wila
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You got at least one thing right.. this is about trust.
What is the future for Legacy DirectAdmin License holders?
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wila
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LOL
woktron
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Frankly I'm surprised that DA have "addressed" this to begin with. I guess this thread has been simmering a bit too long for their taste.
DA are still using the exact same playbook as WHMCS here: "we are not crippling anything, you can continue using the software for as long as you like" - conveniently leaving out potential security risks and the fact that one is running outdated software, which clients won't want understandably. Seriously, have some respect for your clients and let them know how things stand. Be honest - people will respect you for it!
Exactly, yet you are artificially crippling the upgrade path. You are treating a subset of your clients as your enemies - keeping them also purposefully in the dark of any moves you make. Needless to say that is not a recommended way of doing business and certainly not something that we can support in good faith.
Entitled developers (and DirectAdmin is only a small slice of that particular pie) really need to get a grip with their exorbitant licensing fees and backhanded business tactics. It is high time for some actually enforceable legislation to be put in place that prevents developers from using these bait and switch tactics and forces them to accept the licensing terms that they have set forth themselves. And tough luck if it is bad for their bottom line - they should've thought of that when the sale was made. After all, this is all part of careful business planning. So, either it is poor management or the bait and switch was intentional all along.
The thing is that in our case we would generate income for them, had they provided a reasonable alternative.
Since the lifetime licenses have been phased out we've been providing monthly internal code 500 / dedicated licenses that we will need to be canceling when the time comes. Again, income lost. It's no surprise that there has been no word at all about what's going to happen to these internal monthly licenses. Is there an upgrade path? My guess; they haven't even thought of what to do with them yet.
We will now also stop directing clients that we manage servers for in other datacenters (clients that we cannot directly provide licenses for) towards DirectAdmin and instead direct them towards the panel that we do have an active business relationship with, so again income lost.
I do believe that DA are underestimating the residual effects of this move and I don't think that DA are in the position to make a mistake here - being likely the 3rd largest player in this field and honestly I can only see it go downhill from here, considering what is on display here.
We are currently testing Enhance, Webuzo and cPanel. In case of cPanel we would accept paying more if a company behaves in a - let's just say - professional manner. At least cPanel is upfront about their policy changes and manages to communicate these changes clearly: via email, pdf documents, their forum, even press releases.
Having said that we do prefer Webuzo as we have excellent support experiences with Softaculous/Virtualizor who really do go the extra mile if there ever is an issue. However, Webuzo is unfortunately still a bit rough around the edges.
DA by comparison seems overly disorganized and appears to lack any direction. It feels like a ship without a captain. I think it is also likely that they are attempting to maximize their monthly turnover in order to prepare for another party to come in and buy them out.
ouch wordgames... I refer you to my first paragraph: "Be honest, people will respect you for it".
DA are still using the exact same playbook as WHMCS here: "we are not crippling anything, you can continue using the software for as long as you like" - conveniently leaving out potential security risks and the fact that one is running outdated software, which clients won't want understandably. Seriously, have some respect for your clients and let them know how things stand. Be honest - people will respect you for it!
fln said:
Exactly, yet you are artificially crippling the upgrade path. You are treating a subset of your clients as your enemies - keeping them also purposefully in the dark of any moves you make. Needless to say that is not a recommended way of doing business and certainly not something that we can support in good faith.
Entitled developers (and DirectAdmin is only a small slice of that particular pie) really need to get a grip with their exorbitant licensing fees and backhanded business tactics. It is high time for some actually enforceable legislation to be put in place that prevents developers from using these bait and switch tactics and forces them to accept the licensing terms that they have set forth themselves. And tough luck if it is bad for their bottom line - they should've thought of that when the sale was made. After all, this is all part of careful business planning. So, either it is poor management or the bait and switch was intentional all along.
floyd said:
The thing is that in our case we would generate income for them, had they provided a reasonable alternative.
