View Full Version : Ensim vs. Hsphere
Hey
I take it most of you guys are Hsphere-fans ;)
But what do you see as the pros and cons of using for example Ensim Pro versus Hsphere.
Personally of course a better Control Panel in the sense of having several servers in one control-unit = HSphere plus .. but Ensim Unify is there now
In the new Ensim Unify you will get all the latest Microsoft - as soon as it is happening (Sharepoint, exchange, CMS etc). Definetly a plus for Ensim.
Any thoughts or even experiences
Is there other companies "as good as Hsphere and Ensim". ?
dynamicnet
09-09-04, 14:06
Greetings:
Why does one person like ice cream, and another would perfer coffee?
Uh?
You are asking for a comparison between a compelte hosting automation solution that happens to include an end user control panel, and just another control panel.
There is no comparison. It is like comparing apples and oranges.
Thank you.
Greetings:
Why does one person like ice cream, and another would perfer coffee?
Uh?
You are asking for a comparison between a compelte hosting automation solution that happens to include an end user control panel, and just another control panel.
There is no comparison. It is like comparing apples and oranges.
Thank you.
I am looking at it from a technical point of view. I do understand that Hsphere also includes billing, domain registrations etc, but I absolutely do feel that they can be compared from a technical point of view.
It is just a question of what you want to use it for / what parts of the product you compare.
I am looking at it from a technical point of view. I do understand that Hsphere also includes billing, domain registrations etc, but I absolutely do feel that they can be compared from a technical point of view.
Well Dynamic is one of the better technical minds here ..
Ensim Has a weaker e-mail system ..
Ensim Has far weaker administrative interface ..
Ensim Costs more (Ok thats not technical .. but many a technical project has been hampered by money concerns)
Ensim has a weaker community/vendor support network .. Trust me I am migrating people away and they want off ASAP.
Any new thing "Unify" they are coming out with is FUD .. What I see is vaporware ..
But in the end . no matter what you might make the supportabilty question number one .. Ensim does have a stronger third party support network .. Than PSOFT .. And in this case I will withhold comment ..
Lady Linux
Well Dynamic is one of the better technical minds here ..
Ensim Has a weaker e-mail system ..
Ensim Has far weaker administrative interface ..
Ensim Costs more (Ok thats not technical .. but many a technical project has been hampered by money concerns)
Ensim has a weaker community/vendor support network .. Trust me I am migrating people away and they want off ASAP.
Any new thing "Unify" they are coming out with is FUD .. What I see is vaporware ..
But in the end . no matter what you might make the supportabilty question number one .. Ensim does have a stronger third party support network .. Than PSOFT .. And in this case I will withhold comment ..
Lady Linux
I have been working with Ensim (And Actually also Ensim Unify) and can definetly not advise _anyone_ to using it ;-)
What does "FUD" and Vaporware mean ? (Sorry for my bad English).
Basically what I _really_ like about Hsphere is that I can "build on top" of it better than Ensim. Better Skin, better XML, much better possibility of changing Qmail etc. etc.
But I truely would wish as you say that I could get a stronger support (24/7-365 phone ;-)) with Hsphere, buuut of course that costs.
Well - nuff said I was just curious what other people experienced ! :-)
dynamicnet
09-09-04, 15:23
Greetings:
"I am looking at it from a technical point of view. I do understand that Hsphere also includes billing, domain registrations etc, but I absolutely do feel that they can be compared from a technical point of view.
It is just a question of what you want to use it for / what parts of the product you compare."
(still blushing from LL)
As a pure technician I guess you can compare a go cart to a Rolls Royce, but what would that gain because you are really comparing apples and oranges.
H-Sphere can be compared with HSPComplete and Spherea if you want to find systems that fit the genera of complete hosting automation solutions.
If you try to compare H-Sphere to Ensim/Ensim Pro, what you really end up doing is only comparing one small piece of H-Sphere; and that does not justice to either product.
What I can state as a server administrator is keeping H-Sphere-based servers up to date from a security and application perspective is 1,000% easier compared to a lot of other “just another control panel” systems especially Ensim.
