/knowledgeable enough to be considered server administrators and command line proficient enough to admin a server only through ssh?

I would say a good majority of site admins wouldn't be proficient enough for SSH.
But you don't need cloudlinux if you are just hosting 1 website. And that doesn't mean you will be administrating the server via SSH if you aren't on cloudlinux.

 

[MrChris]

Well cloud Linux in a shared environment is a must yes.

If the server was just your website, wouldn't be needed.

I agree with that as well.

 

[Aaron]

I've tried DA a couple of times but always go back to cPanel as that's what I'm familiar with.

 

[Tyrsson]

Back when I used non cloud based solutions. VPS etc. I rarely had only a single domain. I also did not want them all running as the same user (i'm aware there are other ways to accomplish that). So, since I was lazy in some regards I guess you could say, what I would do is always setup a shared environment even if it was only my domains that were going to be hosted from that server. Back then, your selection of management software was a lot more limited than what it is today. The only sites I maintain these days are demo sites for the various projects I build that need a demo. I no longer maintain a forum of any kinda (don't have the time nor the desire).
To each their own. At the time it worked for me. These days I just deploy either from the command line or via a github action from the project repo to Azure. Life is so much easier that way. I use Google business for email. I just point the various records that are needed to the correct app setup that has a custom domain configured for it. It just works. Plus it scales as needed with zero additional work required of me. Which none of my demo's see enough traffic to require scaling but, hey, ya never know right.

 

[Tracy]

o, since I was lazy in some regards I guess you could say, what I would do is always setup a shared environment even if it was only my domains that were going to be hosted from that server.

I went a somewhat different process... when I was running dedicated iron, I used ProxMox or SolusVM and created individual VPS instances for each site. I liked the fact I was able to tailor the needs of each VPS instance for the site. One day I may decide to get back to playing with dedicated iron, but the niche I'm in eats up most of my "spare change" for toys.
Of course, I didn't use a "panel" on any of them.. the last "panel" I used was over a decade a go when I set my first site (for about 2 months) up on a shared hosting environment. I personally find a panel to be about as useless as teats on a boar hog.... I host my transactional email via a better 3rd party service, and do my "base" email also via a 3rd party service (if I'm not setting up a mailcow-dockerized instance for it). I have ZERO use for a standard web panel as most "need".

 

[Arantor]

I'm mostly lazy; Cloudways does a lot of the stuff I'd normally care about without having to worry about the details, but I think my next project is going onto Laravel Vapour (piggybacking off AWS I think) because it'll be doing burst scaling, currently I'm expecting two server instances to be the base load (spread across datacenters for resilience), scaling up to maybe 8 instances based on what we've been told the expected user demand is, but we'll see.

I will say that I don't mind having cPanel, just because I *can* do it all by hand, doesn't mean I *want* to. (And the last site I worked on with cPanel/WHM was an online retailer... on Black Friday. Handled the load spike like a champ.)

 

[Jason]

I don't know much about it. Is it like the interface on Hostinger? It was slightly different than cPanel, which I was familiar, but easily learned, anyhow.

 

[Arantor]

Cloudways doesn't give you that much control - the point of being a managed service. You get the server, it mostly runs nginx, you get SFTP, limited SSH, but it *just works* and there's almost no reason to actually touch it.

Vapour on the other hand is really not like that... https://vapor.laravel.com/

 

[Tyrsson]

I still have a hard time believing I am going to type this but.... I have nothing but good things to say about the experience I have had with Azure. Docs are great. Interface is great. Even after you move to pay as you go, you only pay above what is in that service tier for free as a baseline. I did some testing with AWS before I settled with Azure. No comparison IMHO. Hands down. In multiple categories Azure smoked them. But, again, that is only my opinion and everyone has one lol.