Since the lifetime licenses have been phased out we've been providing monthly internal code 500 / dedicated licenses that we will need to be canceling when the time comes. Again, income lost. It's no surprise that there has been no word at all about what's going to happen to these internal monthly licenses. Is there an upgrade path? My guess; they haven't even thought of what to do with them yet.
We will now also stop directing clients that we manage servers for in other datacenters (clients that we cannot directly provide licenses for) towards DirectAdmin and instead direct them towards the panel that we do have an active business relationship with, so again income lost.
I do believe that DA are underestimating the residual effects of this move and I don't think that DA are in the position to make a mistake here - being likely the 3rd largest player in this field and honestly I can only see it go downhill from here, considering what is on display here.
We are currently testing Enhance, Webuzo and cPanel. In case of cPanel we would accept paying more if a company behaves in a - let's just say - professional manner. At least cPanel is upfront about their policy changes and manages to communicate these changes clearly: via email, pdf documents, their forum, even press releases.
Having said that we do prefer Webuzo as we have excellent support experiences with Softaculous/Virtualizor who really do go the extra mile if there ever is an issue. However, Webuzo is unfortunately still a bit rough around the edges.
DA by comparison seems overly disorganized and appears to lack any direction. It feels like a ship without a captain. I think it is also likely that they are attempting to maximize their monthly turnover in order to prepare for another party to come in and buy them out.
fln said:
ouch wordgames... I refer you to my first paragraph: "Be honest, people will respect you for it".
How did the tests with Enhance go? We are also thinking about testing Enhance.
I think we can all understand why DA is taking the position it is. I think deep down we knew this day would come as development cost is never free and time and resources cost money. I just wish the price was not as steep/year/license and there were better alternative options than the one proposed.
Ultimately, vote with your $. I tried buying a license and it didn't end up worth it for me. Fortunately, there are alternatives in the market. Change is hard but necessary at times. They didn't come to the decision lightly, but based on the responses, they've shown their decision is final. We know what alternatives there are. As mentioned before, they were a great deal at the time, but times change and just another panel in the pack with business practices that has alienated some clientele. It might've been altruistic and the reality of costs caught up or it was a good way to inject lump sums of cash into a small business. Either way, pick your panel.
Ultimately, vote with your $. I tried buying a license and it didn't end up worth it for me. Fortunately, there are alternatives in the market. Change is hard but necessary at times. They didn't come to the decision lightly, but based on the responses, they've shown their decision is final. We know what alternatives there are. As mentioned before, they were a great deal at the time, but times change and just another panel in the pack with business practices that has alienated some clientele. It might've been altruistic and the reality of costs caught up or it was a good way to inject lump sums of cash into a small business. Either way, pick your panel.
Didn't WHMCS end up settling a class-action lawsuit? I think I heard something about this..
No. What is development cost difference between selling one license and a million licenses? I don't need a license, I need a product. If permission, called a license, is required to use this product, so be it. I have permission to use DirectAdmin control panel with unlimited domains for the lifetime of the product, yet I'm restricted from upgrading MariaDB for no objective reason.
woktron
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It's a bit of a paradigm shift, but I do like the UI and some of the features are a definite first for control panels. The panel is stable and the features that are available are working without much trouble for the most part. We've tested the disaster recovery feature and it is working perfectly fine. CGroups are working, php version selector is, so a Cloudlinux license is not really needed either.
there is still a wait for things such as node.js however and I really do not like that it is an Ubuntu exclusive - I find Ubuntu less than ideal as a server OS. Also Litespeed did not work out of the box. We had no issues with Apache.
We have added a second node (which is great as it autmatically handles the configuration of the node based on your master node). We are now testing clustering, which also seems to work perfectly fine thus far.
Support seems response
My main concern with Enhance is the fact that they are consistently behind on their roadmap and development is not exactly moving forward at high speed.
As with Webuzo in my view they are not yet ready for prime time, but I have high hopes that both panels will be, sooner rather than later.