Ensim has so much they forbid to update that it makes it very scary.
The average life span of an insure system on the Internet today is 17 minutes according to http://www.dshield.org/; and for the past two years, well over 50% of our work load has been removing hacks and securing servers.
So when I’m forced to wait on Ensim to come out with its own version of a patch the operating system or application vendor released days ago, I tremble.
In ending, I cannot stress that the systems are vastly different enough that no comparison is a fair comparison.
Thank you.
Greetings:
As a pure technician I guess you can compare a go cart to a Rolls Royce, but what would that gain because you are really comparing apples and oranges.
He he he - fair enough ;-)
Well - thanks for your thoughts anyhow !
Boegman
I'm not sure about Ensim, but after trying to maintain a couple of HSphere servers for almost 6 months, we've migrated our Linux and Window's servers over to Plesk a few weeks ago and have only had a fraction of the problems as we had with HSphere. We also had a lot fewer problems when we were on CPanel, but we migrated off of that because they didn't offer it for Windows. I feel a lot more comfortable hosting customers on a non-HSphere server.
I know there are several datacenters who support Ensim in addition to Plesk and Cpanel, but few support HSphere. Our particular datacenter started off with Ensim, but evidentially had some issues with it so they got rid of it and replaced their offering with Plesk.
I have to admit that pre-version 7, I wasn't really a Plesk fan even has a customer, but this new version has made some significant improvements over previous versions and it appears Ensim as well as Cpanel are also making some decent progress and improvements.
Hsphere has good potential, but you pretty much have to be a 'tech-head' to maintain an HSphere cluster because it can be a significantly more complicated system and there may not be a lot of support other than the community here. Whereas, with Plesk, Ensim, or Cpanel, there are a ton of admin companies that can assist with issues.
As for the interface, I've been able to figure out how to setup accounts and administrate the server in a matter of a few days on Plesk what took me several weeks or months to setup in HSphere. HSphere is one of the few control panels I've seen that doesn't allow for full updates of records. I had numerous issues with adding and changing certain things in HSphere where it wouldn't allow me to edit a record or delete it so everything got really cluttered. Plesk even comes with it's own version of fantastico in what it calls the application vault so that was a plus to the interface. HSphere has something similar, but Plesk's ability to let admin's add applications through the CP makes it one step ahead. Plesk, and I believe Ensim, both have builtin Tomcat JSP hosting on single servers with the click of a button that HSphere doesn't have. Plesk also now has it's own 'sitebuilder' application that's supposed to be like SiteStudio. Also, Cpanel and Plesk's single click upgrade buttons are a nice feature that HSphere doesn't have that makes this process easier (when it works properly).
The file structure on how it handles domains is similar between Plesk and HSphere and much better than say something like CPanel, but the Plesk structure is better per domain and seems more intuitive than HSphere. With Plesk, we can secure http, https, subdomains, and webusers all in different directories under the same domain directory. On some systems such as with CPanel everything is just kind of lumped under a single html directory which I always thought was poor structure for handling add-on domains.
As for security, Plesk, as well as Cpanel, have been easier to secure than an HSphere cluster partially because HSphere has too many restrictions on what we can an can't update. Not being allowed to update this software always made me a little leary. And although Plesk comes with some old software, from what I've seen, it does allow for upgrades without breaking the system whereas this may not be the issue with HSphere.
One of the nice things with HSphere that the others don't have is server clustering and built-in billing software. Cpanel and Plesk both have some of these options but not exactly along the same line. Cpanel allows for DNS clustering only. And although Plesk itself doesn't have a built-in billing system, the company that makes Plesk offers their own product called HSPComplete that does this and more although it's quite pricey.
When it all comes down to the nitty gritty, a lot of it is matter of preference. Each control panel has it's pro's and con's and you just need to determine which is best suited for your application. Obviously, they're all successful control panels and there are a ton of people using each of them.
dynamicnet
09-10-04, 08:51
Greetings David:
“I know there are several datacenters who support Ensim in addition to Plesk and Cpanel, but few support HSphere.”
Why does that matter?
