Yeah, if you want the features it does. I proposed multiple options, including splitting the pro pack into two: a "host pack" with admin ssl, cgroups etc and a "dev pack" with the nginx unit , each fairly priced, so it would end up affordable if you just need the nginx stuff for example.
Pro Pack?
- Thread starter chrismfz
- Start date
donkeyKICK
Verified User
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2007
- Messages
- 403
Dang, I just need the email tracking and SSL stuff. In order to get those though, my lifetime licenses are moot/useless. I feel like feature add-ons (which I thought were included in the lifetime licenses) should at least be able to be added without simply abandoning the licenses. It is like those with the lifetime licenses are being simply forgotten. I guess from a business perspective, once you sell a lifetime license, whoever bought it no longer matters. I would think that rather than try to get people with lifetime licenses to abandon them and get new ones, they would try to get new customers.
Thanks for clearing it up though.
Thanks for clearing it up though.
that would be awesome, though I supose they want to kill lifetime licences... A decent monthly price would be a fair middleground, 5$ a month for servers with less than 15 users or whatever, and more for bigger servers (it's an interesting way to keep things affordable, yet profitable)How about let the lifetime license have a chance to buy a lifetime propack license upgrade?
This is definitely quite frustrating for lifetime license holders. While they talk a lot about not "de-featuring" the core product it is clear that the core product will likely not be receiving a lot of the new major features. And if we happen to see a single feature in the Pro Pack that we've wanted for years the only option is to pay an ANNUAL fee two thirds as costly as what we paid for a lifetime license in the first place. No option to pay a small fee for just certain features. No option even to upgrade the lifetime license with the "pro" features. Only paying $199 every year. Honestly it sounds like a bait and switch to me when you go back to review how the lifetime licenses were originally advertised.
I don't begrudge them for needing to find new revenue streams, and I'd be OK with maybe even paying another $299 to upgrade the lifetime license. But $199 annually?? No way is that ever going to happen. Not with my small deployment and use case. The inflexibility shown here for existing lifetime license holders, especially given the fact that there won't ever be any new lifetime licenses, is what bothers me the most. Instead of finding a balance to reward longtime customers with legacy licenses they chose to essentially just make a new product and deprecate the old one. Sure, you can still use the existing features just fine. But over time the pro pack-only feature list will grow. That sounds a lot like similar "changes" that have occurred in other products that used to offer lifetime licenses. It never goes well for the legacy users. Sorry for the rant. It just seems like they could have found a better balance (or found a balance at all) to reward longtime lifetime license holders. Even the monthly lite plan (with pro pack) would be cheaper than a lifetime + annual support option.
I don't begrudge them for needing to find new revenue streams, and I'd be OK with maybe even paying another $299 to upgrade the lifetime license. But $199 annually?? No way is that ever going to happen. Not with my small deployment and use case. The inflexibility shown here for existing lifetime license holders, especially given the fact that there won't ever be any new lifetime licenses, is what bothers me the most. Instead of finding a balance to reward longtime customers with legacy licenses they chose to essentially just make a new product and deprecate the old one. Sure, you can still use the existing features just fine. But over time the pro pack-only feature list will grow. That sounds a lot like similar "changes" that have occurred in other products that used to offer lifetime licenses. It never goes well for the legacy users. Sorry for the rant. It just seems like they could have found a better balance (or found a balance at all) to reward longtime lifetime license holders. Even the monthly lite plan (with pro pack) would be cheaper than a lifetime + annual support option.
Daniel_Dog
Verified User
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2019
- Messages
- 441
Just want to say a couple things: (This is not meant to anger anyone but my opinion/observations.)
And just to mention: I do not own life-time licenses my self.
First: Life-time license are as they said (and undeniably) not sustainable long term. This sadly also will apply to any other lifetime options they would offer. And the fact that they even still allow to update the panel to get bug-fixes and security fixes is better then 99.99999% of companies.
Second: I do agree with the 199$ issue. Why in the world do you need to pay 199$ a year if a "Standard" (No limits) license only cost 29$/month (199$ is cheaper but I will come back to that later.) and a lite license (with some limits) cost 15$/month that: 1. includes support and 2. includes the Pro Pack. In my opinion they should be a middle ground of maybe 5$/month to get the Pro Pack for lifetime licenses but with no support. (Because as far as I know the lifetime only comes with one year of support and thus support for most lifetime licenses is not a needed thing.)
