What is the future for Legacy DirectAdmin License holders?

[ericc]

Is that such an idiotic thought?

In comparison to what DA did, that is a genius idea.

I don't have any experience with cPanel or Plesk lifetime licenses. With the very few cases of such type of software, which I actually dealt with, there wasn't any unpredictable moves so far.

Of course I'd prefer DA act publicly and straighforward instead sneaking around corners and see what happens every time. And if people don't know how business is done, which is unbelievable considering time span they are active, sure - just shut your kiosk down and don't annoy everyone.

 

[Nickske00]

I have two '$299 Owned License' so I'm asking myself where I cheated and deserve to be put on legacy codebase?

I understand, as a company, you can't keep offering these... But then you had to think about that in the first place. Personaly I'm not a fan of companies changing the rules as they go. And if you have so many cheaters still with old licenses, just terminate them. If they want DA they will order new ones, if not then you didn't lose anything.

I'm looking into alternatives, migrating next month I think.

 

[d.dobrev]

I have two '$299 Owned License' so I'm asking myself where I cheated and deserve to be put on legacy codebase?

I understand, as a company, you can't keep offering these... But then you had to think about that in the first place. Personaly I'm not a fan of companies changing the rules as they go. And if you have so many cheaters still with old licenses, just terminate them. If they want DA they will order new ones, if not then you didn't lose anything.

I'm looking into alternatives, migrating next month I think.

They don't keep offering them, they want to twist our arms and milk us $$$ each month. That's a big no-no.

 

[floyd]

And if you have so many cheaters still with old licenses, just terminate them.

That bring me to this question: Is there really a way to know who is abusing a license and who is not?

 

[Richard G]

but it's hard due to way they behave or rather - misbehave.

Agreed.
But to bring some nuance into this fact, this is only with lifetime license holders. For normal license holders, there was no price raise since the beginning, meaning in fact, that it got cheaper every year for them, because even inflation was not corrected in the price.

There is just the fact of so much development, and way too much internal licenses out there, from which too many are abused and at this moment in spite of the cPanel customer flow, no real additional income has arrived.

Is there really a way to know who is abusing a license and who is not?

That is the biggest issue, it's very hard. Sometimes they can catch one like the complaining one in this thread, who couldn't even provide an url for his company, which should be a datacenter or at least a big host.
But in other ways... very very hard as there are so many internal licenses out there. However, feel free to give suggestions to them if you have some good ideas.

It's hard to investigate several thousend licenses and check them one by one, to see if the company who bought the licenses still exists, maybe uses other ip ranges or other datacenter, or if it not exists, has it really stopped their business, or is it taken over by another company, still using the datacenter the licenses where bought for?
That's the big trick here for them... a good way to find the people who are abusing them.

External licenses are punished too by this MariaDB issue, which is unfair as they are not part of this imho, as external licenses are allowed to be used anywhere.

 

[floyd]

which should be a datacenter or at least a big host.

I disagree with that. In 2006 all you had to be was a dedicated server provider or even a dedicated server reseller. In 2006 I had just a few dedicated servers and DA approved me for internal lifetime licenses. They knew exactly who and what I was. And shared hosting companies could also use these IF they also sold dedicated servers. I exactly followed the rules as they laid out exactly even with the 4 licenses I use currently for shared hosting and for my own server (which @smtalk accused me of abusing).

Think my memory may be faulty? https://web.archive.org/web/20060203034840/http://www.directadmin.com/internal.html

 

[netswitch]

But to bring some nuance into this fact, this is only with lifetime license holders. For normal license holders, there was no price raise since the beginning, meaning in fact, that it got cheaper every year for them, because even inflation was not corrected in the price.

OK but let's be realistic, how many "normal license" were sold at the offcial price ?
(and let's see the distribution regarding the whole licence base :
-lifetime fullprice
-lifetime internal
-recurring intenal
-recurring normal
)

I would be surprised if the majority of sales would be "30/month licences from the official website" when every host/datacenter provided licences at 9$. Again I don't get how they ended up in this situation.
Yesterday I re-read the post from 2019 annoucing end of sales for lifetime.
The post clearly stated "no change for old LLH" and "new lifetime at 299 + 99/year support fee".
This product has now disappeared, it was 8,25$/month, still very high for me but still largely below the current best option of 15$/month and accessible to everyone. I am yet to find and read the thread where they explained why they were killing that product.

Again, most of the issues here are about the pricing, bring back an option for datacenters and host to get licences at 5$/month with the full updates and no support and a contractual obligation to sell at 9$ max and money will flow for everyone. Give that option to all LLH holders and everybody should be fine.
This is my view of the world as a reseller with 150 LLH but if I put myself in the shoes of a LLH that is using the software for a hobby, 5$/month makes it a 60$ yearly, I would accept to pay that. Probably never 360$ and hardly 180$.

