I've been playing with Plesk a bit lately. mu.nu has been running on CPanel for the past three years, and I've come to rather dislike it, not least because they still haven't managed to get it to work with Apache 2.x.

Plesk seems to be pretty good - though admittedly I don't have 250 users on it yet. It's certainly prettier and better organised. CPanel with the Xcontroller theme isn't bad at all, but that does nothing for the administration system that lives behind CPanel - WHM - which is what I get to use. "Disorganised" is too kind a word for WHM, unless you were to prefix it with "hopelessly".

I bought a license for Plesk to try it out; I probably didn't need to do that, since as it happens you can download it for free as long as you only want one domain and one email address. I have it installed on Martina and Sylphiel that way; my license key languishes unused. And I got it installed on Ranma as well.

Both my bought license and Ranma's monthly license are for 30 domains. One thing about CPanel - it costs a bundle, but there are no limits to the number of users you can load onto it. Plesk comes in 30, 100 and 300 domain licenses as well as the even more expensive unlimited version.

And, as I looked at putting my site on Ranma, I counted the domains. I set up ranma.mu.nu as a valid web site, so that Host-Tracker has something to track. I have seven pixymisa domains (com, net, org, nu, biz, info, and name*), four domains pointing to this blog (ambientirony.com/net/mu.nu and ai.mu.nu), then there's animeclips.mu.nu, and whatever my short-lived anime downloads blog was.** So that's 17 out of 30 gone right away.

Well, as it turns out, it's a bit better than that. It's not 30 domains, exactly. Subdomains don't count. Neither do add-on domains - domains that point to the same site as an existing one. And since subdomains seem to be able to have their own FTP and web user logins, and mu.nu is of course just one domain, and most of the domains here that aren't mu.nu are actually add-ons to mu.nu subdomains, I could probably host the entire thing sprawling mass of Munuvia on a single 30 domain Plesk license.

Or maybe not, since I can't work out how to point an add-on domain to a subdomain.

But it certainly is pretty.

And while CPanel has not, after three years, managed to support Apache 2.x***, Plesk in the same amount of time finally managed to incorporate Awstats.

On the yet-another hand, their SpamAssassin module is an extra $50.

Meh.

* Uh... they were cheap.

** I'd revive it, except that it was largely a front-end to my Broadcast Machine installation, and I ran into some nasty bugs in Broadcast Machine about the same time the lead developer called it quits. (I think that's what happened. There hasn't been even a patch for it issued in six months.) I'll probably revive it anyway, now that I have another 1.5 terabytes a month to throw around and don't need BitTorrent so much. Minx has some features for doing Broadcast Machine style sites (if anyone remembers what it looked like), but doesn't do torrents, and won't for some time.

*** Okay, it appears that they recently added Apache 2.0 support to the "EDGE" release, essentially their public beta. Of course, Apache is now on 2.2.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:10 AM | Comments (56) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)