Hsphere to DA

DamnSkippy

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Joined
Mar 16, 2005
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273
Location
USA, Texas
I am looking to move a couple Hsphere reseller accounts to a dedicated box. It seems my only choice of CP is going to be DA or Cpanel. I have no experience with anything other than Hsphere, well webmin but that is not what I am looking for. I would stick with Hsphere except getting a dedicated, managed hsphere machine is at a minimum $400.00 a month and I was looking at about 200.00.

So I wanted to see if any of you have experience using Hsphere and could make some comparisons for me please.

Most of my clients are web designers and like to host multiple domains in one account to manage them. Most of them have multiple domain aliases of each domain to cover .com, .net, .org etc. Most of the sites they build are standard HTML with some flash but some use MySQL for forums and CMS's. Nothing special for requirements.

Mainly I am interested in the differences to the end user as I know you can not really compare Hsphere and DA entirely.

How does DA handle multiple domains? Does the directory structure make sense? Is it easy to manage multiple domains?

When you add a domain alias does it also create a mail domain alias?

Does the file manager have the ability to uncompress tarballs and zip files?

Things like that are what I am interested in.

Thanks for your input.

P.S. I have a thread over at WHT comparing it to CPanel also http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=496003
 
Each domain has it's own directory located in /home/username/domains/

The File Manager can extract tar files however we are still lacking zip file extraction.
 
Moving email from H-Sphere to DA may be a problem for you.

H-Sphere uses qmail, and Maildir.

While Maildir is available for DA, by default you get mbox.

So you'll have to convert your DA server to Maildir (lots of posts on these forums), and then figure out how to move the mailboxes.

Jeff
 
Thanks for pointing that out, I did notice it as I have been reading through the forum. Fortunately I only have a couple clients that use webmail and to be honest I don't think it is worth converting the system over. I would rather keep it (DA) "stock" as I have gone down the road of changing up the system before and it gets to be a pain to manage.

Does DA let you add DNS records so that a user can have their mail handled some place else? I have one client that hosts their own mail server.

Anyone have any input on my other questions?
 
yes DA allows you to change the mx recrods via the DNS panel for the user (if you allow them DNS control) to point to a remote mail server, although it's in a kinda obscure text link at the bottom :)

I personally think DA is great and have no experience with HSpere except i know it can manage windows servers from a single linux install while da is for linux only.

DA shines on user experiences and stability of the panel itself. The skin and management is very logical. If you login as admin you can login as any user on the system via the control panel make any updates the user could without actually logging into their account. Resellers have the same control over their created accounts.

Where some may see this as weakness, da requires you to update the software it uses manually, although using a set of bash scripts they have created to make it easy.

That way you do not rely on a host to release updates for you, test, an *cough cpanel* release buggy releases that break your server.

Plus a nice bonus is www.site-helper.com a premade, unbranded website that links directly from the control panel allowing your users to help themsevles, although it needs some screen shots updated.

my 2 copper.
 
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