I'm not aware of this, but there is certainly legal precedent for a class action. However, DA would in this particular case certainly argue that the licenses are in fact active. Current legislation unfortunately does not offer much protection for this unless you are able to prove that the crippling of the software effectively means that the license has been invalidated.
Nearly 1 Million People Will Get Lifetime Subscriptions In SiriusXM Settlement.
Three law firms will receive $3.47 million in attorney fees in a class action settlement with SiriusXM over how the satcaster handled the terms of lifetime subscriptions. In an order
I don't think DA deserves that much of misinformation. I work for DA, you could say I'm biased and this would be correct. But I own my own company MC2 for server management, and majority of shared hosting providers use DC licenses for their own uses, and it's been a "norm" for a very long time even if it was prohibited. There are some other server management companies on the forum, if they provide their own personal experience with the licence type used for own purposes by their clients - I think they'd say something similar. As MANY shared hosting companies purchased DC licenses for their own use (to share their own hosting customers), this does not meet criteria for DC license, and never did. If company has hard times because of this cheating, does NOT want to sell itself (seen many speculations on this...) and wants to prevent scam, it becomes a scammer itself? Many of MC2 customers are active forum members, I understand why they are unhappy but it was unfair to use licenses by abusing the rules. Some of them posted in the thread. Some say that it is DA's fault that they let them buy this type of license, when terms always said that this type of license should be re-sold with dedicated/VPS servers by datacenters. Yes, it has consequences for fair-users (minority, which I appreciate a lot!) and it is sad that other customers made DA to make decisions that affects them. Statements that MariaDB could not be used after 2026 is another piece of misinformation as RHEL-like distros backport important fixes for MariaDB 10.5 and OS becomes EOL in 2032. It is true that this change affects some people who did not cheat with DC-type licenses, or customers who had external life-time licenses, but I've seen no true recommendations on how to make these companies switch to the license type they should've used for the purpose they use DA for. I'd just recommend everyone to be honest in the thread, and those who have really violated the terms - admit that and propose what to do next, so that you could continue using DA legally.
I don’t really understand this. You buy a license for a server. If this server is your own or if you sell it should be no difference. The license is for one machine and used on one machine. What is exactly wrong with that? Please explain.
I pay each month to my datacenter for the rent of my vps + da. Now I cannot optimise our systems to run new mariadb installations because you try to stop others from cheating?? Where did i cheat? And what would be the right way for me to use the license?
I really want to understand, if something in the system is beeing abused this should be corrected. But you cannot harm others in the process, not even if you think this a minority.
Sebastiaan
I pay each month to my datacenter for the rent of my vps + da. Now I cannot optimise our systems to run new mariadb installations because you try to stop others from cheating?? Where did i cheat? And what would be the right way for me to use the license?
I really want to understand, if something in the system is beeing abused this should be corrected. But you cannot harm others in the process, not even if you think this a minority.
Sebastiaan
floyd
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I think I have 181 lifetime licenses. I use one for myself and 3 others for shared hosting. All the others were dedicated servers and VPSs. It was supposed to be a value added service for especially for my VPSs I sell. After MariaDB reaches end of life these licenses will be worthless. So yes it does hurt me who was not cheating as @smtalk said.
Your DC might be the one who is not cheating and I think it might be worth mentioning it here, as really, there aren't many of them. In country I live in (Lithuania, EU), I've seen only 2 companies who re-sold it as they should (serveriai.lt) and a new one offering DA - Hostinger, others just buy DC license which they should re-sell to their end-customers (I know their names, but won't mention them here), but they have no end-customers of VPS/dedicated, and just do their own shared hosting. Most of the hosting companies at MC2 we manage did that as well...
Would you be happy to reveal how much do you pay for this license monthly? As every customer, not a DC, everyone, can get bulk discounts (the more you purchase, the better discount you get). So, for example, you could get Personal Plus for $3/mo, Lite - $9/mo and Standard - $17.4/mo, and it needs no special agreements or use-cases. May you tell how many users/domains do you have on your server? I guess that sum might be something similar to what you currently pay monthly.