In the "new price thread" DA Sales mentionned the issues of people having kimsufi VPS that would not pay more for the software than what they pay for the hardware, it was sound and real, I don't know where that wise man has gone in between. (I also wonder why / how OVH stopped providing DirectAdmin but seen their scale it must have been quite a cash stream and an evangelist to the product)

I don't know the market study DA made to define the prices, I have no idea how good it sells under the current conditions, but I would not create so much trouble to my existing customer base if sales were good on their own.

But on another side, it's been many times I worte here that I would convert all my LLH to a model at 5$/month, this is 750$/month, I had no contact from sales to challenge me on my word so I guess they don't really care about money neither.
Or they prefer to wait until we convert under worse conditions.. There is no way we would pay 27.000$/year on licences (15*150*12) or this would be a crazy incentive to find alternatives, if their strategy is to wait until poeple convert, they might wait a long time and loose a lot of customers to other panels, aside from loosing the revenue they could make from tomorrow.

 

[Richard G]

I disagree with that. In 2006 all you had to be was a dedicated server provider or even a dedicated server reseller.

You are quite correct. My impression was that only bigger hosts would sell dedicated servers or VPS systems or that DA would use some minimum and did not sell internal licenses with only a few systems, which is why I said it that way. Sorry about that misunderstanding. My mistake.
Indeed it's also allowed that smaller hosting company's would be using these license IF indeed they were rented together with a server or vps like stated. You're quite right about that, so there is no disaggreement. I only used the term "big host" in an unclear way.
As you are saying it, you're doing nothing wrong.

 

[Remco00]

In 2006 all you had to be was a dedicated server provider or even a dedicated server reseller.

Think my memory may be faulty? https://web.archive.org/web/20060203034840/http://www.directadmin.com/internal.html

Thank you Floyd for your posting. I started to feel like a criminal after DA's comments in this thread. Perhaps DA staff should also look into the past to read what the agreements were to obtain internal licenses. It is sad to see so many forum participants here, sometimes going back almost 20 years. And now we are confronted with an attitude from DA that shows that we better get out of here. Very sad indeed.

 

[skym4n]

Guys, I didn't understand the posts very well.

I have a life-time license, will I stop receiving updates? Will there be no future integration and support for mariaDB, for example?

 

[Richard G]

Will there be no future integration and support for mariaDB, for example?

You will keep getting updates as far as we know, but no Mariadb upgrade. So 10.6 is the last one you get, no MariaDB 10.11 anymore.

 

[LawsHosting]

Maybe this is void in practice, but...... One way to check for license abuse is by checking if the used IP is bound to the actual Autonomous System (AS) route (i.e IP blocks) in their client account (uneditable after account creation)...... I know only big hosters have AS numbers, but not sure how else they can mitigate cheats.

 

[sekorulez]

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.

@smtalk:
I already posted some details in a previous message, including some prices. I wrote at 7/2 (https://forum.directadmin.com/threa...min-license-holders.69159/page-12#post-371167) I pay 9 euro a month per server. I currently run 3 servers. 2 servers are for the hosting/development of our product and websites. 1 is just for hobby projects. We now pay EUR 324 a year. Our new price would be $ 29 a server -> $1044 a year. Which is a triple in price. For this 200% price increase we whould receive the same product, and no more support from our Datacenter. We are not aliagable for a discount. We are to small, and don't have existing life-time licenses as we are renting a license from our datacenter.

I dove deeper in the old prices, reading the previous messages. If i look at the archive page at https://web.archive.org/web/20060203033109/http://www.directadmin.com/pricing.html I notice you previously sold a server lifetime license for 299 for a hosting company and 49-89 (based on nr of licenses) for a Datacenter. So the missing income you are now fighting agains is hosting companies bying a license for 49 or 89 when they should have payed 299. This is a loss of 250 per license. I cannot see how big this problem is. But I can understand this could have hurt you in the past. But isn't there any other way to target these users? Should you renegotiate with the internal license holders/ the datacenters instead of blocking all lifetime licenses? The ones that paid the 299 are good guys by your explanation. Or you could you make smaller changes in prices instead of jumping 3x times in price with 0 added value?

We are an organisation that rent for a VPS from a Datacenter. This seems al within the rules. So why are we targetted by these changes in your license model? The price the Datacenter paid 49 is redicoulously low. However do you think all the customers that paid like me 9 euro a month are all going to pay you 29 dollar a month? That's sounds redicious to me too. The Datacenter will simply stop selling DA and help me merge to something else. You are cornering them.

