Interworx - our experience

[cloudhopping]

We are loving Interworx mainly because they are a smaller operation that seems to be serious about ensuring their customers success.

Let me start by stating that I think the folks @ Rack911 (mainly Steven) knows his stuff and has been serving the Hosting Community for years and recently both he and a few others have begun a process of testing the different applications all of us in the Hosting Community use on a daily basis - from control panels to auto-installers and even site builders.

Recently I saw a posting he had made regarding some of the issues in the Interworx control panel as well as a few others.
He simply listed that there were issues - and listed the time frame waiting for solutions

What I found was a glaring reality - Interworx, while a much smaller operation, actually FIXED the issues and their largest competitor (also a product I have been using much like everyone else here I bet for years) still has not.

This is what led me to start peeking at the interworx platform.
I also like the fact that they also have a much more distributed platform (if you want it to be) as one server can run one service (such as mail) and another host the website.

Or - each can do each -

Our current ControlPANEL does not allow this - and while we have personally asked for the ability to distribute load from them now for years - it still has not happened.

One downside to Interworx however is that it still is not a Guaranteed HA (High Availability) solution - as if the master node goes down - everything is offline.   

I am however excited to see that they have been working on a solution to this issue - and appear to be closer than I actually thought see  http://vimeo.com/13268879 

Anyhow - I am wondering who else is using Interworx and how has your experience been with HostBillApp  /

[Patrick]

Yeah i was following that thread, and after reading what Patrick and Steven over there were trying and cPanel's response, we contacted them and received the same non critical response from them.  Blown away by it, we decided to start moving over to an up and coming set of developers (interworx).  These guys i believe went to Hostingcon and though small are very responsive and had a fix out in about 24 hours. 

They know their competition.  cPanel appears to be pretty lax these days by the overwhelming market share they currently hold.  Only thing really holding us back from a complete move and sure it sounds a bit lazy but i personally truely love easyapache lol.  Other small tweaks i don't mind doing manually.

So feel free to share your pros and cons of interworx, i'm curious to know what people don't like about it other then the HA solution

[Paul]

All I'm going to say, is that the more that can be done by free open source, the better. And instead of spending money on up-and-coming panels, spend time working with an up-and-coming open source project. That's what I do. And it means I get to include the panel for free with any VPS, and can scale the hosting clusters without cost. win win for everyone. it only lacks a couple things, and there's always flexibility. I don't like being beholden to others, so if I can code something, in it goes, no waiting for the vendor. That's my 2cents, and why when I looked at Interworx, based on where they were in comparison to open source projects, I went open source and haven't regretted it.

[Patrick]

All I'm going to say, is that the more that can be done by free open source, the better. And instead of spending money on up-and-coming panels, spend time working with an up-and-coming open source project. That's what I do. And it means I get to include the panel for free with any VPS, and can scale the hosting clusters without cost. win win for everyone. it only lacks a couple things, and there's always flexibility. I don't like being beholden to others, so if I can code something, in it goes, no waiting for the vendor. That's my 2cents, and why when I looked at Interworx, based on where they were in comparison to open source projects, I went open source and haven't regretted it.

I'm all for opensource projects 110% but there is one big problem with them.  Longevity.  I've hit EOL on a few over the years and the last one was a VPS panel (i for the life of me cannot remember it right now) it was a popular one.  That was our last straw.  Paid software still has it's issues too but as long as developers are feeding their families, they'll likely continue developing.  Supporting a software by paying it's developers is usually a good motivation to innovate. 

I don't usually see ground breaking features on open source projects.  When they do turn up awesome features, they are then removed from sourceforge or where ever else and gone paid.  One simple POS system one of my side businesses use was once open source and went paid out of the blue.  Though the price is still good, it just taints the whole meaning for me.

I'm sure there are still a lot of good ones out there but the only development i've seen to date that has gone way way above and beyond in features for open source is crafty syntax. 

All that said, Interworx considering what a perpetual license costs is an insanely great deal.  Awesome developers behind it so far and i think they are going places

edit: typing errors.  Not used to this new laptop keyboard.

[cloudhopping]

Paul - what are you using ?

In regards to opensource....

Drupal is opensource and awesome.
WordPress is opensource - and awesome
Typo3 is opensource and awesome

I just picked 3 content management systems - but know tons of other software that is opensource
Let's just for a second peek at cloudstack and openstack for starters

In any event - we also see the other side of the coin (being a huge opensource shop ourselves)

Even if OpenSource is FREE - the support is not.

We like what we have seen in interworx thusfar - but as I said - would love to know what your using Paul.

[cloudhopping]

Putting interworx through the paces.

I asked Interworx for some help as I needed something that NO other control panel offers.
and they got back with me today (roughly 9 days or so after I asked) with some questions on how best to do what I needed done (interface gui kinda stuff)

In short- this is something that will make anyone using WordPress MU, Drupal multisite, TYPO3 Multisite who also wish to push a control panel for email account setup and usage - drool.

I have passed quite a few things over in the past to cPanel and to a few others - including SolusVM and all i heard were crickets

Interworx - they are very interactive  - from email to even skype.

If they stay that way I see longevity :-)

[tallship]

All I'm going to say, is that the more that can be done by free open source, the better. And instead of spending money on up-and-coming panels, spend time working with an up-and-coming open source project. That's what I do. And it means I get to include the panel for free with any VPS, and can scale the hosting clusters without cost. win win for everyone. it only lacks a couple things, and there's always flexibility. I don't like being beholden to others, so if I can code something, in it goes, no waiting for the vendor. That's my 2cents, and why when I looked at Interworx, based on where they were in comparison to open source projects, I went open source and haven't regretted it.