In follow-up from my previous post, there also should be two distinct categories for lifetime license holders. The "internal" lifetime licenses versus the retail lifetime licenses. Given that a lot of the talk of unsustainability appears to come from the number of internal licenses floating around, it would seem reasonable that there could be a legacy lifetime Pro Pack upgrade ONLY for retail lifetime license holders. In the context of this only being available to legacy retail lifetime license holders that would strike a balance between rewarding the early adopters while still allowing for some additional revenue coming from that subset of users. That would satisfy me, and it doesn't seem like that would be "unsustainable" given that you can't get retail lifetime licenses anymore. And it certainly would get them more revenue from me versus nothing at all, because I'm not going to pay $199 a year.
I honestly don't understand so much confusion for something so simple.
Basically it is as follows:
1- Lifetime licensees don't want to pay for support.
2- Not offering packages to those with lifetime licenses is a slap in the face.
3- I fully agree that they must charge an additional amount for new features, after all if the company depends only on payments for lifetime licenses it will go bankrupt.
But I believe they should include a sim package for those with lifetime licenses (Nothing for free, but a fair price).
Basically it is as follows:
1- Lifetime licensees don't want to pay for support.
2- Not offering packages to those with lifetime licenses is a slap in the face.
3- I fully agree that they must charge an additional amount for new features, after all if the company depends only on payments for lifetime licenses it will go bankrupt.
But I believe they should include a sim package for those with lifetime licenses (Nothing for free, but a fair price).
In the next few years, the percentage of people who have lifetime licenses will go down lesser than the percentage of people who purchase subscription licenses. So in the next few years, it is hard to believe that a lifetime license that only works per host have a big impact on their finances.
yep.
I'm still a big fan of just making pro-pack features affordable without needing a support licence, 199$ every year is too much, eg a pro-pack addon for lifetime users that's like 5 USD/month is much more attractive
Well... I see a lot of discussion about this Pro Pack and package/price changes... Everyone agreed that the old pricing model don't work well anymore. Probably many will not agree with me, but well, we are free to talk and express opinions, right?
Still, no one is willing to accept the mistakes they made and the lack of vision they had. I work with some hosting companies that are willing to switch from cPanel, but when I start to explain what happened with the packages, they have a doubt now...
So, back 10-15 years ago, the way to sell this kind of software was a one-off fee and sometimes a yearly updates access fee. At that point, DA (and some others) choses to offer a lifetime license for a bigger upfront price. That bigger upfront price provided a boost of resources to be able to further develop the product and attract new customers. Those that paid those prices, helped those companies to develop and move forward, in exchange they got a good enough and stable hosting platform.
But none of those companies offering such lifetime licenses (who's life? how much lifetime means? like a cat life of 10-15 years?) never said they will kill those licenses (like WHMCS did, for the sake of example), or start to create new additional services that will be included in the Standard package but not in those lifetime licenses that meant so much for them at the start.
Now, who is responsible for the lack of vision, the companies or the clients? You asked for a price, then you come and say I will not give you those nice things if you don't pay for support (will get to support soon too). If I would know at that point such thing would happen, maybe I would chose differently instead. Who knows. So it's my fault I trusted some nice promises from a company I decided to trust? Probably yes. But the offer and price itself was not made by me. So I don't think is fair to come and tell me that your prices are not fair anymore...
Admin SSL won't replace expiring certificate issued by cPanel (or whatever) for lifetime licenses without the support extension. Wait, WHAT? So if I chose to switch from cPanel, let's say, 500 accounts, I should check them regularly for expiring certificates and do it manually so clients won't get hurt? This auto-replace is so basic and so normal, there's no other thing that I can think of other than pushing me to buy the support option or a standard license just to be able to offer a good service without headache.
Another thing is that I use CloudLinux for all those PHP versions, for the MySQL governor, for resource limiting and so on... it's fair to ask me to pay $199 per year for that auto-replace expiring certs that, as I said, in todays world is a very basic thing to have?
Don't get me wrong! I don't say things like Ruby/Node/Redis/Git shouldn't be in the Pro Pack. Those are things that are NOT mandatory for a hosting service which is mostly - maybe more than 95% - used for PHP...
And to be frank, I would always prefer to pay DirectAdmin for the Pro Pack $10 or $12 more per month instead of CloudLinux and $2 or $3 more instead of JetBackup! But some things are still missing...
The $199 support extension offer, yes, support... Well, in my 13-14 years of DirectAdmin, I think I had like one or two support tickets (and some forum posts, but that is not a support ticket) that are truly support request... Most of them are things that didn't work as supposed, and some of them I ended up fixing them myself. So, I to push me on buying support when I won't really bother you anyway? Why would I pay for that, it's another question...
