Some pre-sale questions

[ibaker]

I have a dedicated server and up until 2 years ago I had always used cPanel/WHM as with it I could do the basic things myself like email, adding domains etc as I am NOT any kind of server admin person. The server is very over spec'd for what I need but I get it at a good price, Intel Xeon E-2288G, 64GB DDR4 ECC, 1.2TB NVMe, 1Gbps Port and based in LA.

I have 1 main and 1 small IPS Invision Community forum web sites as well as a small ecom site. My main site has a maria db of about 700mb and up to 100 concurrent users (most are bots). There are 12,000 registered users with about 80% of them in Australia even though the server is in LA

About 2 years ago I got a server admin person to set the server up so he put my domains in CloudFlare and installed nginx with centinmod BUT every single time I need something done I have to pay him as mentioned I know nothing about server management which is why I used cpanel.

I am having heaps of trouble with email as the server admin guy won't install any email system on the server. I use my personal email address for the sites as I have the Legacy free edition of G Suite (max 500 emails per day) so the server admin guy set up to use Amazon SES for my personal email address through to gmail so my site's emails don't go into the users spam folder.

Now I want to send out weekly newsletters (more than 500 emails) so my server admin guys says I now need an email host.

I really miss my simple cpanel where I could do all my basic things...in comes Direct Admin which my server provider can supply

So:
1. With Direct Admin on my server (an over spec'd server) and centos would i notice much of a performance hit?
2. With Direct Admin on my server and nginx could I still do the basic things like simply adding a new domain, set up email accounts for the different domains?
3. With cpanel it came with a firewall where I could block certain ip addresses...does Direct Admin have something similar?
4. Anything else you think I need to know (strictly in layman terms, remember i am not a server admin person)

I only get one chance at this as to put Direct Admin on my server it is a big job and i would have to get someone to remove my sites, reinstall the server, set up Direct Admin, set up my domains and sites and then put my sites back on it (3 sites total 9gb, 3 databases total 1gb and email)

Thanks for any help

 

[pmjcreations]

I moved to DirectAdmin from cPanel more than a year ago. Moving to DirectAdmin was one of the best tech decisions I ever took.

1 - I can certainly say that DirectAdmin is not a bloated piece of junk as cPanel. And the Performance is indeed a relative term. So, it is not so easy to pick one without doing the actual testing.

2 - You can do almost all the things that you used to do with cPanel. DirectAdmin has a modern icon base look. Those features you are mentioned are indeed basic, they are already available, and more features are in the pipeline.

See https://feedback.directadmin.com/

3 - I don't know if cPanel is preinstalled with a decent firewall. However, you can install a free Firewall like https://configserver.com/cp/csf.html or a paid one like https://www.imunify360.com/

DirectAdmin is way ahead of cPanel. cPanel is still won't fully support CentOS 8 and CloudLinux 8.

DirectAdmin support is helpful and humanly. You don't get any useless canned response after waiting a day or two.

 

[Richard G]

1.) cPanel is using more resources, so looking at that point, DA might be a little bit faster because it uses less resources. For the rest it's indeed a relative term.

2.) Several things are different compared with cPanel but most is all present. It's just a bit getting used to. But it's very easy to setup domains, email accounts and such.

3.) I don't know cPanel with preinstalled decent firewall. At least not decent like CSF. And it's possible to have DA automatically install CSF/LFD for you on installation, but it can also be done afterwards.

4.) You might still need a server admin. We got some very good ones here, like Zeiter (Poralix) and SMtalk (Dev for DA) and Sellerone, and some others which you can ask for a quote.

 

[ibaker]

Thanks guys, so no one can say whether I would experience a performance hit by having Direct Admin with either apache or nginx compared to what I have now. Seems a big risk and costly if I do it and then have to drop Direct Admin and go back to straight nginx.