cPanel or DirectAdmin

Lee · February 2020

Interested to gauge general feeling around the choice of hosting panel these days given the options of cPanel or DirectAdmin. Forget the price, provider, location, emotion around whatever cPanel has done, and whatever else.

Just pure preference, which would you rather use?

Francisco · February 2020

For us DirectAdmin has been a big mover.

Most people that have more than their single account on a reseller has opted to move to DirectAdmin.

They're really ramping things up if you check their change logs.

Francisco

Lee · February 2020

What I have seen in my free service is this. Everyone who I invited to test in November/December last year, about 46 or so from a specific group, let's call them middle-class hosters were all happy enough with DA. Then I threw up cPanel this week in a few locations.

Middle-class hosters have filled two of the cPanel locations in like 3 days, dropping DA like it was the Coronavirus.

Meanwhile, everyone else that could only have come from LET/LES/WHT, another 41 users have all (but 2) shunned cPanel and are going for DA locations.

wdmg · February 2020

DirectAdmin all the way. With the new features rolling in, simple UI and reasonable pricing it’s hard to beat.

vimalware · February 2020

DirectAdmin was very straightforward to figure out.

Added a subdomain,( softaculous) - installed some software I'd been meaning to check out and letsencrypt cert deploy all figured out in 10mins.

I think it helps that the options list is way less cluttered on DA

jureve · February 2020

I like DA, it's simple and does its functions.

seriesn · February 2020

@Lee said:
What I have seen in my free service is this. Everyone who I invited to test in November/December last year, about 46 or so from a specific group, let's call them middle-class hosters were all happy enough with DA. Then I threw up cPanel this week in a few locations.

Middle-class hosters have filled two of the cPanel locations in like 3 days, dropping DA like it was the Coronavirus.

Meanwhile, everyone else that could only have come from LET/LES/WHT, another 41 users have all (but 2) shunned cPanel and are going for DA locations.

Well given option, where the cost is same, no one would chose a budget option over "premium". But once you start adding $$, people are more inclined to go for an iphone 11 vs an iphone 11 pro max. Cause, well, some can live without the extra inches. (That is what @Lee said)

Lee · February 2020

@vimalware said: DirectAdmin was very straightforward to figure out.

I definitely agree with this, cPanel unless you already know it is way more complex albeit more feature-rich. But then for basic hosting needs, DirectAdmin wins in my view.

debaser · February 2020

I'm currently running DirectAdmin with a personal license on my main VM. I host some 'production' sites for friends and family on this setup and I really like it. It's clean and straightforward as opposed to cPanel. So as an admin, it's definitely DirectAdmin.

As an enduser though, I'd choose Plesk any day.

bikegremlin · February 2020

These are mine "on-line-notes" (don't know how else to call it) regarding DirectAdmin (compared to cPanel, of course):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/13269/directadmin-experience/

TL/DR: if we put pricing and "grudges with the Oakley" aside, for me at least, cPanel is preferred, hands down.

And that's after giving DirectAdmin a lot of testing - to make sure that habits, fear of the unknown, or any other bias is overcome.

Taking the price and "the evil past" into consideration:
If DirectAdmin gets more "polished" - then I'd prefer DirectAdmin.
If cPanel makes any further price increases, with DirectAdmin staying as it is - I'd prefer DirectAdmin.

Mr_Tom · February 2020

As an admin, DirectAdmin. As a user, they're both about the same from my point of view, just a different way of doing it. I suspect more users have heard of cpanel, or have used it in the past and so that may be the reason for chosing it.

AlwaysSkint · February 2020

I'm more inclined to side with @bikegremlin .
The whole Custombuild is confusing and non intuitive. Additionally, some tasks appear to be queued in that even though I ran an update, the Custombuild icon still showed the notification icon.
The messaging system is a pain: Having to periodically go in and delete the something or other has been updated, for example. A simple email to notify of the update suffices.
DA is improving but still a long way to go..

Can we have a filtered "apachectl -fullstatus" a la WHM? Very handy to know what is being accessed, prior to doing a reboot, is one scenario. It's also useful to spot crawlers/potential hackers. (I cobbled together a status page for CWP but it displays too many historical accesses.)

As for plesk, I always thought it to be f'kin ugly, with a strange directory structure.

Lee · February 2020

I think most are in the same position. As a way to throw up a website and mail either is find, DirectAdmin is probably the easier of the two for that limited purpose. Anything beyond that people tend to gravitate towards cPanel, perhaps not least as it comes with more that is useful out of the box, Cloudflare plugin, Acronis/JetBackup and so on. Not saying everyone is that way but I find most are.