About the lifetime licenses, I think yea, there should be an option with support for those that need it, for $199 for example, and one without support, just for the Pro Pack... let's say $99, or even $120 per year if you like, but don't force me buy something I don't need just to get something so basic as auto-replace for expiring certs issued by other thing than DirectAdmin itself.
And I think those $99 per year from maybe hundreds or thousand of lifetime license owners, will help develop new things in the Pro Pack that will benefit everyone... I don't know, maybe I'm wrong...
Now, about that feedback website where people add feature requests... I used to use it. But I know from experience how things work with those kind of websites... Many uses them to chose things that will be implemented, and those companies that have paid additional services, will push all those most requested things to the paid additional services. Am I wrong on saying that? Let's see the top requests right now on that website:
Right. It's fair to limit lifetime licenses of DirectAdmin only to very basic things? The answer depended on whether you are the developer or the client, but there should (not must, because we can't decide that, but DA) be a balance.
To end up all this novel I was writing here... I am not agains the Pro Pack, I do agree it should cost something especially for those with lifetime licenses, but some basic things (like auto-replace expired ssl, and this is just an example) should exist in the basic version.
DA started to look really cool even before the cPanel questionable move... I just hope in a year or so my clients won't be forced to find some replacement solution again because of some questionable decisions...
Regards,
Dan
Still, no one is willing to accept the mistakes they made and the lack of vision they had. I work with some hosting companies that are willing to switch from cPanel, but when I start to explain what happened with the packages, they have a doubt now...
So, back 10-15 years ago, the way to sell this kind of software was a one-off fee and sometimes a yearly updates access fee. At that point, DA (and some others) choses to offer a lifetime license for a bigger upfront price. That bigger upfront price provided a boost of resources to be able to further develop the product and attract new customers. Those that paid those prices, helped those companies to develop and move forward, in exchange they got a good enough and stable hosting platform.
But none of those companies offering such lifetime licenses (who's life? how much lifetime means? like a cat life of 10-15 years?) never said they will kill those licenses (like WHMCS did, for the sake of example), or start to create new additional services that will be included in the Standard package but not in those lifetime licenses that meant so much for them at the start.
Now, who is responsible for the lack of vision, the companies or the clients? You asked for a price, then you come and say I will not give you those nice things if you don't pay for support (will get to support soon too). If I would know at that point such thing would happen, maybe I would chose differently instead. Who knows. So it's my fault I trusted some nice promises from a company I decided to trust? Probably yes. But the offer and price itself was not made by me. So I don't think is fair to come and tell me that your prices are not fair anymore...
Well... that is true, you don't force anyone to buy it, but for those that want a fully working migration path from cPanel to DA, it's could be a must if they have like 500 accounts. Let me explain with a simple example...
Admin SSL won't replace expiring certificate issued by cPanel (or whatever) for lifetime licenses without the support extension. Wait, WHAT? So if I chose to switch from cPanel, let's say, 500 accounts, I should check them regularly for expiring certificates and do it manually so clients won't get hurt? This auto-replace is so basic and so normal, there's no other thing that I can think of other than pushing me to buy the support option or a standard license just to be able to offer a good service without headache.
Another thing is that I use CloudLinux for all those PHP versions, for the MySQL governor, for resource limiting and so on... it's fair to ask me to pay $199 per year for that auto-replace expiring certs that, as I said, in todays world is a very basic thing to have?
Don't get me wrong! I don't say things like Ruby/Node/Redis/Git shouldn't be in the Pro Pack. Those are things that are NOT mandatory for a hosting service which is mostly - maybe more than 95% - used for PHP...
And to be frank, I would always prefer to pay DirectAdmin for the Pro Pack $10 or $12 more per month instead of CloudLinux and $2 or $3 more instead of JetBackup! But some things are still missing...
The $199 support extension offer, yes, support... Well, in my 13-14 years of DirectAdmin, I think I had like one or two support tickets (and some forum posts, but that is not a support ticket) that are truly support request... Most of them are things that didn't work as supposed, and some of them I ended up fixing them myself. So, I to push me on buying support when I won't really bother you anyway? Why would I pay for that, it's another question...
About the lifetime licenses, I think yea, there should be an option with support for those that need it, for $199 for example, and one without support, just for the Pro Pack... let's say $99, or even $120 per year if you like, but don't force me buy something I don't need just to get something so basic as auto-replace for expiring certs issued by other thing than DirectAdmin itself.
And I think those $99 per year from maybe hundreds or thousand of lifetime license owners, will help develop new things in the Pro Pack that will benefit everyone... I don't know, maybe I'm wrong...