What type of support would a data center have to provide for an automation system like H-Sphere or a control panel like Plesk or Ensim?
“Hsphere has good potential, but you pretty much have to be a 'tech-head' to maintain an HSphere cluster because it can be a significantly more complicated system and there may not be a lot of support other than the community here.
Whereas, with Plesk, Ensim, or Cpanel, there are a ton of admin companies that can assist with issues.”
I continue to be dismayed by your opinion in this area.
Any system administrator with several years experience should have zero problems maintaining H-Sphere or Plesk or Ensim or Cpanel, etc.
There are some companies that for various reasons choose the chop shops of managed service providers on the Internet. You know, those companies that oversell their services, hire high school and college students, and who have a business model which does not permit their employees and contractors from being real system administrators.
But, please do not rate any system (be it H-Sphere or any other system) as being hard to maintain on the basis of contracting with companies that do not have real server administrators under their employment or contract.
Please understand that there are vast quantities of people who call themselves Web designers because they created a site in FrontPage. There are vast quantities of people who call themselves programmers because they either installed someone’s script or because they copied and pasted some lines of code.
But there are also vast quantities of people who call themselves system administrators when they’ve read a book or two, and maybe they’ve trouble shooted a problem or two.
Please do not compare or judge any system on being too technical when you are basing your experience with such people.
It does no justice whatsoever to the system you are judging; and it certainly does not justice to those of us who are system administrators et al.
“As for security, Plesk, as well as Cpanel, have been easier to secure than an HSphere cluster partially because HSphere has too many restrictions on what we can an can't update.”
This is an opinion, and a false statement, David.
H-Sphere has the least restrictions of all systems; and such restrictions are documented on http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentation/sysadmin/rh_update.html
Where as with the others you have to be careful for a wider range of what can and cannot be updated.
Furthermore, there have been more defaced / hacked cpanel-based servers than H-Sphere; I cannot speak for Pesk in that one specific area of defacement / hacking.
Thank you.
Why does that matter?
What type of support would a data center have to provide for an automation system like H-Sphere or a control panel like Plesk or Ensim?
It helps if a datacenter at least knows something about the software running on the servers especially if they're providing any kind of server management with them.
For example, what if they didn't realize that a certain package wasn't supposed to be updated, but as part of their management routine, they updated it and didn't realize it broke the CP until after they get complaints. If they know the CP, they would know not to update that particular package and what may cause problems with a particular CP and not another. Or how would they know that blanking out a single file unique to a particular CP can kill a server dead in the water and how to diagnose and fix this unless they know that CP?
More datacenters nowadays are providing value-add services to compete which typically includes some level of server management which should encompass all software components installed on their servers including the CP.
Any system administrator with several years experience should have zero problems maintaining H-Sphere or Plesk or Ensim or Cpanel, etc.
There are some companies that for various reasons choose the chop shops of managed service providers on the Internet. You know, those companies that oversell their services, hire high school and college students, and who have a business model which does not permit their employees and contractors from being real system administrators.
This may be true, but from my experience, I've found that '2 heads are better than 1' per say so I, personally, would rather pay 2 admin companies that hire mid-level administrators rather than 1 company with high level administrators at the same price. From what I've encountered, no single person knows everything about a system and what one person is lacking in competency, another can pick up the slack on to help out. I just don't like to 'put all of my eggs in one basket' by going with a single admin group and/or allowing a single CP control multiple servers, etc.
A lot of these companies that may not have administrators with certifications may have as much or more experience than someone with a certification. Experience can go a long way and farther than a piece of paper that maybe some of these people never got.
Sure, I've had some competency issues with some of these 'administrators', but everyone is still learning and where one screws up, another can usually come in and fix it. If I find compentency becomes a repetitive issue or major issue then I just move on to another group but I realize that even a certified administrator can screw up and make mistakes.
Please understand that there are vast quantities of people who call themselves Web designers because they created a site in FrontPage. There are vast quantities of people who call themselves programmers because they either installed someone’s script or because they copied and pasted some lines of code.
But there are also vast quantities of people who call themselves system administrators when they’ve read a book or two, and maybe they’ve trouble shooted a problem or two.