181/4 is a good number
But you just admitted, that it's being done. I don't know why you chose this way, instead of letting DA have funds for development by having these regular type of these 4 licenses, but I won't go into details. I can just say even those 4 would have helped if every company would choose to get the right license type they need. Something small, but with thousands of customers - that would make a change. Thank you for being honest, I hope others won't be afraid to be honest as well. On how many licenses (which cannot be resold) they've resold, how many used for own purposes etc. We've been a community, but I think only honesty can make a big change here. Especially when community could see the real numbers.redjersey
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1. Because we and a lot of people are scared of "End of Life" software. I mean PHP 5.3 can still be used, but how many hosting companies will offer PHP 5.3 and nothing higher?? When we purchased the lifetime license, it's clearly stated that we will be getting "Automatic upgrades / updates"
2. What about people with external license? We paid hundreds of dollars for 1 external license. It's not DC style lifetime license and we did not cheat. Yet our license has converted into "legacy" license
woktron
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smtalk said:
The thing is even with the usage of internal license applications, DA have been spreading misinformation.
On 8/11/2012 I specifically asked in a ticket (with subject "Internal License Application") if internal licenses could also be used for shared hosting purposes in addition to leasing them out with VPS'es or dedicated servers. I was met with a positive response. I have this in writing and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
smtalk said:
I think you should be careful labeling your (former) clients as dishonest - that really is business 101. I get the feeling DA is run by a bunch computer nerds with zero marketing and financial ability. You should look inward foremost.
What is "this change" and why should it affect "some other people"? Are there so few people with external licenses so they can be counted towards collateral damage even if some mass punishment is taking place at the moment?
Same at our side, 150+ licences, we have maybe 5 for our shared hosting servers and began shifting them to the "normal ones" because we wanted to check if there was value in the propack (there was unfortunately none that would justify the price difference). I also remember an email discussoin with Sales back in 2005 that stated "if you don' use them only for your own you should be fine"
Also, this "abuse" is about internal licence paid 49 or 89$, what about licence that were acquired the full price of 299$ ?
As explained many times, we are ok to pay something but we cannot pay 150*15 / month, the customers will not follow and there is no added value that would justify it if they compare to what they had before.
Offered to choose between DA and Plesk for 30$/month, they prefer plesk.
Offered to choose between DA, (even at 15$/month) and free ispoconfig they prefer ispconfig.
The pricing is just wrong. At 5$/month we would convert all our licences to the new model even if, as many, I would feel that is is a breach of what was promised with the lifetime licence.
Those area DA updates/upgrades. But yes, I'm not saying I don't see your point.
If we start being honest - may you confirm no technical support tickets were created after 90 days period? May you confirm it hasn't been re-sold (With a recurrent payment from someone else? As ToS forbids to resell, what many do with these life-times, they "rent" them). And may you confirm MariaDB support was there when you purchased it?
You don't need to answer all of those, I'm just curious. As some even confirmed in the thread that those external life-times were re-sold.
LawsHosting
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In the past, I've seen DA staff say to still open tickets even if they have no "support", me included - it might be more strict these days, but I did see it.
But, hey, I'm just using ~2 licences, I have no beef against DA..... ?
DA created ticketing only in 2015. Earlier it was all e-mail based. I'd appreciate a screenshot here or in PM if you have private details there
As it's new to me.There is a difference between a recommendation to be honest and admit the things if they've been done, like some people already did. I did not say that clients are dishonest. I wouldn't like to play the word game and fuel everyone's anger, so, feel free to ignore this paragraph
I think if accounts who used 3-4 licenses for personal needs purchased the right type of license, we could think about 'financial ability' for marketing purposes
I personally see this as a problem, but it's everyone's right to have their own opinion.Thank you for your input.
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