maniacmartin

I’ve finally decided that enough is enough with DirectAdmin. It’s haphazard way of downloading tar.gzs and compiling from source to random places that it only knows is a sure way to make a disaster in the future. Not only does this make applying updates a cumbersome process, as it doesn’t use any sort of repository or anything, it also means that when something does go wrong it can take ages to track down.

Amidst the ill-thought-out shell scripts, perl scripts and binary blobs, sometimes you can work out what its up to, sometimes not. And things being broken because of syntax errors (e.g. missing closing brackets) in a paid product is not something I really have time to sort out any more.

Now, for all of you screaming “Use SSH with webmin/virtualmin”, I would love to, but other server users would be less than pleased to lose their shiny control panel, so that leaves cPanel and Plesk. I’ve decided to go with Plesk, because it looks shinierâ„¢ and is rumoured to be more secure and manage things better behind the scenes, even if its interface isn’t as intuitive as cPanel’s.

Of course, control panel providers only truly support Redhat derivatives (the Debian etch build wouldn’t even install for me), so I’m moving my server to CentOS (even though I prefer Debian). At least it will work, which is the main thing.