UnitedHosting server upgrades - CPanel Control Panel - Page 2

UH-Matt · 9th October 2009, 08:33 AM

Mark,

Regarding dedicated's who wish to migrate, we will first concentrate on our shared/reseller boxes once we have completed our testing process. Then we will speak to you on an individual basis regarding dedicated migration, and can plan and make this happen to fit in with your needs rather than ours, or not at all if your happy to stay as you are.

mark.willis · 9th October 2009, 08:35 AM

ok. Thanks for the quick response

jmc · 9th October 2009, 02:55 PM

Heh. Pardon my ignorance, guys (I've not made a point of getting seriously to grips with the in-depth, server-related stuff you lot rattle blithely on about

), but if we're gonna lose the "chroot" system, does that not automatically mean we will be less secure? I may be wrong, here, but I gathered that the chroot ("jailed"?) environment meant overall security on a shared server was much improved?
And I'm sure I read on here (some time ago, mind you!), that CPanel sucked, security-wise, compared to Ensim. Mebbe they got a lot better, in the meantime?
Either way, one thing I make a point of doing, is keeping my stuff up-to-date for security fixes.
The only thing I'd really hate to see is the CHMOD/CHOWN issue raising it's ugly head. I just love that I don't really have to give that issue a second thought, when slapping Jomla experiments etc etc on my UH webspace. Whilst, seemingly (at least, with Joomla extensions), the rest of the world has "Ownership/Chmod Problems" up the wazoo.
Am I gonna lose my comfort blanket when we go CPanel???

UH-Matt · 9th October 2009, 03:05 PM

Hello

When we made our decision a few years ago then yes Cpanel had its fair share of security issues. However it has come on leaps and bounds since then, and has some excellent security settings and procedures built in as standard, we also have our own usual customisations and addons to toughen up security.

The chroot will be lost, and was indeed a unique selling point of the Ensim system, however having the chroot but no updates for months on end (meaning running older versions of key packages) becomes swings and roundabouts when it comes to security.

Ultimately a fully up to date system, without a chroot, but with correctly configured security procedures should be considered the best combination for shared environments, over a chrooted out of date environment without any prospects of further updates on the horizon. This decision was a hard one to make, but it was made much easier by the fact that the Ensim control panel system now seems to be a dead product with very few prospects for improvement in the future, or regularly maintained updates.... Something we simply cannot allow production systems to continue without.

Shared environments always have their risks, be it Ensim or Cpanel, its how they are managed which counts, and thats something we feel we are rather good at

UH-Matt · 9th October 2009, 03:08 PM

I should add that we feel the debate should really be Cpanel vs other panels rather than Cpanel vs Ensim, as in our eyes Ensim is no longer a viable proposition.

We definitely spent a lot of time shopping, and you will see at one point we were very keen to proceed with Plesk (listed as one of the only Platinum level UK partners with Parallels) we spent a lot of money on a partnership, however the Plesk product has come up short on a large number of key areas, even small things like no shared SSL being possible! So there really only seems to be one obvious choice.

jmc · 9th October 2009, 03:16 PM

So much for "Platinum Partnership" deals, then, I guess. Heh.
I have no doubts (and every confidence) that you guys (and Gals) are great at what you do.
I suppose we'll see wot 'appens, when it 'appens (as my dear old Ma used to say... God Bless 'Er!).
As long as you don't mind if I hide behind the sofa, occasionally.

UH-Matt · 9th October 2009, 03:48 PM

We always plan our changes very carefully with months of testing, so there should be no hiding behind the sofa. Cpanel have provided us a dedicated team of 5 to actually handle migrations with us.

UH-Matt · 9th October 2009, 03:50 PM

Of course we also should not lose focus of the fact that the primary reason for some changes is the replacement of hardware. As a responsible provider we switch out older servers to new hardware every ~ 3 years to ensure your always on the fastest possible hosting and also to avoid failures in aging hardware. In the past few month's we have seen a definite increase in servers experiencing disk failures, so it makes sense to get everyone onto shiny new servers now.

We will be increasing our already extremely high specification shared/reseller boxes to a specification well ahead even the platinum server shown on our site, an investment of literally hundreds of thousands of pounds in the best available for everyone to enjoy for another 3 years.

It made sense to make both changes together, rather than migrate ensim to ensim on new hardware and then find in another 6-12 months the product remains dead and another migration is required...

