Hi all
ScoutNet Switzerland (www.scout.ch) is an association offering hosted services to the swiss guide and scout movement and other scouting groups in switzerland.
We have the urgent need to renew our hosting platform. We did try to develop an own environement exactly fitting our needs for the last maybe three years, but we had to conclude this is not possible on voluntary base.
Now we want to evaluate which available solutions might cover most of our needs. So SWINOG probably is not the badest place to ask what others use and what the your experiences with the solution your use are.
Scale: - About 200 Groups having a website with an own domain. Mostly quite simple things but also some Typo3, Gallery and other resource consuming applications. - Up to 10'000 Email Accounts.
Main Needs: - DNS - LAMP Server, preferably running Debian or a derivate. - Mailserver supporting IMAP + SMTP Authentication + Webmail + Listserver like Mailman. - Customer can do most himself. As less as possible support need. - Setting up news Customer without need of root access to the server (preferably via a admin web gui)
Would-Be-Nice-To-Haves: - GroupWare like Interoperatibily Tools working cross customer. - Accountancy System - IPv6 - Sendmail/MIMEDefang/SpamAssassin/ClamAV (from my point of view the best combination to flexibly filter emails). - Scalable (control multi phyical servers from one 'admin' instance which could have dedicated funktions or even fail-over ability)
So what commercial or non commercial Hosting Pannel Software do you use or do know which would best fit those requirementes? There is money around to buy something if it's realy 'the solution'.
(oh, if some hoster would like to have us as customer, this also would be an option, but as scouting works on voluntary base and we try to offer everything mostly for free to our 'customer', we have no financial ressources for recuring fees - sponsoring could be negotiated)
Kind regards -Benoît Panizzon-
On Nov 30, 2007 10:06 AM, Benoit Panizzon panizzon@woody.ch wrote:
So what commercial or non commercial Hosting Pannel Software do you use or do know which would best fit those requirementes? There is money around to buy something if it's realy 'the solution'.
If you want to go the open source route, I can recommend ispCP ( http://isp-control.net/ispcp/ ), a fork of VHCS. It works great with debian and doesn't create a big config mess some control panels are known for.
If you prefer a commercial product, make sure you get one with good support!
regards
Flavio
Flavio Tischhauser schrieb:
If you want to go the open source route, I can recommend ispCP ( http://isp-control.net/ispcp/ ), a fork of VHCS. It works great with debian and doesn't create a big config mess some control panels are known for.
We used VHCS itself for a while and it worked quite well, it would fit almost for everything you're looking for. The problem there is that it is(was) mainly developed by students (no general offending), what turned out to be a big problem. They barely got time to fix bugs (and there are quite a few) and they prefer to implement new features instead of fixing bugs. AFAIK they stopped the developement by now, or at least the community died.
A few developers then forked the project to ispcp. I observe that one for quite a while now and I honestly have to say it doesn't convince me. It might look nice and it's definitely as easy to use (admin/reseller and for users) as vhcs, but the developement goes too slow. I suspect that they will meet the same fate as VHCS.
The most active open source project by now (my opinion) is probably ISPConfig (http://www.ispconfig.org/). They patch regularly and the community is quite big. Indeed it is more complicated than VHCS/ISPCP (initial effort) but it looks very adaptable and it works great on Debian. I definitly recommend to take a look at it.
regards
Tobias
On Fri, November 30, 2007 10:06 am, Benoit Panizzon wrote:
So what commercial or non commercial Hosting Pannel Software do you use or do know which would best fit those requirementes? There is money around to buy something if it's realy 'the solution'.
I asked a similar question about a year ago on this list and got some useful answers:
http://osdir.com/ml/operators.swinog/2006-02/msg00033.html
I'm not really happy with the control panels i've seen so far. They tend to interfere to much with my "perfect" configuration of the system.
If you configure your services to use mysql for authentication and configuration, creating a new customer consists only of some INSERTs. I'm considering to write an own control panel for my needs. A web interface for the admin himself would be relatively easy to implement, but certainly not a full featured solution with a nice looking interface in which the customer can manage things on his own.
regards
Manuel
-
Benoit Panizzon -
Flavio Tischhauser -
Manuel Krummenacher -
Tobias Koenig