Beherit
Verified User
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The Personal Plus cost 5$/mo, where you see option for $3/mo? The old Personal license was a really good for me. Could You add again such license with only 1 Account and 10 Domains limit?
What is the future for Legacy DirectAdmin License holders?
- Thread starter beansbaxter
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I guess when you have the maximum official discount rate of 40%, these are the prices you get (but then if you have that pricing it is because you have many licences, and if you need to make any money out of it you have to take a markup too)
.
But I guess your request supports my proposal :
"Create licences without technical support, without installation, only supported trough paid tickets, at 2 / 5/ 9 $ / month."
.
But I guess your request supports my proposal :
"Create licences without technical support, without installation, only supported trough paid tickets, at 2 / 5/ 9 $ / month."
I'm not OK with the "/month" thing. Paid tickets - sure, hell, it should've been done a long time ago.
What I'm okay with is: https://forum.directadmin.com/threa...dmin-license-holders.69159/page-3#post-366429
Any other form of a "/month" payment I consider milking, and I'm not a cow.
Maybe this should have been thought of before DA started offering Lifetime license to try to flood the market to take sales from others to gain ground to become bigger in the market share then and now well our help from the past is now not viable to the current state of DA position in the market.
This is how this seems to me.
Well if DA cared why not let the public update legacy packages that you don't plan to support. Let us fix and submit to have added back or give us the option too. No time spent for you.
Well I'll answer what I think answer will be....
No because you wont switch to more paid options.
Its to bad to see the same thing happen over and over with company's making a bad decision and then later try to correct a good idea from So DA tries to change way of business (Not hungry to start anymore a business.) and well this could be straight bad business but won't care and just needs more money to try to keep up with current market which requires more money inflation is no joke.
Long story short cost went up and DA seems to be trying to find a way out of these lifetime license.
First day my license won't run as it should we all need to open support tickets request to get DA working correctly again.
The good news is well the extra money their making now will more likely need to go to the support department to cover all the new tickets that will flood in the day DA stops working. DA's thinking making money now but may need to go to the new support department team to fund them. So DA maybe right back in the same boat of losing money. See business is like tit for tat.
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I want to give my 2 cents here, to explain how I see this issue.
Few people said that lifetime software licenses are non sustainable business practice. That is simply NOT true. Unlike lifetime services, such as lifetime webhosting/VPN etc., which basically mean taking a one time payment for a promise to provide a service which has some associated per user/account monthly cost, in case of the software there is NO such associated cost.
The cost to modify the software is the same, regardless if there is just 1 customer, 100K or 1 million customers (or whatever this number is). Lifetime licenses were provided without long term technical support, and datacenter licenses were provided without any DA support at all as far as I know. In my opinion that's the real and main reason why datacenter licenses were sold for much cheaper price than direct lifetime licenses - as the datacenter was then responsible for all associated support, from installation forwards, at their own expense. And thus I personally don't see the current move as a business necessity, but rather as a simple greed.
DA used the money from selling these lifetime/DC licenses to develop the product, and without the income that came from selling these licenses probably the company could not afford to pay for many of the additional features that were developed. Thus people and datacenters that bought these lifetime and DC licenses should be more properly seen as investors of DA, that put their trust into the company. Trust that now have been violated.
First CustomBuild was moved from simple source script to being closed functionality embedded into the DA executable. Something that worked flawlessly for many years, with disconnection between the DA version and versions of open source 3rd party packages was replaced with a new model that created a lock between DA version and the versions of these 3rd party packages that have nothing to do with DA itself. After all, all DA is supposed to do is to help manage the configuration of these 3rd party packages through an easy web interface, and the configuration format of these packages doesn't normally change in backward incompatible way.
