/blog/1 A balanced look at what is happening in the Information Technology world and its effects on businesses large and small. <p>It is a well known fact that cPanel is the industry standard in web host control panels however, after my experience with their software it really suprised me how unreliable cPanel is and that it is used on the majority of servers today. These events ultimately made me choose Plesk over cPanel.</p> <p> The story begins when I e-mailed cPanel and asked if their software is stable on the AMD Opteron (x86_64) platform. I received a reply a few days later from cPanel exclaiming that indeed the software is stable on the Opteron platform. Thus I went ahead and installed cPanel on the server. The install script ran smoothly and it looked like everything was installed properly. Since the cPanel software has to be activated, I went and purchased the license in order to setup the software.</p> <p>This is where the tradegy begins. I logged into cPanel and begin their installation wizard. I filled in the information necessary and clicked submit. My browser said &quot;Waiting for response&quot; for approximately 5 minutes. The response never came, cPanel, SSH, and Apache all crashed. So I had to restart the server via the web based administration tool given by the datacenter. The machine came back online and I began the setup wizard once again. This time I got to the third page of the setup wizard before cPanel crashed. This time the reboot would not go so smoothly. I went to reboot the machine and the services never came back online. I contacted the datacenter to have a look at it however, no one was on site to see what was going on. Thus, I had to wait until the next day to find out what was happening. It turns out the whole entire usr partition was corrupted. There was over 1000+ files in the lost+found directory and the kernel could not load without some user intervention.</p> <p>I had to have the operating system re-installed by the datacenter. The cPanel script ran fine and this time I finished the setup wizard without a hitch. After running for a few hours the server would crash. This would happen constantly, the server had to be rebooted every couple of hours. There is no way I can run websites on a server this unreliable. I had the datacenter re-install the operating system for a second time. This time I had them install the 32 bit version of the operating system. This time however, there was a problem in the install script. It turns out the script would hang at a certain point (which I would find out later was a bug in their newest install script.) In order to get passed it, I logged into another SSH terminal and killed the process that was running. The script would resume and it would say complete. Next I went into the setup wizard and everything went smoothly. When I came back to log in to the server via SSH it would not let me log in. It would not even let me type in my username to log in. It would just instantly disconnect me.</p> <p>That was it, I was furious. I had the datacenter install the operating system for the third and last time. I had cPanel refund my money for the license, which they did with no problem thankfully. I then went and purchased Plesk which installed without a problem and has not crashed yet. The server at the time of writing has 29 days uptime and is running very smoothly.</p> <p>By the time everything was said and done, I spent $120 dollars on operating re-installs, and several hours of the datacenters' staff and my time. In my opinion cPanel needs a lot of work done to make it ready for the Opteron platform and that their install scripts need to tested more thoroughly. One of the things that cPanel does that also bothers me is the fact that cPanel downloads and installs every package in the update tree for the operating system. This overall makes the server bloated and possibly less secure. Plesk on the other hand only needs a handful of packages and it only installs the ones it needs elminating these concerns. Perhaps in the future if cPanel corrects these problems I will re-evaluate their software however, at this time I would not recommend that anybody uses cPanel under any circumstances.</p> <p /> <br /> /blog/post/1/5 Tue, 31 May 2005 08:36:15 -0600 <p> I will be blogging on just about anything, mostly my thoughts on information technology, etc. </p> <p /><br /> /blog/post/1/4 Mon, 16 May 2005 10:22:20 -0600