Windows hosting admin panel

mick.fr

Hi there,

I have a customer, an ISP, not based in Ireland, who is seeking to implement Windows Hosting (With IIS and MSSQL).
He is looking for a solution equivalent to cPanel.

So far I have found PLESK, CWIPanel.

Do you know any other solution that provides a good frontend web interface to manage Windows hosting options (Add FTP user, change DNS entries, add email users, add MSSQL tables/database...).

Thanks

Adam

Blacknight provide helm with a lot of their windows hosting packages if I'm not mistaken...? I find it quite good.

There's also zpanel, although I've no experience with it so I can't say anything for it. Link: http://www.thezpanel.com/

hth,

Adam

mneylon

There are a lot of hosting control panels out there for windows and linux.

Before you make a choice you should really take the time to test a few of them thoroughly to ensure that they will scale.

Most commercial control panels will offer you a solution that is superior to cpanel (which doesn't take much!)

mick.fr

Thanks for your reply.
Yeah sure this is going to be tested first, but I wanted to know what are the main and most reliable ones that an ISP could implement without too much hassle.

mneylon

Plesk, Helm and Ensim with maybe H-sphere a close runner

To be honest this is not the best place to ask. You'd be better off on one of the more specialised sites

mick.fr

Well ISP is not my main area, so I don't know any specialised forum, but I know people like you have the experience to do that, reason why I asked.
Thanks again

seamus

I installed ZPanel here on my own machine and took a brief look. Aside from it being in a seemingly beta state, it doesn't seem to be overly well coded or full of features.

It's a nice idea if you're on a budget, but for proper business it doesn't come remotely close to something like H-Sphere (for example).

mneylon

It depends on how many servers you want to handle.
The products I've mentioned all have some form of multi-server coverage

mick.fr

The company I am looking after is going to buy HP blades (465c) and (480c) for IIS and MSSQL hosting, with a SAN on the back but it is really difficult to estimate how many domains with hosted packages can they actually run on a single blade (Depending of the hardware and the package itself).

Reason why I was also looking for some kind of tool to calculate the load of the Windows servers depending of the typical charge with 500 hosted domains or more.

The company use to set up everything manually (DNS change, FTP user accounts...) and sometimes those basic ops takes them 2-4 days.
So they want a management interface (web based) for them as admins and another one for the customer, to automate this kind of tasks and improve the quality of service.

I think 365 hosting has this kind of windows frontend for customers, but I have not seen which solution they use.

mneylon

mick.fr wrote:

I think 365 hosting has this kind of windows frontend for customers, but I have not seen which solution they use.

they use h-sphere, but it's just one of the solutions available.

If you speak to Plesk or Ensim or Helm they'd be able to tell you why their solution is or isn't suitable

Arch-Stanton

Ensim are doing a deal on their Windows Software, free for the first year, might be worth a look
http://www.ensim.com/ProXwin/mspromo07/index.html?utm_source=ensim&utm_medium=banner&utm_content=homelink&utm_campaign=mspromo07

.

mneylon

Several of the more popular control panels are listed here:

http://www.whmarket.com/hosting-automation/control-panels/

steve-hosting36

Hsphere sounds ideal and we run it on the same kind of platform. It runs windows and linux as well as all the database servers, dns server and email servers from the same single login/management tool and is a very mature product.