Unfortunately this is true. There's a lot of 'BS' out there with people overinflating their credentials and it's a matter of filtering through who is competent and who is not.
Please do not compare or judge any system on being too technical when you are basing your experience with such people.
That is not my sole judgement on a system being too technical. I also like to be able to perform some of the administrative duties on my servers myself so I don't need to call in an administrator for every little issue that may come up. As a hands-on kind of person, I don't like having to depend on someone else all of the time as a crutch to maintaining my own servers. I think if people are going to be in a particular business or industry, they should know at least something about it and be able to be somewhat functional by themselves. And there should be no need for a particular tool to be more complicated than it needs to be where it requires an expert to manage it to get the job done.
H-Sphere has the least restrictions of all systems; and such restrictions are documented on http://www.psoft.net/HSdocumentatio.../rh_update.html
Where as with the others you have to be careful for a wider range of what can and cannot be updated.
I have to disagree with this as HSphere requires about a dozen packages to be excluded from up2date whereas Plesk requires none to maybe a handful and Cpanel require no exclusions. This may or may not be why some CPanel servers have issues periodically but from what I've seen 'no exclusions' is common for a CPanel server.
Furthermore, there have been more defaced / hacked cpanel-based servers than H-Sphere; I cannot speak for Pesk in that one specific area of defacement / hacking.
This is probably true, but you also have to consider who is leasing the CPanel servers vs those with HSphere. There are a ton of newbies out there that just throw a CPanel server online without even securing it because CPanel is so 'easy' to use and cheap for some people. Many of these people don't realize they need to secure their server nor how to do it until it's too late. HSphere has typically had a different customer base, one which may more realize that their servers need to be secured and may make more proactive measures in doing so. It's also similar to the issue with Windows being so popular that hackers target Windows just as Cpanel is so common that they're also an easy target. The combination between these makes Cpanel servers more vulnerable, not because of the control panel itself but because of these other circumstances.
dynamicnet
09-10-04, 10:45
Greetings David:
Most data centers that include control panels with their dedicated server rental offering offer unmanaged servers.
Those data centers that are offering add on value services typically do not employ or contract server administrators.
“If they know the CP, they would know not to update that particular package and what may cause problems with a particular CP and not another.”
If you have /etc/sysconfig/rhn/up2date or /etc/yum.conf set up properly, then unless they are following their own procedures vs. standards, there should be zero problems.
“I've found that '2 heads are better than 1' per say so I, personally, would rather pay 2 admin companies that hire mid-level administrators rather than 1 company with high level administrators at the same price.”
That’s an interesting idea; and it may work some of the time.
A short while back we helped a well known, WHT-frequenting, provider recover from a hack.
While we were on the phone with the owner, they shared that “su” was broken for several months now, and their team of administrators (2+ headers were worthless) could do nothing; and the recommendation was just stick with “sudo” that was working.
In less than five minutes, without logging onto the server, we had “su” working.
Several months, su broken. Several months, a team of mid level administrators did nothing. Less than five minutes from a senior administrator, problem solved.
That’s just one example of decade’s worth of examples that can be given.
“A lot of these companies that may not have administrators with certifications may have as much or more experience than someone with a certification.”
David, you do not need any certificate to be a system administrator. However, you do need experience, training, and education.
“Experience can go a long way and farther than a piece of paper that maybe some of these people never got.”
As I stated, “Any system administrator with several years experience should have zero problems maintaining H-Sphere or Plesk or Ensim or Cpanel, etc.”
Please note there was no use of the word “certification” in my statement.
I stated, “Please do not compare or judge any system on being too technical when you are basing your experience with such people”
You replied, “That is not my sole judgment on a system being too technical. I also like to be able to perform some of the administrative duties on my servers myself”
And you can do so, if you read the documentation.
You posted question after question in the forums that were in the documentation when you first started using H-Sphere.
“have to disagree with this as HSphere requires about a dozen packages to be excluded from up2date whereas Plesk requires none to maybe a handful and Cpanel require no exclusions.”
And all you have to do is add the exclusion list to the proper configuration file – something even a mid level system administrator can do – and you are set.
