Wrightsites.com Hosting Blog

As a hosting customer, you probably don’t realize the importance of the control panel to the functionality of your website.  Over the past ten years, I’ve been surprised that some customers don’t even know the control panel exists.  I guess for the most part, it isn’t important because once everything is set up; you usually won’t have to go into the control panel very often.

Control Panels were first developed for wide scale use by a company called Alabanza around 1998.  It was on that first control panel that I started my business in 1999.  I wasn’t a techno geek, so keying in commands on a server frightened the heck out of me.  This made the control panel perfect for me.  It allowed for automated account signups, email creation, file management, and more. 

Over time, various control panel solutions came on the market, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.  In 2001, Wrightsites.com moved to the H-Sphere system because it offered so many excellent features: ability to manage servers running multiple operating systems (Linux, BSD, Windows, and more), ability for customers to host multiple domain names in one account, ability for customers to have multiple accounts under one login, integrated trouble ticket system, integrated billing system, and more.  H-Sphere was truly a turn-key system for us and our resellers, which was very important to me because as a former reseller I understood the need for those features and knew that most other systems left resellers to fend for themselves.

Over the past few years, the hosting control panel market has seen massive consolidation.  This has resulted in all major commercial control panels except one being purchased by a company called Parallels (formerly SWsoft).  This company had already owned the Plesk system, which had an ugly and hard to use interface.  Plesk ran on Linux and Windows, but independently of each other (whereas our Linux and Windows are controlled jointly).  Now, they own every commercial panel but cPanel, which like Plesk runs Windows and Linux separately.  Running the systems separately would require more equipment and would virtually double expenses for things like security. 

Why should you care about this?  I guess I’m not saying you should.  That is, after all, why you pay us to host your sites, right?  So we worry about the hosting stuff and you don’t.  That’s very true, but I think you should at least know that so much of what a hosting company can offer is based on what their control panel includes or is capable of.  When Parallels first bought H-Sphere, they treated it like an ugly step-child.  That has started to improve recently with the inclusion of Site Builder, which will replace Site Studio and the availability of the Virtuozzo VPS system.  Much works remains for Parallels to bring H-Sphere back to the cutting edge, but some signs indicate that they will.  I truly hope so because it is a great product that is still unmatched in the basic feature set it includes.

Finally, before closing off for the night, I’d like to welcome a new customer to our service.  Apples Markets and Village Market this week launched a new website that I built for them.  You can view the sites at www.applesmarkets.com and www.wellingtonvillagemarket.com.  It has been a pleasure working on this site.  I guess this is a good time to point out that although it isn’t prominent on our site, we do offer website design services.  If you’d like to discuss this, please let me know.

Next week I’m going to write about Cascading Style Sheets and their importance in website design today.  I hope you’ll join me again for that blog entry.  For now, I’d like to wish our U.S. customers a happy Independence Day (Happy Birthday America!) and our international customers a great weekend!