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I have two based on my own experience: 1. ROES Roes is used/offered by many large photo and digital press printing companies. Almost every pro wedding and por

I have two based on my own experience: 1. ROES Roes is used/offered by many large photo and digital press printing companies. Almost every pro wedding and portrait photographer I know uses it to submit print orders. It is, believe it or not, a desktop Java app. It lets labs define their own products/prices and have orders queued into their printing systems. It's a gigantic PITA to use, has no sort of modern API and is part of the reason many of these print companies can't innovate with "Stripe for printing X" type features. http://www.softworkssystems.com/roes_pro/index.php http://www.softworkssystems.com/roes_pro/index.php 2. Plesk/cPanel Pick either one. Combined, the 2 have probably 90% of the server/hosting control panel market. Yes, I know on-demand cloud computing is all the rage with us hackers but I don't see the need to manage traditional hosting and email going away anytime soon. Considering a) free google apps going away, b) Wordpress not slowing down, c) static sites/blogs like Jekyll gaining popularity, d) rising popularity of nginx and PostgreSQL, etc, I think there's several angles you could choose from as an initial wedge into this space. We use Pesk on our dedicated servers and its a nightmare. It infects a server, it's bloated, it's slow, and it has a horrible API/command line interface. If you doubt me, ask anyone who's ever worked for Rackspace support how much they love handling Plesk tickets. If you built a simple rails/Sinatra based panel that did about 6 core features and didn't hijack a system, I'd write you a check right now. http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/ http://www.parallels.com/products/plesk/

dangero 13y ago
cPanel is a good one. I cringe anytime I have to use it, but I understand why it's there... It has a ton of features that the hosting company can advertise. That's probably what would make it hard to disrupt because while a new interface could look cleaner, the hosting company could lose some marketing appeal. I'd be interested to hear you elaboration on how you would create an initial wedge in that market.
- rfnslyr 13y ago
  Honestly I have never had any problem with cPanel. Does exactly what I need it to do. What problems did you run into with cPanel?
  - dangero 13y ago
    For one, I think the cPanel interface is very out of date graphic design wise. Secondly, it's your typical last decade software that has a million features. I think it's also probably too technical for the average shared hosting user. Defeating cPanel probably is a lot like defeating craigslist. I think like callmeed is saying, you're not going to do it by creating a cPanel competitor, but rather making replacements for specific features of cPanel that can stand on their own.
- callmeed 13y ago
  Well, cPanel and Plesk are mainly centered around Apache, so my first though is make one for nginx. Include a 1-click installer for Nginx + PHP-FPM + WordPress [1] and I think you'd already be onto something. Next, look at some way to do simple, static site/blog hosting (again using nginx). Give them a choice of Jekyll or Middleman (I do Ruby so that's what I know) and let them update via (S)FTP, a rich-text editor, or email. I started something like this with http://www.utterson.me http://www.utterson.me but also check out http://neocities.org http://neocities.org that was posted on HN recently. Basically, slap a nice hosting account on either of those and go from there. Think about all the freelance designers/developers out there. They build a site or a WP theme for a customer. That customer then needs to host it. So give them the ability to make money without all the bloat of Plesk/cPanel's reseller/sub-account BS. Stripe integration could come into play here. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-wordpress-with-nginx-on-ubuntu-12-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...
stevekemp 13y ago
Regarding Plesk/CPanel you might consider looking at the open-source project we released: http://symbiosis.bytemark.co.uk/ http://symbiosis.bytemark.co.uk/ As you can see it is thoroughly documented and allows you to create websites and mailboxes via SFTP. For example to create the hosting for the site "example.com", and some mailboxes you'd run: mkdir -p /srv/example.com/public/htdocs mkdir -p /srv/example.com/config echo "ftp-pass" > /srv/example.com/config/ftp-password mkdir /srv/example.com/mailboxes/bob echo "secret" > example.com/mailboxes/bob/password Built around Debian Squeeze, iwth wheezy support in the future, it is a modular series of packages for IMAP, POP3, Webmail, Website hosting, with utilities for SSL, etc, too. Adding a control panel would be trivial, but we tend to assume folk will login via ssh/sftp.

dangero 13y ago

cPanel is a good one. I cringe anytime I have to use it, but I understand why it's there... It has a ton of features that the hosting company can advertise. That's probably what would make it hard to disrupt because while a new interface could look cleaner, the hosting company could lose some marketing appeal. I'd be interested to hear you elaboration on how you would create an initial wedge in that market.

rfnslyr 13y ago
Honestly I have never had any problem with cPanel. Does exactly what I need it to do. What problems did you run into with cPanel?
- dangero 13y ago
  For one, I think the cPanel interface is very out of date graphic design wise. Secondly, it's your typical last decade software that has a million features. I think it's also probably too technical for the average shared hosting user. Defeating cPanel probably is a lot like defeating craigslist. I think like callmeed is saying, you're not going to do it by creating a cPanel competitor, but rather making replacements for specific features of cPanel that can stand on their own.
callmeed 13y ago
Well, cPanel and Plesk are mainly centered around Apache, so my first though is make one for nginx. Include a 1-click installer for Nginx + PHP-FPM + WordPress [1] and I think you'd already be onto something. Next, look at some way to do simple, static site/blog hosting (again using nginx). Give them a choice of Jekyll or Middleman (I do Ruby so that's what I know) and let them update via (S)FTP, a rich-text editor, or email. I started something like this with http://www.utterson.me http://www.utterson.me but also check out http://neocities.org http://neocities.org that was posted on HN recently. Basically, slap a nice hosting account on either of those and go from there. Think about all the freelance designers/developers out there. They build a site or a WP theme for a customer. That customer then needs to host it. So give them the ability to make money without all the bloat of Plesk/cPanel's reseller/sub-account BS. Stripe integration could come into play here. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-wordpress-with-nginx-on-ubuntu-12-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-insta...

stevekemp 13y ago

Regarding Plesk/CPanel you might consider looking at the open-source project we released: http://symbiosis.bytemark.co.uk/ http://symbiosis.bytemark.co.uk/ As you can see it is thoroughly documented and allows you to create websites and mailboxes via SFTP. For example to create the hosting for the site "example.com", and some mailboxes you'd run: mkdir -p /srv/example.com/public/htdocs mkdir -p /srv/example.com/config echo "ftp-pass" > /srv/example.com/config/ftp-password mkdir /srv/example.com/mailboxes/bob echo "secret" > example.com/mailboxes/bob/password Built around Debian Squeeze, iwth wheezy support in the future, it is a modular series of packages for IMAP, POP3, Webmail, Website hosting, with utilities for SSL, etc, too. Adding a control panel would be trivial, but we tend to assume folk will login via ssh/sftp.