In any event, we share different points of view which are fine.
Thank you.
Hello,
Alex ??? As someone who has quit and moved on .. you are straying this thread with your Rant .. Now .. We all know that you had issues with Hpshere .. Well I do remember threads with you and "Well My Maint Company When They Get Time Will Learn It" ... I support Cpanel,Plesk, And Hsphere .. Now .. Peter has the same experience .. Now before you judge something so harshly .. Remember point and click is not server administration .. Knowing how to click a button .. is not being a Admin ..
I Speak from building hosting companies WITHOUT a CP .. As in do everything manually ..
Much Like Peter ..
Lady Linux
PS: I will not comment in this thread again .. Boegman asked a fair question .. and now Even im Ranting .. not cool ..
I use Ensim before I switch to Plesk 7 and now I am trying out Hsphere.
Ensim > Plesk? Ensim email failed every 2 weeks under heavy use, and a host of other problems.
Plesk > Hsphere? I am not giving up Plesk yet but would like to try out Hsphere. I need Modernbill to integrate with plesk 7 (to equal hsphere) and yet it is not a seamless integration. Operation wise you still have to meddle with Plesk setup to get all the services setup as per the order spec. Hsphere is everything in one so I am giving it a try. Still in the setting up phase I have yet any production experience to share. I can understand why Alex think it is complicate. After trying modernbill and plesk, I think Hsphere is what I have been looking for.
Why I don't consider CPanel+WHM+Autopilot?
Cpanel is till using sendmail, I am staying away from sendmail at all cost.
My only complain about Hsphere is that, there is no mail user login to setup mail forwarding, auto-responder and setup their own spam filter list.
Just a small note to add here - Ensim Pro 4.0.x does not restrict or require you to not update any packages now. In the past it did but now it does not, and you do not have to wait for the security fixes to come from Ensim.
Those data centers that are offering add on value services typically do not employ or contract server administrators.
Some may have actual server administrators, but at an additional cost above the standard management typically included. It appears most of the included management of our datacenter is from technicians which seems to resolve most of the issues and fortunately, actual administrators don't always need to be called in.
Several months, su broken. Several months, a team of mid level administrators did nothing. Less than five minutes from a senior administrator, problem solved.
I've had similar experiences, but this can be true in several cases even with a senior administrator. It's sometimes a matter of whether that particular administrator has encountered the problem before. Many times the more experience someone has, the more likely they may have encountered the problem, but not always true. A newbie could encounter and resolve something new that maybe even a senior admin may not have encountered yet.
Please note there was no use of the word “certification” in my statement.
Sorry if I misinterpreted your reply regarding this.
And you can do so, if you read the documentation.
There's a ton of documentation that's tough to weed through if you don't know what keywords to search for. Some of the documentation may also be unclear or there were some other various reasons it was easier to inquire on the forums.
As someone who has quit and moved on .. you are straying this thread with your Rant
Actually, we still have 1 of our hsphere servers with a couple of accounts on it left although everything else has been migrated off. The plan is to either cancel the server or put Plesk on it within a couple of months after breaking in the Plesk servers, but in the meantime, we're still doing some HSphere administration. I think the last straw for me was when our last ticket to psoft came back stating they couldn't resolve the issue. I need to know we have support groups that can resolve our problems.
I'm just trying to point out my experiences of various control panels so as to give my input on different options. I've tried to include any references I can regarding the original Ensim question based on what I've encountered also.
But, personally, I still like Cobalt the best for user interface. :-D
Operation wise you still have to meddle with Plesk setup to get all the services setup as per the order spec. Hsphere is everything in one so I am giving it a try. Still in the setting up phase I have yet any production experience to share. I can understand why Alex think it is complicate. After trying modernbill and plesk, I think Hsphere is what I have been looking for.
Actually Cpanel is probably the easiest to comprehend and setup between CPanel, Plesk, and HSPhere. Plesk is probabably one of these easier to setup unless you deal with resellers in which case, it wasn't originally so clear how to set those up, but both are easier to setup than HSphere. It probably took me 5 months working with HSphere to figure out what I could figure out in a matter of 5 days of cpanel or plesk. This is one of the reasons we also reloaded our windows/helm/hsphere server with windows/plesk.
