What is the future for Legacy DirectAdmin License holders?

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BestBoard said:
So you agree that they're breaking the deal, and you know they will do it again some day. but for some reason, you are still willing to pay 15$/m.
well, now I understand DA approach.
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We did this with cPanel, it bought us enough time to move to something else. cPanel is a big brand and asked about from customers, DA still isn't well known and likely won't be, customers have rarely even heard about it, so we just say "control panel". With DA we don't have a path yet, but it will happen eventually. 95% (or more) of our users need just a few things:

- to manage their WP installation (softaculous atm)
- manage emails + their passwords
- set PHP version + modules (cloudlinux atm)
- webmail client (roundcube)
- FTP or file manager

and that's it. So we don't need anything major, Cyberpanel etc. will be considered and tested, definitely something opensourced. Getting swindled twice was enough.
 
Richard G said:
Not really. I know for a fact that they are reading this thread and also looking if any new idea's are posted and also they are talking with various party's via the ticket system. So they are silent here, but they are interested in the feedback.
So your feedback does matter when containing idea's. They are aware that pricing is a very important issue.
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But they haven't responded publicly and that is what is needed if they want to keep current legacy license holders. But they are not interested in keeping current legacy license holders since we do not generate any income for them. They are hoping this thread just dies down and goes away and it will eventually. If legacy license holders get angry and stop using DA its not a problem. DA will not lose any money or sleep over it.
 
floyd said:
But they haven't responded publicly and that is what is needed if they want to keep current legacy license holders.
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Correct. But as long as they are still talking to people also via ticket system it can take some time.
As legacy license holder I also understand the need for a public respond. But I also look at it from their side. They know very well this is causing a fuzz amongst legacy license holders, but also know MariaDB 10.6 is by far not EOL.

The thought is (if I understood it correctly) to gather all idea's for solutions and results from talks they are having to big license holders. Then at a certain point, they want to make an official statement about what's going to happen or if things will stay as they are or whatever.
But when they make a statement, they want it to be a good and final statement, so things are clear for everybody and we all (so we and they) are not having the same issue in for example 10 years from now.
So personally I don't mind that it takes longer. We have this issue now and if waiting for another response MIGHT mean that maybe we are able to get some other or a better deal, I would gladly wait a bit more.

floyd said:
If legacy license holders get angry and stop using DA its not a problem. DA will not lose any money or sleep over it.
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Partly correct. However this also would mean getting more negative mouth to mouth advertisement and probably written too. And knowing DA they always have tried to be fair to us. So I hope it will be the same now. They think the 15/month deal is fair, but they make the wrong comparison imho with that.
 
floyd said:
But they haven't responded publicly and that is what is needed if they want to keep current legacy license holders. But they are not interested in keeping current legacy license holders since we do not generate any income for them. They are hoping this thread just dies down and goes away and it will eventually. If legacy license holders get angry and stop using DA its not a problem. DA will not lose any money or sleep over it.
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I'm not so sure that's a smart move.
As DA isn't a very known hosting panel (as a VPS client point of view), compared to Plesk / cPanel, so most of my clients go with Plesk / cPanel which are more known.
When I offer them DA as a replacement for approx half price of Plesk / cPanel, I'm doing DA an advertising for free, and more clients are getting to know DA.
 
Found a good alternative and that's cents os panel open source formally and now it's cwpanel and all kinds of features.. but what I like is how they charge for pro license other license is free. Script installer all that. I really think da is talking with other company to sell out plesk or sell a peice to them. Makes sense look at what's offered for anti virus and backup tools. Same tools plesk has. Hmmmm talks are happening and this guy that owns da I think is about to sell us all out. Get ready for it. Like the helm deal all got ripped by plesk. ? where all done. Pitty because I like da but looks like time to move on.
 
Same story, not much to say here, we noticed the problem since the Datacenter Licenses became (without any notification) obsolete.
The only one who's losing here is small business but at the bottom line, this is the "cycle" of software.

On the bright side, many new Control Panels are already out there with quite good UI and features, some if not most of them lacking in DNS support (like DA) but will also grow and extend.

It's ok....we keep learning and moving as fast as possible, that's life, and with AI in our lives, this decade saves many surprises for all of us.

Today fewer and fewer people care about the Control Panel, they want their website up and running without issues and their emails working again without issues. The website? That's a story for their DEV, and they usually are more flexible, because they know the cycle of software.

Cya...
 
floyd said:
I am curious to know more about that. What is lacking? I have been using DA since 2005 and have not found it to be lacking in DNS support. I would like to know what I am missing.
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I never used DA DNS. Do they have something specific?
 