So now DA not just prevents update of MariaDB through DA itself, but goes one step further by actually disabling the license if somebody updates MariaDB through other means. Basically requiring the current lifetime/DC lifetime license holders to either pay extra monthly payment for something that was supposed to be provided without any extra cost to that already paid, or loosing the ability to use the latest MariaDB functionality for the 10.x branch (version 10.11) and basically loose the ability to provide LAMP stack in about 2 years from now, when older 10.6 version will be no longer supported.
So, what we're left with now and what should we do? Besides the insulting begging for DA to respect their original promises, that is for those that think it may help. I think that the ONLY real option is for several large datacenters to combine forces to develop some GOOD open source solution for this simple (reseller/user mgmt for the DNS/mail/LAMP stack) use case. That is really the only sustainable path in the long term.
Few people said that lifetime software licenses are non sustainable business practice. That is simply NOT true. Unlike lifetime services, such as lifetime webhosting/VPN etc., which basically mean taking a one time payment for a promise to provide a service which has some associated per user/account monthly cost, in case of the software there is NO such associated cost.
The cost to modify the software is the same, regardless if there is just 1 customer, 100K or 1 million customers (or whatever this number is). Lifetime licenses were provided without long term technical support, and datacenter licenses were provided without any DA support at all as far as I know. In my opinion that's the real and main reason why datacenter licenses were sold for much cheaper price than direct lifetime licenses - as the datacenter was then responsible for all associated support, from installation forwards, at their own expense. And thus I personally don't see the current move as a business necessity, but rather as a simple greed.
DA used the money from selling these lifetime/DC licenses to develop the product, and without the income that came from selling these licenses probably the company could not afford to pay for many of the additional features that were developed. Thus people and datacenters that bought these lifetime and DC licenses should be more properly seen as investors of DA, that put their trust into the company. Trust that now have been violated.
First CustomBuild was moved from simple source script to being closed functionality embedded into the DA executable. Something that worked flawlessly for many years, with disconnection between the DA version and versions of open source 3rd party packages was replaced with a new model that created a lock between DA version and the versions of these 3rd party packages that have nothing to do with DA itself. After all, all DA is supposed to do is to help manage the configuration of these 3rd party packages through an easy web interface, and the configuration format of these packages doesn't normally change in backward incompatible way.
So now DA not just prevents update of MariaDB through DA itself, but goes one step further by actually disabling the license if somebody updates MariaDB through other means. Basically requiring the current lifetime/DC lifetime license holders to either pay extra monthly payment for something that was supposed to be provided without any extra cost to that already paid, or loosing the ability to use the latest MariaDB functionality for the 10.x branch (version 10.11) and basically loose the ability to provide LAMP stack in about 2 years from now, when older 10.6 version will be no longer supported.
So, what we're left with now and what should we do? Besides the insulting begging for DA to respect their original promises, that is for those that think it may help. I think that the ONLY real option is for several large datacenters to combine forces to develop some GOOD open source solution for this simple (reseller/user mgmt for the DNS/mail/LAMP stack) use case. That is really the only sustainable path in the long term.
Richard G
Verified User
Just 1 thing you are wrong about. Data center licenses were only cheaper because they were taken multiple licenses at a time and were restricted to their datacenter, were to be sold together with a VPS/Server.
External lifetime licenses were not restricted to any datacenter and could be used anywhere. That's the only difference.
As for support, the external lifetime licenses only had 90 days official support and after that it was forum support.
However, in the old days DA didn't really make a fuzz when a lifetime (internal or external) made a support ticket if needed, after that time.
So for support, both licenses were the same.
For the rest I guess you're right.
However I very much doubt that the bigger datacenters will start making something open source which is as good as DA. Remember it's not just 1 system for LAMP. Multiple OS systems and versions are supported and also both Mysql and Mariadb (which are groing wider from each other, more differenes) and then the A is not only Apache anymore but also nGinx and OLS for example. And that also for various versions of DA.
So being compatible with all of them is most likely the most work.
However, I would love seeing some open source panel able to do all the things DA can do.