As for billing, that was another of the reasons I switched from cpanel to hsphere, but it wasn't worth it in the long run for us so we switched to something else. We still have our whoiscart license and they're currently working on a plesk integration which I may try out. I had also considered modernbill, but we want to use multiple brand names, not just for hosting but other ventures as well for client management, and the price of all of the licenses may get too expensive whereas we can purchase several whoiscart licenses for a lot cheaper than a bunch of modernbill licenses and run lots of brands at an affordable rate. This is one nice thing about HSphere in that billing software is included, but that was only one of the many aspects behind our choice of control panels.
Why I don't consider CPanel+WHM+Autopilot?
Cpanel is till using sendmail, I am staying away from sendmail at all cost.
Cpanel primarily uses Exim for it's mailer. I'm not sure if it actually uses sendmail unless its just for certain php functions, but I'm sure you can disable this or maybe reroute it to exim if it's not already. As for autopilot, it's a pretty nice system, but the automation only works with cpanel servers. So, in our case, since we no longer have a cpanel server, we now have a copy of autopilot that's less than fully functional although we can still technically use it for other customer billing if we wanted.
Not that I am prejudice, whoiscart is a bit primitive to compare with modernbill and hsphere. I also factor in time (to me is more important than just $$ value), to put everything together to make what hsphere already have in one complete package.
Scalability, is another important factor, but can't comment much. Till I reach that stage and see how more servers could be added without breaking anything.
Not that I am prejudice, whoiscart is a bit primitive to compare with modernbill and hsphere.
It may not currently be quite as robust as some systems, but they're working on an advanced whoiscart called silverstar that is supposed to be comparable to something like modernbill, whmap, etc.
Scalability, is another important factor, but can't comment much. Till I reach that stage and see how more servers could be added without breaking anything.
Plesk also has multi-server software to help manage multiple servers called plesk expand just like it has hspcomplete for billing and virtiosso for virtual servers.
One of the things regarding this with hsphere is that it's easier to setup multi-servers from the beginning than to expand later. It seems like many times psoft has to intervene to do the migrations because of the complexity.
I did a larger Project in January and migrated a complete Hosting Company off 4 Control Panels (Confixx,Cpanel,Cobalt RAQ,Standard Ensim) onto Ensim Pro. Now 8 months afterwards we are evaluating H-Sphere since Ensim is simply FUBAR in the environment.
Ensim Unify prices were around 13.000$ for the Setup we required (5.000 User Accounts with around 15k Domains). Ensim Sales and Techs were very helpful in this Process we had alot of Demos and Webex Meetings about Unify and other Techniques used and provided by Ensim.
Ensim Unify is a 100% Microsoft Solution this means no more Apache (i.e no more .htaccess) PHP Support limited (90% of the Clients used PHP), mySQL not supported (that was in January dunno if they support it now). The Mail System is MS Exchange (say hi to 4$ per Mbox) which has in Version 2003 one of the Best Webmailers I have seen so far, and is also a great Groupware Product for Companys but simply oversized for the Standard 5$ Hosting.
They had a multiserver Solution in January which was cancelled due to many Problems and oversized prices, we tested it with our 20 Servers, it was a total pain the copy jobs failed 90% of the time, Ensim Support was unable to be anywhere near helpful. i.e all Custom DNS Entries from Customers vanished on copy, Databases got corrupted etc.
As of now the Standard Server is Intel Celeron 2,6GHZ 1GB RAM 2x80GB HDD with Fedora + Ensim Pro , the most load on the Servers is brought by the Control Panel itself. After a usual week we reboot the Machines otherwise the load of the Control Panel just gets worse. I dont like the fact that I have to login to 20 Machines manually in Order to Process Accounts, Check Reseller Usage etc, we have scripts but its still not a professional built-in Solution by the Developer.
One thing I like tough is Ensim Basic, its cheap and useful for the Entry Level Server that is being sold to those that have grown out of their Hosting Account but dont want to loose the Point & Click Administration.
