TravisT said:
I would respectfully disagree with ZenOswyn. I think what seperates yourself from others is the way you identify yourself with a niche market rather than the software itself. Afterall, cPanel is arguably the most popular and that is not just by coincidence. It is a great panel that many are familiar with. You want to appeal to the most people possible, and by getting software that no one likes or is familiar with can potentially drive customers away rather than to your company.
Heh, sorry all. My love of directadmin came through a little too strong there. I'm merely saying there are other options, and it's not a bad idea to look around a bit before going with the most widely available product.
cPanel after all does have its drawbacks, but does have a large number of features--and sometimes you pay the price for that. It's a memory hog, anyone who has try to run it on a server or VPS with limited RAM availability can vouch for that. Every other major control panel on the web has less of a memory footprint: Plesk, Webmin (especially webmin), Directadmin, ISPConfig, zPanel, and the dozen or so others. Granted, they don't have the features of cPanel, but stability and software restrictions also seems to be an issue.
Some examples of the software restriction would be the inability to upgrade to apache 2.x without a bit, or an insane amount of difficulty. I believe there was a brief period when PHP5 wasn't compatible, even has a non-supported addon, but I could be wrong. Not to mention the rest of the services that cPanel interacts with--ftp, mail, ssh, DNS). But those things apply to all control panels, so consider that a rant against them in general. However, I will say that Webmin and Directadmin offer a much greater array of applications to choose from, but sometimes the process of upgrading is worse.
Then there's the matter of security. A quick search through security bulletins yielded over 75 results for cPanel exploits--mind you, most are patched quickly, but it's always during that short pre-patch period that the exploits really matter. I'm not saying that the code underneath is bad, but rather that it's a victim of it's own success, and lots of people are trying to find vulnerabilities.
My emphasis here is stability and security, which I believe are more important in the long run than features and ease of use. And no matter what you use in terms of software, you're always going to run into that fact. If you gain a feature, you lose some security and stability, simply because no application is error proof.
Rant over.