Now, about that feedback website where people add feature requests... I used to use it. But I know from experience how things work with those kind of websites... Many uses them to chose things that will be implemented, and those companies that have paid additional services, will push all those most requested things to the paid additional services. Am I wrong on saying that? Let's see the top requests right now on that website:
Right. It's fair to limit lifetime licenses of DirectAdmin only to very basic things? The answer depended on whether you are the developer or the client, but there should (not must, because we can't decide that, but DA) be a balance.
To end up all this novel I was writing here... I am not agains the Pro Pack, I do agree it should cost something especially for those with lifetime licenses, but some basic things (like auto-replace expired ssl, and this is just an example) should exist in the basic version.
DA started to look really cool even before the cPanel questionable move... I just hope in a year or so my clients won't be forced to find some replacement solution again because of some questionable decisions...
Regards,
Dan
It does replace the certs, unless they aren't Let's Encrypt ones. For these you could simply run this script and have them all replaced to Let's Encrypt: https://forum.directadmin.com/threads/how-to-replace-cpanel-ssl-to-letsencrypt.58618/#post-300256
I'd also like to note that Automatic SSL is a part of every license. Admin SSL (SSL administration page, offering settings to replace invalid certs too) isn't.
Richard G
Verified User
Is that activated automatically or does it need a directadmin.conf setting? Couldn't find it that quickly.
Yes, that's what I am referring to, accounts migrated from cPanel... many are Sectigo issued by cPanel. If I migrate 500, I have to check them one by one and issue new certs. when they expire.
And running a script each time we migrate a batch of accounts... dunno... maybe it's an idea to create a custom post hook for user_restore but I still find it so basic thing this days that I don't understand why is a Pro Pack thing...
The option "Replace expired/invalid certificates with Let's Encrypt ones" in the settings popup doesn't specify it's a Pro Pack thing and let you select it but doesn't save it. Shouldn't it be marked as Pro Pack?
At the user level on SSL Certificates page there's an option "Use the best match certificate". That lets DA to manage the certificates and show some other options on that page, including the ability to manual trigger the renew. If you have SSL active I don't think there's any other thing you should set. Also, I think it's the current default when creating new accounts...
Richard G
Verified User
Well I don't have that option on user level. I just created a test account to see if new accounts would have this, but they don't either.
However, on new accounts I do see this at the bottom:
"Automatic SSL is not enabled".
I pointed to it at some time but totally forgot about it. It can be used like this:
but that is only to install certificates for existing domains which don't have one yet..... So still looking for a solution on how to enable autossl for new domains which are to be created in the future.
Edit: Might have found it:
and this
Odd that it's not that easy to find in docs.directadmin.com so maybe needs some addition @scriptkitty ?
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Richard G
Verified User
Again odd. Just enabled it this way, and on existing accounts with autossl enabled it still says "Automatic SSL is not enabled"
So it seems the extra options SSL page do not appear for existing accounts. How can this be fixed @smtalk ?
I tried using the autossl.sh script but that won't add the options either. At least not in the enhanced skin.
The options do appear with newly created users.
So it seems the extra options SSL page do not appear for existing accounts. How can this be fixed @smtalk ?
I tried using the autossl.sh script but that won't add the options either. At least not in the enhanced skin.
The options do appear with newly created users.
It works on enhanced for me, out of the box (so internal defaults)
On my installs, once I select "Use the best match certificate" on user level, on page refresh, show those new options. After that, you can check the status on the Admin SSL page at admin level (should have this page no mater of internal or retail license - I think it's a bug here, because you may need to reset the skin for new things to appear at admin lever after an update, like Admin SSL and Redis, but it doesn't happen on user lever). I use Evolution skin.
Anyway, I think it's best to open a separate thread if you still have trouble with it.
It's an entire adventure... many things are not on their place... It's quite hard to understand that, when you ask $199 per year so the accounts gets a very basic auto-replace on SSL not issued by Let's Encrypt...
You can set your cPanel tool to use let's encrypt instead of sectigo, it was commodo before that and I had issues on cPanel when they switched so I went let's encrypt
And then migrated accounts will have auto reissuing ssl
I know... but runing /scripts/install_lets_encrypt_autossl_provider and then configure and run AutoSSL on all domains on the server, I don't think will switch and reissue all certs... it will wait for them to get near expire to switch. If the account just issued it's cPanel SSL, then you have to wait about 60 days to get a Let's Encrypt on it...
And from a commercial point of view, do you want to to switch a server (or thousand) from cPanel to DA, making that an easy step, or you want me to think twice on that? Some of my clients think twice or more... unfortunately... many of them think at a commercial level.
I know we are all good at providing solutions needing a lot of manual work... but let's get a bit real here... it's not about work and finding a solution, as it's about principles and attitude.
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