H-Sphere Positives (as compared to DA):
H-Sphere includes Site Studio, so clients can set up simple websites themselves with no knowledge of html, and without having to buy any other software.
H-Sphere is truly mult-server, and includes support for Linux and Windows webhosting (Windows webhosting licenses are available from Microsoft, and incur a monthly charge; you
cannot use a regular purchased license or a license that came with your system for Windows webhosting).
You can host websites on Windows, on Red Hat Linux, and on FreeBSD. You can host MySQL and PostgreSQL on Linux and on FreeBSD. You can host MS-SQL on Windows, and you can host Mail and DNS on Red Hat Linux and on FreeBSD.
H-Sphere Negatives (as compared to DA):
H-Sphere uses qmail, an absolutely ancient MTA (mail transit agent) that hasn't been modified or updated by it's author since 1998; it's free as in beer, but not open source.
H-Sphere is priced by the "account" and you can use up accounts quickly: Every admin, site-owner and reseller is a user.
The H-Sphere control panel itself (as opposed to the services (see above under Postives) can only run under Linux.
H-Sphere is quite limited as to what OS versions it supports; here's what they write on their website:
We support the following versions of Linux and Unix:
* RedHat Linux 7.2, 7.3 (not recommended)
* RedHat Enterprise Linux up to v.3.0 (ES/WS/AS)
* CentOS 3.1
* FreeBSD 4.8, 4.9 and 4.10
If your distribution is not listed, it is unsupported at this time. We don't support beta, testing, or unstable versions of any distribution.
For example, Red Hat 8 and 9, Fedora, Debian, and Mandrake aren't supported.
Email support is 20% of your total licence fee per year. It includes response between 2 am and 4 pm, M-F only.
Priority support, 24 hours and weekends, up to five incidents per month, is $300 for the first server, and $50 each additional server, minimum three months.
We're looking into offering H-Sphere support, but we've reached no conclusions yet.
Jeff