As I said in my original post. Please make a plan which gives perspective. Not just for me, but for everybody. You want to make money, great! Make it worth to us to upgrade. From what I understand DA didn't increase prices for a long time, not even to handle inflation. This is unhealthy for you. If you want people to convert to subscription model, not selling a live-time license is a start. Enticing people to convert there life-time license to a subscription model is good idea to. Pushing them/forcing them (and I try to say this as polite as I can) is a not the way. You cannot change everything overnight. But you are trying to by blocking you're current customers.

Right now there is no perspective and no trust. Could we please do something about that? You and I both deserve better!!! Lett's work together. You need me as a customer, and I need the great product you make!

Sebastiaan

 

[floyd]

So the missing income you are now fighting agains is hosting companies bying a license for 49 or 89 when they should have payed 299.

Why should we have paid $299? I paid what they asked for and followed their rules. I would never have paid $299 each for 180 licenses.

 

[netswitch]

You also have too keep in mind that a few years ago DirectAdmin was not the most popular panel. (even if it was better than the others on many aspects)
You needed a strong incentive to have hosters / datacenters promote it to their users.

 

[sekorulez]

Why should we have paid $299? I paid what they asked for and followed their rules. I would never have paid $299 each for 180 licenses.

I just try to understand what exactly the DA reasoning is and to see what could be a acceptable sollution from there point of view.

But even if you calculate with your numbers

180 * 49 = 8 880
180 * 299 = 53 820

I can see that's a big difference. And would require a big investment from you. But if you ask for it what my datacenter ask (9 euro a month per server) = 19 440 income a year. Even then a investment of 53 820 is a lot, but you would get back you money in 32 months.... that's not bad. The price of 8880 has simply been to cheap. You can make money on that within 6 months.

But to get back to my point. If they would expect more customers to have paid 299 in stead of 49 I can understand that they mis income. This doesn't mean I think you did anthing bad. I really don't.

I simply think selling life-time licenses is rediculous if you have montly costs. A different licensing system must be created. Do I agree with the way DA forces us? No I definitely don't. I think it's unethical and possibly illegal. But on the other hand I do understand the licenses they sold in the past creates a problem from them. They cannot keep supporting that.

What I miss in the whole situation is taking ownership of the problem. DA created a problem by selling life-time licenses which they cannot keep maintaining. They created this problem, not the people that bought licenses. I'm sorry to see that they blame the customer for miss use. I try to understand there point of view. And can to some extent but not really. They should taken ownership from the problem they created.

From my point of view there should simple be 1 license for a server. Thats it. And how you use this server, for your own use, to resell, rent out as a whole machine or per domain should make no difference. 1 license for 1 one machine.
If you buy from DA they should provide installation support. If you buy from a datacenter they should provide installation support. And everybody need maintanance from the software. DA cannot exist without updating everything that it's based on.

If you wish to differentiate between a hoster and other users you could perhaps have an account with a limited number of users... perhaps 3 or 5. A hoster will always need multiple users to seperate it's customers. But limiting the number of domains like you do right makes it difficult. It almost then makes it cheaper to get an extra VPN then it is to get an bigger license. Which is weird!!!

 

[ericc]

I just try to understand what exactly the DA reasoning is

I tried that too and considering I received feedback from DA (bunch of my posts were removed), I did it successfully.

This thread now is nothing more than a wailing wall, it's so miserable to see guys begging for what they paid for. It may be just another fetish for DA, as I'm 99% sure you won't get any deal. But truth must be spoken, so let's just keep this thread alive.

 

[floyd]

I just try to understand what exactly the DA reasoning is and to see what could be a acceptable sollution from there point of view.

But even if you calculate with your numbers

180 * 49 = 8 880
180 * 299 = 53 820

I can see that's a big difference. And would require a big investment from you. But if you ask for it what my datacenter ask (9 euro a month per server) = 19 440 income a year. Even then a investment of 53 820 is a lot, but you would get back you money in 32 months.... that's not bad. The price of 8880 has simply been to cheap. You can make money on that within 6 months.

I didn't charge my server or vps customers for DA. It was a value added service to attract customers. I sell cheap VPSs. The monthly license now is more than the VPS itself.

Since I held up my end of the agreement I expect DA to do the same.

 

[netswitch]

Also, when you rent the licence to your customers, you provide them some support which is why they pay a recurring fee for the license.

Regarding ericc's comment about a "wailing wall", I agree that without feedback from DirectAdmin, it's about that.
Which is sad as we ear from smtalk that money is lacking because of some unclear kind of abuse and there is no follow up here where a money generating solution could be found. On the other hand, there are 18K reads of this thread so many poeple seem to care.

 

[smtalk]

Which is sad as we ear from smtalk that money is lacking because of some unclear kind of abuse

Please don't get me wrong, this is not to "validate" the measures and just to provide more details I'm trying to reply personally, as you seem to be interested in solution and would like to understand the issue, thus, might really wish to give some suggestions.