90 days of support still have (at least potential) associated per customer expense, that is unlike software updates. Even if that is only support with initial installation and configuration, that is still time (and thus money) DA had to spend on the customer. If the issue was purely mass purchasing, then we would see similar prices in case of bulk purchasing of external lifetime licenses.
You don't need a solution that has ALL the features of DA.
You don't need support for that many OSes either. DA itself dropped support for FreeBSD, which basically leaves only GNU/Linux distros. Of which support for latest versions of RHEL (8 and 9) and it's clones/rebuilds is the most important as it's the most prevalent platform. And if Ubuntu is supported as well, then it will fit majority of the users, but most could live with RHEL only, certainly for the LAMP use case.
Most people can live with Apache httpd, as it's the most versatile option. Yes, having an nginx option may be nice to have for higher performance static content delivery, but most can live without it. And it's the same with RDBMS - for most cases MariaDB support is enough.
Richard G
Verified User
Well I doubt that. I think at least Debian (and it's deratives like Ubuntu) should be included. There are way more Debian systems using DA then we think.
Indeed all panels were based on RHEL systems, so this could be enough, but would mean many have to switch their OS systems.
I also just use Apache with php-fpm and Mariadb.
With "all the things DA can do" I ment, making the backups via cron, choosing what to backup, creating and managing accounts, also for databases, lets say what DA could do around 10 years ago when it was still the good old DA and everything we required were present.
Oke maybe a bit later because also automatic LE is nice to have.
staff_nowa
Verified User
DA standard build should have a typical LAMP configuration. As I see, after a minimum of 10 years in DA, we have Composer, redis, git, and another feature that people can self-install...
wila
Verified User
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- Dec 15, 2017
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It's not like they break the typical LAMP stack.. oh wait
bertvandepoel
Verified User
For us, the main issue remains the fact that the licenses we convert over to the new, discounted pricing would need to be paid constantly. If we could pause licenses while the discount remains, then we could accept the pricing (presuming we do get the bulk discount on any new licenses we buy based on how many we already have). We use our current datacenter licenses as a way to increase the value of our VPSes and dedicated servers, for example for webdev companies that want their infrastructure to be exclusive to them but don't really have the know how to run a conventional LAMP stack and create vhosts themselves. This is, as was discussed previously, completely within the rules, because yes we are a datacenter.
As I outlined previously in this topic, we only use 60% of our licenses. The remaining 40%, a little over 30 licenses, we have as spares ready to use when a customer requires them. This puts us in such an unnecessarily awkward position right now where we'd convert some licenses but keep some and then hope the discount continues whenever a customer requires a new DA license. We'd much rather convert all of them and only pay for the licenses that are in use, while keeping the discount on all "sleeping" licenses. Worst case, even a sleep/wake-up fee would be acceptable for us if we could prevent a monthly cost paid for unused licenses. The 29USD/month price is not something we can make work for our customers. For several of our VPS customers that would mean a 50% price increase. DirectAdmin then goes from a way for us to increase the value of our VPSes to a thing that makes us look expensive compared to our competitors. We could make the discounted price work, but then sleeping licenses until needed is an absolute requirement.
I would really like for someone from DirectAdmin to engage with my arguments here. Do they understand the problem and are they willing to consider my proposal? I think this could really resolve quite a few of the frustrations for somewhat larger customers. For the personal licenses I have no solution. This isn't really a case I'm familiar with.
As I outlined previously in this topic, we only use 60% of our licenses. The remaining 40%, a little over 30 licenses, we have as spares ready to use when a customer requires them. This puts us in such an unnecessarily awkward position right now where we'd convert some licenses but keep some and then hope the discount continues whenever a customer requires a new DA license. We'd much rather convert all of them and only pay for the licenses that are in use, while keeping the discount on all "sleeping" licenses. Worst case, even a sleep/wake-up fee would be acceptable for us if we could prevent a monthly cost paid for unused licenses. The 29USD/month price is not something we can make work for our customers. For several of our VPS customers that would mean a 50% price increase. DirectAdmin then goes from a way for us to increase the value of our VPSes to a thing that makes us look expensive compared to our competitors. We could make the discounted price work, but then sleeping licenses until needed is an absolute requirement.