No it's just a good DNS system. But @gozen said DA was lacking DNS support, which it isn't. So we are curious as what he thinks is missing.
 
Ready to go API to automatically connect & sync to all major domain reseller systems? :)
 
Hi everyone.

Thanks for the feedback. Let us clarify the situation of legacy licenses. The future of legacy licenses is somewhat stagnant due to a shift towards ongoing maintenance rather than future features/integrations.

We understand no legacy license owner likes this change, but it is no secret that integrations with external software is the primary work of a control panel, and supporting new 3rd-party software requires continuous resources for such integration and testing work. Therefore, the scant resources provided by the legacy license model, along with the exceptional expectation of its longevity, requires shifting to an ongoing-maintenance-only approach.

Contrary to some claims on this forum, we are not taking away anything from the legacy license owners. Legacy license owners can continue to run their existing software stack for as long as they deem feasible, and these legacy licenses will continue to receive updates for existing services, features, integrations, and licensing infrastructure. However they should consider the licenses stagnant in terms of future features/integrations, and even compatibility with future Linux distros.

While we appreciate all the feedback given, much of it pertains to extreme conversion discounts (for example, some suggesting full Standard licenses priced lower than our Personal PLUS license), under the assumption that enough extreme-discounted license orders will provide sufficient resources. Unfortunately this is not sustainable, and is an echo of our failed (and now retired) extreme-discount internal pricing model.

To help legacy license owners, we are currently offering a special discount where a license can be converted to Standard at approximately 1/2 price. This puts them at a tremendous price advantage compare to someone paying regular price. This can be discussed with the sales department.
 
fln said:
Contrary to some claims on this forum, we are not taking away anything from the legacy license owners.
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Well that is not quite true. Not that long ago was us told by DA staff that we would keep getting updates, it was even quoted somewhere in this or the other thread.
Also, some time ago it was discussed was what a lifetime license was as some thought it was the same as like you could use Windows 95 forever, just not updated. This was spoken against by DA staff, stating that DA was kept up to date and lifetime ment that with a non-EOL OS it would keep running.

Most problematic issue is that the "lifetime upgrade" is in fact taken away, because we can't upgrade MariaDB anymore making a lifetime license worthless in 2 years.
We external license holders are now paying the price for the failed extreme-discount internal price model. And yes some have lifetime licenses a long time, but some only 4 years.

We discussed this 1/2 price already, but because there is no pause option, this for lifetime holders is a enormouns price raise. Because you compare to regular prices, not to what we are experiencing.

Lifetime licenses we payed extra, some even in 2019 just when DA said, get them before we stop selling them, promising lifetime upgrades.
So once 300 and then nothing anymore.
With the pro pack seperately it was 100 a year. But at least unused licenses could be just rest in place with no extra cost. Which is why we paid extra for the lifetime licenses, to have such option!

You are now in fact forcing us within 2 years, from a price of 0 to 180/year per license with no option to pause the license.
We don't have many licenses, but have 7 from which mostly 3 are in use.
That would mean a price raise from 0 to 1.260/year to be able to keep the licenses, because if we temporarily use license 4 and then stop using it, the 1/2 price offer stops and we loose the license too this way.
For little company's like us, this is way over our head and brings us down. And that is the correct comparison, not to the current monthley prices, but to what we paid before and have to pay now.
So that is no help at all, or maybe only to a few happy ones with only 1 or 2 licences.

It's crippling our business and loosing trust in DA massively.
I had hope with the talks something better would come up, as we now pay the price for the internal license failures which even payed way less then us.:(

You know I undertand DA's point of view, that resources are required, but this is a way too single sided view imho from DA.
 
Richard G said:
We don't have many licenses, but have 7 from which mostly 3 are in use.
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Recurring payment licenses are a double edge sword. Comparing it with a fixed license, on one side - you pay periodically as you use it, but on the other side, you can stop using when you do not need it. Meaning you can only pay for what you use, no need to buy surplus licenses just in case you will need them later. You are also more flexible to pick the license type you need, for small projects personal PLUS license is all you need.
 
fln said:
You are also more flexible to pick the license type you need, for small projects personal PLUS license is all you need.
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I might not fully understand what you mean, but we don't do small projects, or very seldom. Mostly we use licenses for several years. So this is also the reason we bought 7 licences. Easy to use, easy to pause and also more time to do server transfers because we could use other licenses for that too, as we did recently.
 
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