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As some of you may know (or not), I keep all my shiz on a managed Dreamhost VPS. They have an in-house control panel which I'm in love with.

Today, for the first time, I had to interact with a cPanel account. Who the hell designed this and why is it so popular? Everything is so disorganised and spread out in the dumbest way. Hosted domains, subdomains, redirects, parked domains, email accounts, email forwarding, basic DNS, and advanced DNS each have their own separate section. Why? It reminds me of a bloody Windows desktop.

With Dreamhost's panel, each domain, be it hosted, sub, parked, DNS only, whatever, is in one organised list. Each domain in that list has options for DNS, email, parking, assigned user, etc. Everything is just so much more organised this way, IMO.

Secondly, the concept of "the" domain, plus "addon" domains is also dumb. I have about six domains on my server right now - all are equal as far as the web panel is concerned. With cPanel, you have to pick one site that's branded all over your account, your other sites are just "addons". Why? If you decided to rename, sell, or kill your "main" site, you have to get the host's support team involved just to change your "main" domain, and I'll be damned if they'll do it for free.

Did I mention it's as disorganised as a Windows desktop? There are .htaccess generators all over the place. Dreamhost keeps ALL .htaccess goodies under one section. Again, so much tidier.

The interface is too corporate. I didn't know what "Fantastico" was until I opened it. They could easily rename it to "One-click installs" - Dreamhost panel does just this. The actions behind "SpamAssasin" are obvious enough, but still, it's a web hosting panel, I don't need dumb names plastered all over it.

Anyway, I was in this guy's cPanel because he wanted me to set up a site I had just built him. He hadn't set the domain's nameservers yet, so I used my hosts file as a temporary solution for myself until he did. But wait... cPanel doesn't let me because the nameservers aren't set! - This is a really dumb restriction, IMO.

Eventually we got it, but still, I don't understand how anyone can deal with this overpriced pile of junk. It's just so disorganised and cheap-feeling.

If I ever moved away from Dreamhost, it would be to an unmanaged VPS, or a dedi. For now, I'm really liking DH, though.

/rant.

I actually quite like the Cpanel. You just have to get to know it. Once you do, it's a piece of cake. I think having it all spread out is good too. It helps me see where things are in a flash. But, I haven't used your program so I can't really say much.

If you hate cPanel, you'd hate GoDaddy's panel

CLI > GUI

All control panels are silly anyways, they just waste tons of resources. But if you must have a control panel, go with lxad... err Kloxo.

(2010-03-14, 01:35 PM)KuJoe Wrote: [ -> ]CLI > GUI

LOL! Well, maybe...but only if you happen to know all the commands you need. GUI is usually easier to work with.

It's all about the learning for me. I run cPanel on all of my servers but I love how cPanel lets you do everything for CLI also.

I laugh everytime I recompile Apache via the CLI and it takes a quarter of the time and a fraction of the resources than running the same exact script in the GUI (it's also 1 command versus clicking through 5+ pages).

Yeah once you know what you're doing (which I do not, in most cases, and I know more than a lot of other people hosting websites nowadays), CLI commands tend to me much quicker and easier (and pretty much always require less of your resources) than clicking through a GUI. The problem is that many people do not know the commands they would need.

There's really only a couple commands I know by memory, the rest I have to search for but I still enjoy CLI over GUI even if it takes me just as long to find the commands as it would to use the GUI I just enjoy using the CLI. I guess I'm weird like that.

I don't really see why cPanel is so bad. But since I like my windows desktop, that could be a part of it.