TonyW · 12th October 2009, 03:22 PM

I've used cPanel with my previous host so a change from Ensim/Parallels to cPanel here will be welcomed by me. cPanel has come on leaps and bounds from its earlier days and is still being updated, something I note is not happening with the Ensim/Parallels control panel software.

One observation is that last time I used cPanel, SpamAssassin was an option to enable or disable for spam filtering. Given that you moved from SpamAssassin to Mailfioundry, will that option still be available or not within cPanel? I don't particularly want to use SA, but if the option is there, it may confuse users as to what is best to do.

UH-Matt · 12th October 2009, 03:26 PM

SpamAssassin will remain disabled because we use MailFoundry instead.

(SA is also standard on Ensim, but we disable it due to using MailFoundry).

Thanks,

TygerTyger · 14th October 2009, 11:23 AM

What's the timescale for this and the hardware changes? Realistically, I know best intentions tend to spin out quite a bit.

By the way, isn't this feedback? I had to jump around a bit looking for the thread.

UH-Matt · 14th October 2009, 01:40 PM

The new hardware is ordered. We will be doing it in a couple of phases and announcing with as much time in advance as possible. I would guess the first server is likely to be migrated in 6 weeks to 8 weeks, with our first announcements going out hopefully next week when our first live production server for new signups goes live.

Spec for our new servers is:

Dell r710 Chassis
Dual Quad Intel E5520 CPUs
12GB Ram
4 x 300GB 15k SAS Disks (RAID 10)

Quite an upgrade to our current spec shared/reseller boxes and 4 disk raid to help avoid some of the recent raid/disk issues we've seen as well as give good disk performance, which is where most our servers that experience load spikes have their problem (disk i/o).

Samizdata · 15th October 2009, 11:06 AM

I am not a fan of any control panel - they all exist to restrict what I do - but my ISP's bundled webspace uses cPanel (version 11) so I had a poke around.

Obviously the features provided are for a single site only (no reseller stuff) but they included:

Simplified Apache configuration options (for those who don't hand-code .htaccess)
Multiple distinct FTP accounts
Multiple distinct secure WebDAV accounts (properly implemented)
Multiple host MySQL access
Multiple log analysis tools
Raw log access
Cron Jobs
Home directory (above public root) access
Ruby on Rails
GnuPG encryption
Clear tutorials

I don't know whether UH will implement all of the above and I expect there will be something I find irritating in the changeover (life is like that).

But this was much more useful to me than Ensim, and much, much faster.

...

UH-Matt · 15th October 2009, 11:14 AM

We intend to leave absolutely everything we can enabled, as well as some possible additions.

For those that care we will also be including Fantastico Delux for auto installing the LATEST version of most popular scripts:

netenberg.com || creating possibilities

UH-Tony · 15th October 2009, 04:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by UH-Matt

For those that care we will also be including Fantastico Delux for auto installing the LATEST version of most popular scripts:

netenberg.com || creating possibilities

Just a quick note, Fantastico is nice for quick and easy script installation, but it is FANTASTIC for updating an installation each time an update is released.
(You have to install the script with Fantastico originally but then can perform a 1-click upgrade).

Bech100 · 21st October 2009, 03:14 PM

Im all for the CPanel switch.

Anything that give those that need more advanced features, myself included, is welcome!

demonloop · 22nd October 2009, 07:16 PM

Any updates on cPanel? I thought the switch was early this week for new clients?

Nothing on the main site yet however.

Simon · 22nd October 2009, 07:19 PM

Who said this week! I dont remember anyone saying a final decision had been made...

UH-Matt · 22nd October 2009, 07:33 PM

Well a final decision has definitely been made, and Cpanel is coming.

Currently we are waiting on a particularly large order of brand new Dell r710 servers to arrive in our datacenter, these will be the replacement spec for all current shared/reseller servers and will be including 4 x 15K SAS disks in RAID10, we are very much looking forward to improved disk performance, speed and life after several recent disk/raid failures on some of our older shared servers.

Once the hardware is in place we will be making an announcement regarding new accounts, as well as timelines and information for existing accounts.

Another thing we are waiting for is the next release of Cpanel, which they have rebuilt the way MySQL Databases work to remove the need for prefixes, making it very much easier to migrate Ensim servers to Cpanel servers!

If anyone has any further thoughts or comments or questions or feedback, now is the time so we can get that information into our final announcement coming very soon!

demonloop · 23rd October 2009, 10:47 AM

Matt,

Any chance of a rough estimate when new customers will be able to sign up for cPanel, it doesn't have to be set in stone, but it will save me the trouble of checking the board and your site twice a day!