My honest review about DirectAdmin

[sufiyanshaikh]

I want to share my experience with DirectAdmin so far..

I started using DirectAdmin after cPanel price hike.
No doubt pricing of DirectAdmin is "Best" compared to all other control panels and I will always prefer DirectAdmin.

Big reasons I am using DA:
1) Best alternative to cPanel/WHM.
2) Affordable pricing (especially I like the pricing which is provided to hosting providers. DA is helping a lot of small businesses to grow).
3) Friendly Support (I will rate 85 out of 100)


Now I would like to share something which I believe should be improved by DirectAdmin
1) Bugs - 70% times I encountered it. (when I switched to CloudLinux, when I switched to LiteSpeed, when I updated php version of server, etc)
2) Hard to create a new server with same configuration (Yes! its hard for non-techies and even hard for basic level techies if any error/issue comes)
3) Unexpected issues - (Lost a few Databases- It's a big loss)
4) Sometimes support team reply late (Yes! sometimes they reply very late. However I understand only on big issues they reply late)

DA team should make it easy to clone a server setting like WHM/cPanel provide (in WHM/cPanel MySQL, Apache, Exim, EA4 profile)
DirectAdmin should also have similar easy to clone sever setting feature or a 'proper detailed guide' (It should be understandable and having proper files paths rather than only name. Make it understandable to a non-techie guy easily)

DirectAdmin should provide quick "bug fixes"(in updates) for features(essential features) having bugs.
If DA team is not able to test new updates and features made in pre-release, DA should provide a developer license(or similar) in which voluntarily test pre-release on testing server (In production server it can't be tested and in "personal license" the account limit is 1. The problem with 1 account is that you can't test other 'users' domain At least provide 10 user account ability for pre-release DA version(developer license)
I will be more than happy to test DA pre-release if the license for testing DA pre-release is Nil or 6$ quarterly rather than 24$ yearly.(I can't pay 24$ at once because even server costs adds up. Charge quarterly 6$ and I will be happy to pay)

In my final words, I will say DA will be my 1st choice for Shared hosting servers but I feel only 70% secure, whereas in WHM/cPanel I would feel 100% secure in terms of bugs and problems in/after update/upgrade.

DA should also come up with emergency support to provide help to the one's who's server is "down" due to bug/error caused by Control Panel.
No doubt, you should charge a fee(8-10$ should be good?)

I also really appreciate how DA team is working hard to improve DA software and make it more reliable and stable.
I would like to thank John, Gedas, Martynas, Paulius, Jonas and others(who I forgot to mention) who provided me support when I needed it

Please note: I have only provided my experience and opinion so that DA team can improve.
Also I am 100% sure, DA will be leading soon in the Web hosting market.

 

[factor]

Thank you for your time and thoughts.

 

[Richard G]

2) Hard to create a new server with same configuration (Yes! its hard for non-techies and even hard for basic level techies if any error/issue comes)
3) Unexpected issues - (Lost a few Databases- It's a big loss)

I can't agree on these points. Never lost databases and I never had issues to create servers with the saem configuration, and believe me, in the 12 years of our existance, we moved lots of times from server, in the beginning even every year due to the leasecontracts in that datacenter.
And I don't know if it's DA to blaim if you loose databases or have sudden issues with it, depends on what was causing it. In your case it probably was. But I mean that is not something for improvement, it's more an occasional issue, which can occur on all panels so hard to improve it.

And I was a basic level techie at that time also and I hope a medium techie nowadays.
However, I never used cloudlinux.

Bugs I encountered just a few.
If you can't pay server and only $24 dollars a year for DA, you're really doing something wrong as a business, next to the fact that a personal account is not ment for businesses really, but they can use them. With this I mean that DA should not need to give out developer versions for testing purposes, that's my personal opinion.

As for some other things I agree with you. You have some good idea's like emergency support, better detailed documentation, a clone setting would indeed save lots of time, because it's not that hard to do, but it costs a lot of work.

However 8-10 dollar for emergency support? I don't think that's realistic pricing, the idea is good though.
Although there is other kind of direct support, it's a bit more expensive but not unreasonable, they have normal market prices.

However, nice to see an insight with also some nice idea's into it.

 

[Richard G]

As for the databases, I didn't say you did not have the issues. I've said I never encountered them. And once a while it can happen on any panel (I did have one with cPanel by the way). I was only trying to say that is not a something which will happen more often in DA than anywhere else.

For this, I specifically mean when server is down due to DA bugs/issues.
I know charges can be set "high" if DA team only has a profit motive like cPanel. But that depends on DA team.
If "Full" Server is down like apache not starting or error while compiling php due to DA bug(I only gave my opinion)

But that's a bit of a problem. It's not always clear that when a server is really down, it's due to DA bugs/issues or user (configuration) errors.
I know you gave your opinion and I gave my opinion that it's in fact a good idea, only I have doubts about the pricing stated. But that's up to DA to decide if they want to implement something like that.

Maybe we can list the idea's here you have which are good, and then see if they are already made as feature request or if not, create feature request for them? This would also benefit DA's improvement, correct?

 

[sufiyanshaikh]

You can remove your tickets.

I have deleted my last reply as things are more clear now

 

[Richard G]

That's good. I removed some text from my reply so the reply's are a bit more clear to others too.
And added the explanation in the reply before that, to enlighten the 24 dollar part.