EIRCA Premium Quality H-Sphere Reseller Hosting

I’ll start this post off by telling you that my thoughts on this topic are gathered after 5+ years working with both control panels.

This comparison is specific to Multi domain and Reseller hosting.

Let’s start by giving the pros and cons of the control panel systems. No head-to-head comparisons, just their good and bad points. Part 2, to be posted in a couple of weeks, will see them go head to head.

cPanel

Pros: A great single-server solution for ‘quick and dirty’ single domain hosting. The popularity for cpanel soared because of its single-server licensing cost and the fact that datacenters were given significant discounts in order to push it as a control panel solution. Kudos to the cpanel vendor relations team, they did a great job with their partnership management. For a company offering 1-5 servers for single domain hosting, this panel works “as advertized” and gives a lot of control for the user by way of the new “x3″ skin. Users reported that they like the one-click access of cpanel, and that everything is managed within the one panel, or within a few clicks. The control panel system is heavy in the way of support from third party tool developers such as modernbill, WHMCS, fantastic, rvskin.

Cons:  cPanel doesn’t do multiple domains within one panel. Period. They advertize it, but their version of multiple domains is simply an “addon domain” function that offers little in the way of flexibility or functionality.When it comes to billing, you need to pay an additional fee to a third party company such as modernbill. cPanel has no billing capability so relies on third parties to provide this integration. Most of the third party billing providers for cpanel have solutions starting at around $10-$15. That’s an important nugget of information for potential resellers. Not only does the third party billing solution have to control cpanel from a remote location, it can not do it live. This means that there is little in the way of “click to purchase” from the panel. If you want that functionality, purchase RVSkin to integrate with your billing solution. Yes, that’s correct: Another addon required from a third party.

Myths:  “cPanel is the most popular control panel”. This is a commonly uttered phrase in various web hosting discussion forums. Granted, the phrase is usually being uttered by those that offer the panel, but it’s a viral message, something cPanel “fans” have been uttering for a while, with no facts to back their statement up. I have replied to quite a few people, after they uttered a similar statement, and asked them to provide me with their source. They either don’t reply, or say “they saw it somewhere”. Maybe Al Gore deleted it from the internets. Who knows?

Final thought on cpanel: If a company or a reseller is looking for a single-server system and wants to keep costs down, it would be a good buy (depending on which provider you chose, I guess). I am often accused of disliking cPanel. That is not the case. Infact, I like cpanel for what it is: A single server environment designed for single domain hosting.

H-Sphere

Pros: H-Sphere is a system designed with multi-domain and reseller hosting at the forefront of the developers’ collective minds. Almost every function is geared toward multi-domain or reseller hosting. It is a multi-server automation system that requires no third party programs as it has inbuilt billing, support, payments and other options. That it can scale to hundreds of servers within the cluster is a major plus, it gives admins and resellers alike the ability to spread accounts across an array of servers (and, in our case, across a number of geographical locations). Multi-domain hosting is handled for a user within one panel: Every setting can be domain-specific and all manageable in a true multi-domain environment.

Cons: As a side-effect of everything being fully integrated, resellers can sometimes find the learning curve quite steep. Some resellers find it almost offers “too much”, as they are finding their feet within the H-Sphere environment. I can agree with this, it is a daunting proposition at first glance. Another problem with H-Sphere is that the owners simply don’t market it enough. They have private sales channels, sure, but you don’t see them hammering their product on a bunch of adverts. Advertising the product can only strengthen it in the long run.

Myths: “H-Sphere is expensive compared to other control panel systems”. This is, without a doubt, the biggest myth surrounding H-Sphere.When you compare a single H-Sphere server with a single cpanel/plesk/helm/etc panel then H-Sphere can indeed look quite expensive. Other control panel systems will offer this scenario for you in a pricing comparison, but they leave out the golden nugget of information, namely: H-Sphere is multi-server, multi-environment. You do not have a per-server fee, you have an overall licensing fee, the same fee whether you have 1000 users on a single server or 1000 users spread over 50 servers. A ‘decent’ sized hosting company, in my opinion, has a minimum of 10 servers. When you factor in that all other control panel systems would charge you 10 single-server licensing fees, H-Sphere suddenly, with it’s one-fee structure, doesn’t look so expensive. As the number of servers grow in the example, H-Sphere becomes better value for money than any other panel.

Final thought on H-Sphere:  Positive Software, the developers of the H-Sphere control panel system, was recently sold to Parallels (a.k.a: SWSoft). This move, in my opinion, can only help H-Sphere. If Parallels see H-Sphere for what it is: their strongest tool, the myths surrounding it will drop away, and the negative points made above will become old news.