Would you give up cPanel for better uptime?

[Corey]

Hey Guys,

Currently we have hit a wall with cPanel support regarding some issues we're facing with cPanel on our free servers. cPanel was not made to support the amount of accounts we have and our hands are tied with customizations to it because of the core files being encoded. We have just received final confirmation from them that there is pretty much nothing we can do.

So, my question is... how important is cPanel to you? Please vote on the poll.

We are actively looking for solutions to make cPanel manageable as is. We have some test environments setup with different software that we can hopefully make work with free hosting + cPanel together. I would like to get the opinion of our user base if these solutions we're testing do not work though.

This would only be for free hosting, not paid

==Update==
The #1 problem we're having with cPanel is the forced use of Apache and also why your site goes down. Every time an account is added or removed from the server (which is a lot per day) apache does a graceful restart and reloads the whole config file. Because of the amount of accounts on a server the config file is massive and takes so long to reload that apache stops responding to queries until it finishes which makes your site stop responding. Now say 5 things are queued to be added\removed from Apache and each reload takes 3 minutes... that is a total of 15 minutes of downtime. The only solution is for us to keep adding additional servers to support this, but economically this is not an option for long term growth.

Some Answers:
We would switch to another control panel, it would definitely not be as advanced as cPanel though.

We tried virtualization about 6 months ago and it is not a feasible solution for us.

If we switch it would be all free hosting accounts, we wouldn't be able to offer cPanel for just the people who want it as everyone would prefer cPanel over something else I'm sure.

[Livewire]

Would this affect the paid servers at all, or just the free? I dun wanna cast my vote if it only affects free :S

[ipodtouchforum]

Isn't cPanel necessary to setup MySQL? Anyway, I am in favor of anything that will give me better uptime.

[Livewire]

Isn't cPanel necessary to setup MySQL? Anyway, I am in favor of anything that will give me better uptime.

At the moment it is, however I'm of the assumption if x10 ditches cpanel, they would add in a new system to create databases (might even go as far as auto-creating one when you create your new account).

Keep in mind the poll's ditching cPanel in particular - there's other software available, and with any luck some of the options will better-support the sheer number of accounts x10 has.


My opinion is if it won't affect the paid servers, go for it. I kinda like cpanel though, and with any luck on paid we'll still have cpanel cause there's not as many accounts there

[Rob_C]

Well, I wouldnt mind not having cPanel. I hardly use it anyways. The only thing i'm worried about is the installations I have made through fantastico, will this affect them?

[Dazz]

I would prefer to keep cPanel as it makes things a whole lot easier for me to manage my website and try new things. I would be sad indeed to see it go, never had any problems with it or with the up-time of the server aside from problems with email.

[garrettroyce]

It will be a big jump, but there are many free hosts out there that are pretty good (not as good as us, ofc :P) that don't use CPanel.

Could we make a test case, maybe have one free server without cpanel and see what happens?

[f1lt3rh34d]

This test server should be lotus then, since it's down daily.

[adamparkzer]

Is there a way to potentially remove some features from cPanel that are infrequently used to allow better uptime?

[garrettroyce]

Is there a way to potentially remove some features from cPanel that are infrequently used to allow better uptime?

I think the problem is the number of accounts, but maybe this will help. I think what really makes X10 great is the number of features and if we eliminate that I think it'd probably hurt us too.