Just sharing some of the abuse scenarios:
1) "datacenters" with 1-5 life-time $89 licenses, many of them, who don't even have any website, don't provide IP blocks etc. Nothing worked against them - IP limitations was bad, asking for a proof they sell VPS/dedicated was bad etc. If we take their licenses down for violation of the rules - that's also bad.
2) accounts with many life-time licenses used for their own shared hosting (they're not selling any VPS/dedicated servers), they have thousands of websites hosted, I won't name the hosts, but they're large. They never promoted VPS/dedicated offerings, and they don't do it these days.
3) re-selling of internal life-time licenses or re-rental of them (this was never allowed, there are many companies who have done this)
4) external life-time licenses and internal with recurring (no support as well for end-customers, just support for DCs) always had problems with support, even though 90 days was always mentioned, you may find many in this thread who said they created tickets, and they received help. How does that work? People are creative, when they get an answer "sorry, this is not a DA problem, and support period has ended", they insist that it's a bug, even when we know it is not - threatening starts. And those tickets are still support, as not giving the support costs more of the time (and psychological resources) than giving it..

And these aren't all. Regarding the deleted posts and some banned customers - when threatening starts + photos of garages/houses (some where we live, some aren't), cars with plate numbers etc. - I won't tolerate this, and wouldn't ever like to do this myself to someone else. It was me who removed the posts. I could say some had some truth, some didn't, but when it comes to personal things like places we live, or threatening PMs and posts - this won't be tolerated. I've banned one member a few days ago (permanently), as what has been done was too much (I guess no one would like anything like this for their families, own environment etc.)

Regarding abuse scenarios - I personally had some more ideas which people affected would probably hate again (I guess there isn't any solution, which everyone would like and development would continue?). One of the ideas - note in DA that license internal and must be sold with VPS/Dedicated server and it's illegal to use it otherwise (rent separately, use for own shared hosting etc.). This may or may not solve some of the issues mentioned. Just like snickers have a pack of 4 snickers and mark each of them that they cannot be sold individually, I personally wouldn't think it'd be something bad to do. We don't tell snickers that it's their problem that they sell 4 items at a lower cost, so we're allowed to re-sell even though if rules say otherwise? I'm lost at the options as well, as many did not work in the past. That's why I'm still reading this thread from time to time for great ideas, but to be honest - I haven't found any great ones worth to try to solve problems #1-4 (the ones that could change the situation, and we have plenty of time to see if they do). Please note I'm not the decision taker, and I wish this problem didn't exist at all. Just like you - I offer various methods on how to stop the abusers. Just mentioning that IP blocks, license removals (for "DCs" with 1-2 life-time licenses having no webpage), proofs etc. didn't work. I personally try not to comment statements like MariaDB 10.1 to 10.4 is "update and not upgrade not needing any internal work", I know technical details myself, as I've done many implementations in the past, problems like https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mysql-user-table/ wouldn't arise if that was true and many support tickets/forum posts on issues creating sql users, removal of databases etc. wouldn't exist, as well as documentation like https://docs.directadmin.com/other-...0-4-deleting-databases-is-slow-causes-timeout. I just try to ignore something like this in the thread, as it does not lead anywhere and is not realted to the thread. And this is not only MariaDB strategy, MySQL 5.7 could look minor when compared to 5.6, but then why do we have threads like https://help.poralix.com/articles/directadmin-unable-to-add-access-host-with-mysql-5-7 and problems like https://forum.directadmin.com/threads/add-an-access-host-to-our-directadmin-database.65204/ (just wanted to let you know, as you seem to care).

I haven't mentioned even more more thing which was a huge problem in the past, in addition to 1-4 - pirated licenses It seems we were able to get this sorted out with the new licensing system, custombuild integration and merge of file mirrors. So, that one worked, and I'm glad it worked. @fln had ideas for it. We were not able to get this sorted out without his ideas/work, even though we've tired to do this for many years. So, it shows that some measures could work.

From my point of view there should simple be 1 license for a server. Thats it.

That's the point of change, isn't it? Only external licenses Just with different types. So that you could get a Lite license starting from $9 or Personal Plus (letting you own admin+additional user, so, host your own and friends sites on the same server is possible) starting from just $3 ("starting" = up to -40% off with bulk discounts, you don't need to prove you're a DC, it's for everyone). You may browse Wayback Machine, these weren't the options earlier, only introduced in 2019. And even add-ons like CloudLinux seem to be more expensive like this? However, those options don't seem to be a solution? If the switch isn't made - "there should simple be 1 license for a server" couldn't become a reality, thus other options should be considered.