1) Official introduction of The Genius Network™
2) Three additional tech support staff starting, based in Australia
3) New (type to be determined) servers to be added in Seattle
4) New support SLA for specific levels of reseller accounts (Previously posted averages/expectations to be unchanged for unaffected levels of reseller hosting accounts)
5) Information on the next datacenter

We hope everyone had a great 2008 and, from all the staff at EIRCA, here’s to an even better 2009

We expect that with the phone system now fixed, average response times will settle back to around the 40 minute mark, though the target, which is used on the site, will still be four hours.

Immediate support can be gained via the toll free system, of course, and should help bring the averages down. We’ll be looking at this again in a months time to make sure that responses are kept within the target range.

The question will no doubt arise, so I’ll tackle it here.
Why leave Ubersmith?

There’s no short answer, it’s due to a number of problems that have raised their head over the last year. No client-side issues were apparent but the backend was littered with them. From an antiquated staff interface that was meant to be updated/replaced over a year ago, to the severe lack of customization, Ubersmith as a product looks to be on its last legs.

Ubersmith, as a company, have a new product: “Ubersmith DE”. Unfortunately, this product has now apparently taken over all development work done by the company and the “pro” version, despite its hefty price tag, has been allowed to go with one minor update in 18 months. That’s just not acceptable.

With our growth over the last 4-6 month breaking every record set internally over the past seven years, we feel that staying with Ubersmith would be naive and, dare I say it, foolish.

The new support center is 98% ready. The last  task is the importing of clients and services.

Stiofan posted in our forum discussion topic with a screenshot (you must login to view it) and, as you can see, the integration is with the EIRCA Live! portal as a whole.

An announcement will be made very soon regarding the switch over to the new system. It is important to note that we will be keeping the ‘old’ support center active for a number of months in order for people to have a historical view of their tickets.

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.

Clients from Nova Scotia (or within reach!) are also encouraged to contact me for a face-to-face pow-wow. For those wondering, we’re on the south coast. It’s nice here, I promise. Lots of ocean to look at!

The new office will be on Water Street in Shelburne, and will be officially active as of July 1st.

We’ll be conducting interviews via tele-conference over the next number of weeks.

We’ll also be posting this to many career sites, so we expect a large number of applicants.

Link: View PDF document (requires adobe acrobat reader)

Phase 3, the largest and final phase, will see the introduction of one-click reboots, mrtg graphs, OS reloads and more, for dedicated server clients.

As part of phase 2, we will be taking the portal offline approximately four times, each one spanning ~2 hours. This will be announced with plenty of time to spare, closer to the dates in question.

The current plan is to introduce an additional mail server, followed by a web (linux) server and possibly a mysql server. Toward the end of May we will look at adding Windows servers at the facility.

We will be starting to test and provision servers to one of TelecityRedbus’s datacenters in London England at the start of Q3.

The TelecityRedbus datacenters have no equal in London, or even england in general. They are by far the most impressive facilities available. Our current plans are to do a month-long test to see how well the UK facility will integrate in to the GCS and how the connectivity is for clients in general.

Having completed phase one of our “sniffing”, we can foresee no problems at all, but are committed to giving due diligence to this new introduction and will explore every potential point of failure.

In separate news, the Washington, D.C, facility testing will commence on May 8th, 2008.