I move ensim from P4 to Dual Xeon, with less than 200 clients on it, still it broke 2X a months or something will freeze out of no reason. Then we gave up Ensim altogether. At first I want to blame EV1 tech support, but I guess they were as clueless what's going on with Ensim.
I'm surprised this thread didn't mention the fact that Hsphere supports only a few Linux distribs (and a few which are outdated). I've heard that this is because of stability, but can someone elaborate more on this (specifically why)?
dynamicnet
09-16-04, 13:41
Greetings:
H-Sphere supports RedHat 7.x; RedHat Enterprise AS, ES, and WS; CentOS, and FreeBSD in terms of the control panel; and all of those plus Windows 200x for web hosting services.
I don't call that a few; that's a lot.
Thank you.
I'm surprised this thread didn't mention the fact that Hsphere supports only a few Linux distribs (and a few which are outdated). I've heard that this is because of stability, but can someone elaborate more on this (specifically why)?
Distribution structures are complicated. H-Sphere does not exactly operate with the force that CPanel does -- CPanel is often mentioned because of the long list of distributions that are supported for use. What you must consider, is quality over quantity. Out of all of the people here, I'm probably at the head of the list to get H-Sphere moved away from the RedHat line of products, but I still understand their decision to go with them. The "old" distributions you speak of (probably RedHat 7.x versions), are under the support list for both legacy purposes as well as the fact that many administrators using RedHat feel the 7.x series was the last somewhat-stable release.
As far as a distribution being 'outdated' -- if you understand the way a distribution works, the simple updates of packages is what makes a system updated. There are legacy projects that release new packages with security updates (as RedHat has officially stopped supporting those RedHat releases), and of course you're welcome to compile your own new versions.
In the arena of 'new' and 'updated' distributions, RedHat Enterprise and CentOS are fully supported, and are considered to be relatively stable and secure (as far as package and version selection), and are meant to be used in server environments -- using a workstation-oriented release of a distribution (such as Fedora) is generally not wise, as they tend to be more interested in releasing 'cutting edge' software, rather than stable software -- and there's nothing more important in a server envrionment than stability and security.
We could get into a distribution battle, and I would certainly be in the anti-redhat camp, but RedHat offers a significant user base, especially for those 'system administrators' who may be quite new to the task. Ultimately, the development for H-Sphere has been a little rocky recently, and I would much rather have them work hard at a single distribution, and suffer with not having my favorite distribution rather than having that favorite semi-supported.
In the end, if you're intelligent about which H-Sphere upgrades you make, the system is generally quite stable.
I would like to add in a few words here, cannot resist :)
I believe, datacenters' job is to provide a reliable network and all the pieces that one need to manger his or her own servers, this is if you are running a serious business. You need best hardware so that it wont fail you as well as recovery strategy that works under one hour (don't relay on datacenter provided hardware). If you rely on datacenter to provide you with system management then you are in a different market.
You need to know your system, hire a good admin both for system admin and as a backup for emergencies, not two or three heads. I am a programmer by profession, and have seen many times projects fail since corporations hire multiple mid level programmers to satisfy head count. Most projects can be done with two or three top rated programmers and a good DBA. Same thing with system admin, one good company or admin is better than two or three or more, unless you have a listing in a stock exchange or planning to have one soon ;)
I never had issues with hsphere and the software is extreemely stable, plus since I dont bother psoft with foolish things, I get great support when I need them and that being not on the priority support plan. I am not a good system admin, however, I have a good system admin to back me up eps. for linux side.
Hsphere is technical, but its a decent product. I have no experiece with any other control panel though.
I would like to add in a few words here, cannot resist :)
If you rely on datacenter to provide you with system management then you are in a different market.
You need to know your system, hire a good admin both for system admin and as a backup for emergencies, not two or three heads.
Yes depending on Datacenter support for your server problem could be challenging. Recently I ordered a server (P4 3G/HT) with Centos3.1, but it fail to boot with HT enabled, after trying their best for 2 days. Lucky I have a system admin standby to help, he took less than 5mins to resolve the problem.
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