I would really like for someone from DirectAdmin to engage with my arguments here. Do they understand the problem and are they willing to consider my proposal? I think this could really resolve quite a few of the frustrations for somewhat larger customers. For the personal licenses I have no solution. This isn't really a case I'm familiar with.
Same boat here, looking for some feedback form DirectAdmin on theproposals previously made.
Woudl you still need to be able to pause the recurring if the monthly cost was around 5$ / month ?
Also wondering what are the deals aldready proposed to other providers. (talking about transparency...)
Richard G
Verified User
No they don't. As you maybe have read (or missed) in the thread, I already proposed and explained (several times) that a pause option is a real must have. But the DA team refused that option.
For us as little company, 15/month is way to high anyway (see calculations earlier on). Only very few people would agree on that price.
Anyway, as for the pause option (like we have now too), you can forget about that, unless they change their mind, which I don't expect.
Paying a "one time fee" to company that broke the trust after already taking one time lifetime license fee? Really?
I mean what will happen if DA agrees to once again take another 299$ to upgrade a lifetime license to... super duper lifetime license Pro, and then a few years from now repeats this trick? If it happens again say even 5 years from now, then it's basically much worse than paying 5$ a month for these same 60 months. And yes, I'm aware that DC lifetime licenses were sold for much cheaper prices.
The way that I see it, DA basically broke the contract by selling lifetime licenses and then changing their mind, and now willing to start charging hefty monthly fees from everybody, and yes, I consider even 15$/month per instance a hefty fee. It's one thing to decide to stop selling new lifetime/DC licenses, and it's completely different thing to break the current agreement.
I personally not going to pay anything extra, and not only because just like in your case, it doesn't make sense financially.
It mainly because, frankly, I no longer trust DA after what have been done, and a way it was done.
My current plan is to continue to use the DA as long as will be possible, and in parallel to start testing the currently available open source control panels. Yes, the ones I saw have less options than DA, and after many many years that I'm using DA, these are naturally feel a lot less intuitive than DA, and will obviously require some extra learning, but at this stage I really don't have too many options. Those of us not willing or able to pay extra have at most about 2 years, and even that at the expense of giving up any new features of MariaDB 10.7+, and that if DA doesn't come up with yet more surprises. I mean tomorrow DA may decide that PHP 9 or even 8.4 is a Pro feature as well, and anyhow we can't wait till the very last minute.
not yet. It does look ok, but I am not sure how good support is and how quick fixes are. Also it is missing some integration.
To be fair DA is a similar price, so you may as well stick to DA.
floyd
Verified User
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- Mar 29, 2005
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Just showing everybody including JBMC that we do have options. Could be useful if ones do not trust JBMC anymore. Its not just a matter of price but also a matter of trust.
I have many licenses for VIrtualizor (same company) and their support is usually within 24 hours. You can also get some lower techs on live chat. Support will login to your server and fix the problem if you want them to.
beansbaxter
Verified User
I continue to stand by this solution I proposed earlier. The distilled version:
I love DA. Really do. And although the above proposal is not perfect, I think we all can agree this is a win-win compromise for both sides.
- Assign all Lifetime Licenses to RHEL 9. Updates for all services are provided through the entire RHEL Full Support Period.
- Charge $29 USD one time fee, per license, for every future operating system release... RHEL 10, 11, 12, etc.
- This allows lifetime licenses to continue to be used indefinitely, with updates for the lifetime of the assigned OS cycle on the license.
- For customers with active and sleeping licenses, they can wait to activate sleeping licenses to the next OS cycle when necessary.
I love DA. Really do. And although the above proposal is not perfect, I think we all can agree this is a win-win compromise for both sides.
Does it have to be RHEL?
I'm pretty happy @ debian.- Status