Dotnetpanel Forums

Hi All,

I have since almost a year several plesk 9.0.1 windows servers with a couple of hundreds domains/sites on them and I am not happy with plesk because of multiple reasons.

Whatever I do within plesk, I always encouter some bugs. Thinks that don't work, errors etc. etc.That bothered me from the beginning and now with the new 9.0 version it is even worse. There support is willing to help and spent many hours on my system(s) but finaly they told me about a lot of problems to wait for 9.1 version.What scares me the most is that they released a version with so may bugs. 

And when I look into forums many people have problems.  But when you post to there forum, you messages first is being reviewed by them before it is visible so there realy must be a lot of complaints...

 So that is why I am looking for a new control panel and dotnetpanel looks like my new panel. Pitty I wasted money on three lifetime plesk licenses but what the heck... this is costing me more like this.

1) Do you have both experience with plesk and dotnetpanel and what can I expect for differences ?

2) I want dotnetpanel on windows webserver 2008. Is that oke ?

3) What does dotnetpanel has compared to the plesk application pack ?

Hope you have some answers for me.

Best regards,

Michel.

To be honest with you, I don't have much experience with Plesk and my main expertise is in cPanel and Linux. However, I dealt with Helm for many years and now DNP. While DNP has more features (which is why we switched over), there are a lot of bugs. Often, DNP doesn't remove the site from IIS or mail server and we have to go in and do it manually. Our lower level support don't have access to Remote Desktop so they have to wait for someone with priv to login manually on to the server... isn't the point of a control panel to get around this?

 Then, the support here costs money. I paid $20.00 for a support ticket and mentioned 3 issues. Issues #2 and #3 were responded to quickly with patches. Patches? I installed the latest version (or the version they provided) last month. Why weren't these patches included? What else is going to go wrong and where is a link to all these patches?

 The main issue which is a lack of error mechanism in DNP has still not been resolved.

 Then, there is the forum. I have no problem with having to pay for personalized support but if you are charging for that you better be all over your forum. Take a look at the General Support forum. About half the posts have no replies to it. This is the only method of free support (for a paid product) and half the requests have absolutely no answer to them?

I'm just hoping cPanel gives something out soon worth using for Windows because as of this point, our support costs for 1 DNP server is exceeding that of 25 cPanel servers.

 Just my two cents and hoping that someone from DNP looks at this and steps it up. By looking at older forum posts, I see that there may have been a different type of atmosphere around here when it came to support but not sure what's going on now.

 thx for your reply. We mainly have linux servers and almost never we have any problems or bugs. Only the windows servers gives us a headache.

What you describe sounds a bit like plesk... I believe I dont have to expect to find a control panel for windows that has no problems at all. But support is important. What you tell about the forum that is realy a pitty, but again with plesk it is not much different (worse in fact because when you tell something bad about plesk the entry is deleted!).

I don't mind paying for stuff where I make money with but I like open source more and more because of the large community (forums). At this moment I donate as much as I pay for licenses :-)

Arvand:

The main issue which is a lack of error mechanism in DNP has still not been resolved.

Hi,

Good spot here. The error handling is not helpful for Users at all. Customers with a little software engineering experience would be fine to figure out what's the problem, but in most cases it does not make any sence for ordinary users.

Would be nice to have option to set Generic Error saying: Oops, something went wrong. Please try again. If error occurs continuously refer to your administrator.

Arvand:

Take a look at the General Support forum. About half the posts have no replies to it. This is the only method of free support (for a paid product) and half the requests have absolutely no answer to them? By looking at older forum posts, I see that there may have been a different type of atmosphere around here when it came to support but not sure what's going on now.

Another good spot here. I noticed that up to version 2.4 DNP team were more active and communicative, something happened afterwards. I have a feeling that their TODO list is the size of the War and Peace. I still have a hope that DNP guys take a look here sometimes and know what new issues are reported, even if they do not answer.

BTW, had a very bad experience with Plesk. It turned my system into something "not Windows anymore". After I unistalled, it just deleted all my websites physicly. What I really like about DNP, that I know exactly what Windows component or folder or user was effected by any action. And this is kudos to DNP lads for that simplicity!

 To their defence, they were very helpful in getting the rest of my issues resolved (since I last posted). But again, some of the stuff that's elementary to some of the other panels (such as having AWStats and SmarterStats running simultaneously) is not present.

 Arvand,

Just curious.  Since your last post on this topic in April, 2009 has DNP become more stable?  Has support been more responsive?

Thanks,

Russ
CTO
3Essentials Hosting
www.3essentials.com