InceptionHosting · February 2020

I think this discussion will be very interesting in 12 - 18 months time.

Not saying it is not interesting now but I think what has happened when the price hike occurred is that DA went from playing the role of the cheaper less feature rich alternative who were happy to simply maintain that status to the real contender for a big market share if they just get back in to some deep development for a year or so.

When they have the UI a little bit more polished, DNS clustering, jetbackups and cloudflare integration taken care of with some API work they cloud clean up.

Lee · February 2020

I just find a lot of things in DirectAdmin really frustrating at the minute, but, what I don't like others may be fine with. As you say, that will likely change and they are moving at a decent pace to improve as are providers like JetBackup to support.

As always the danger is that you tend to compare DA with cPanel and that is wrong, needs a different lens to appreciate them independently.

With the poll at a 60/40 split in favor of DA I was expecting it to be higher, the same question on somewhere like WHT would likely be 95/5 in favor of cPanel. Different groups, different views, and needs.

MikePT · February 2020

@Lee said:
I just find a lot of things in DirectAdmin really frustrating at the minute, but, what I don't like others may be fine with. As you say, that will likely change and they are moving at a decent pace to improve as are providers like JetBackup to support.

As always the danger is that you tend to compare DA with cPanel and that is wrong, needs a different lens to appreciate them independently.

With the poll at a 60/40 split in favor of DA I was expecting it to be higher, the same question on somewhere like WHT would likely be 95/5 in favor of cPanel. Different groups, different views, and needs.

JetBackup should be around the corner...

WSCallum · February 2020

cPanel currently but this would probably change within the next year or so as DirectAdmin improves their feature sets etc.

For the forseeable future cPanel will continue to be used by the majority singular hosted websites or users who can host multiple websites on a singular account - resellers etc will obviously go for DirectAdmin as it's the cheaper option and offers best value for money.

Personally for us sticking with cPanel has probably actually seen an increase in Web Hosting sales but a decrease in Reseller Hosting customers.

Ympker · February 2020

@MikePT said:

@Lee said:
I just find a lot of things in DirectAdmin really frustrating at the minute, but, what I don't like others may be fine with. As you say, that will likely change and they are moving at a decent pace to improve as are providers like JetBackup to support.

As always the danger is that you tend to compare DA with cPanel and that is wrong, needs a different lens to appreciate them independently.

With the poll at a 60/40 split in favor of DA I was expecting it to be higher, the same question on somewhere like WHT would likely be 95/5 in favor of cPanel. Different groups, different views, and needs.

JetBackup should be around the corner...

Really waiting for this and hoping our pony @Francisco doesn't abondon free DA VPS by then.

MikePT · February 2020

@Ympker said:

@MikePT said:

@Lee said:
I just find a lot of things in DirectAdmin really frustrating at the minute, but, what I don't like others may be fine with. As you say, that will likely change and they are moving at a decent pace to improve as are providers like JetBackup to support.

As always the danger is that you tend to compare DA with cPanel and that is wrong, needs a different lens to appreciate them independently.

With the poll at a 60/40 split in favor of DA I was expecting it to be higher, the same question on somewhere like WHT would likely be 95/5 in favor of cPanel. Different groups, different views, and needs.

JetBackup should be around the corner...

Really waiting for this and hoping our pony @Francisco doesn't abondon free DA VPS by then.

Yeah let's hope it'll be ready in like a month... That was the ETA.

bikegremlin · February 2020

Waiting patiently for JetBackup.
If it gets implemented and properly tested (with most bugs fixed) by the end of this year - I'm happy.

By the time DA gets completely polished and takes a larger market share, I would expect prices to rise - probably not to the level of cPanel, but it would make no sense to not become "more premium" then.

deepsouthcarolina · February 2020

Francisco · February 2020

@Ympker said:

@MikePT said:

@Lee said:
I just find a lot of things in DirectAdmin really frustrating at the minute, but, what I don't like others may be fine with. As you say, that will likely change and they are moving at a decent pace to improve as are providers like JetBackup to support.

As always the danger is that you tend to compare DA with cPanel and that is wrong, needs a different lens to appreciate them independently.

With the poll at a 60/40 split in favor of DA I was expecting it to be higher, the same question on somewhere like WHT would likely be 95/5 in favor of cPanel. Different groups, different views, and needs.

JetBackup should be around the corner...

Really waiting for this and hoping our pony @Francisco doesn't abondon free DA VPS by then.

Not happening

Keep them licenses rolling and I'll work to keep things in stock.

Francisco

cPanel or DirectAdmin

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