I hear what Patrick is saying. But take Redmine and ChiliProject for example, when one goes stale, forks can blossom. This is even more prevalent in the ERP/Accounting and groupware world - the alternatives are staggering, and include leading edge innovation that each pushes to exceed the others, or fold that functionality into another.

Again, like Patrick noted, a lot of that stuff suddenly disappears, and then reappears as paid, but a new model of enterprise/community versions have started cropping up (with the enterprise versions not really having anything more that you want anyway - it just gives peace of mind to those who want to pay for it).

Yes, we had PortSentry, and although it's still available if you dig, it's now been folded into Cisco products; and we had a couple of good exchange server replacements early on, which have gone the same route, but those older FOSS trunks can be picked up like an olympic torch and carried forward.

Contrary to what Patrick points out are the backbone software projects that we all, everyone of us here (we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are... Oh, wait. That's Chrissie Hynde quoting Oscar Wilde) use on a daily basis - The Linux kernel, Apache, MariaDB, BIND, Sendmail/Exim/Postfix, Debian, Slackware, CentOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, ad infinitum...

Those projects haven't disappeared, and without giving credit where it's due, we base more of our livelihoods upon THAT software than we do even on HostBill, for example.

And those projects aren't going away. And even the very people that poo poo open source software neglect to acknowledge that their multi-billion dollar enterprises depend upon those software projects I just mentioned.

Oh, the irony.

I'll mention another Open Source (but paid for) project that is actually seeking to be a replacement for HostBill and WHMCS - http://WHSuite.com - they could use some help getting off the ground too.

I think Paul is spot on yet again - His implicitly infers that if you, "Insist on it, and they will build it" (me). which in newtonian terms, can be presented as the equal and opposite simile of, "If you build it, they will come" (a Kevin Costner character).

dag nabbit Paul, I'm gonna +1 you for that post

[Paul]

and the more that contribute to the software, the more momentum it gains as it gains more features, and the more protection it gets from becoming proprietary.

and opensolaris is a good example of open source ran by a single place that oracle then took private, but because it's under GPL, opensolaris was able to be forked and the results are pretty amazing. openindiana, illumOS with omniOS...

the panel i use has been forked already because the previous got stale, and the fork is doing awesomely, but we need more help to get it to be the all-in-one. it does SNI so folks can have SSL certs without an extra IP, it has a software installer and repository of wordpress, joomla, etc., it does automatic backups with a 1-click restore configurable by reseller or domain and db and/or files. it could use ssh and ruby support, we only got halfway through the ssh part. we need to finish its clustering capabilities. i'm working on revamping its backup system to be a form of compressed rsync so it works incrementally, and so can sell backup archival at premiums based on date and people can restore to a certain date. yeah, open source is awesome.

i had a problem the other day and the main dev offered to teamviewer in and fix it, which he did. i sent him some euros because he was awesome. it's this spirit of community and everyone doing it for the good of others that is so great, and why something like hostbill and being at the mercy of a company and every little thing costs more money, that is just infuriating. the main dev has started doing 'sponsored' features where he'll work on a sponsored feature next. so someone or a few pitch in some bucks to fuel this developer for a feature and then bam, everyone gets the new feature. but everything's constantly being improved and everyone's word actually counts toward future development.

interworx is a decent panel. it's lacking some things too, and layout is a little iffy, but it's a decent option, especially for the lazy. but it will only get more costly. i can't see paying for it over cPanel at the moment though. if you want to get away from cPanel, go the whole way and break free. have a real hand in your hosting again instead of just being some cPanel admin.

sorry if i went off-topic a bit, it's a big nerve to touch on, after all, we are only as good as our hosting panel and billing (and server virtualization).

cloud... www.i-mscp.net is what you should check out.

oh, so for an example of what's about to be released now, i'm instructing (based on the setups i've done) and a dev is going to implement, a plugin that has it so varnish becomes the front-end caching accelerator. then we'll progress it to be more configurable through the gui as well. pretty awesome.

[cloudhopping]

We do a ton of opensource - however there is something to be said for being able to reach someone no matter what time of the day/night it is.

I just tried to reach someone to ask a question on .i-mscp.net   and I got crickets.

:-)

Have you looked @ the beta theme - much better imho

Anyhow- apples to oranges - cPanel is not something we are sticking with and we are moving to Interworx.

We have coded a ton of TYPO3 CMS extensions- including a good portion of the new front end editor that hit in version 4

I love opensource - But still require the ability to ask questions and get answers in a timely fashion.
not days or hours - but minutes.

[tallship]

sorry if i went off-topic a bit, it's a big nerve to touch on, after all, we are only as good as our hosting panel and billing (and server virtualization).

cloud... www.i-mscp.net is what you should check out.

I think a few of us were waiting for you to, for lack of a better term, come out of the proverbial closet wrt i-mscp

The SNI is a big  up and coming concept and I was a little perplexed that after a couple of years now, cPanel only just announced that they're supporting it in their latest release.

Perhaps my take on this is a bit more unique than most folks, but I got my main IP blocks from nic.ddn.mil a couple of decades ago, and although I don't mind throwing a half a dozen IPs out there for people I don't know to share and beat up on, the economy of getting blocks from other places so people can have SSL/TLS involves a cost to me.

Where actual servers are concerned, unless it's an enterprise under a managed contract or someone I personally know, I throw most everyone onto IPs that lease from my upstream providers.

Therefore, from my perspective wrt webhosting, SNI might be the best thing since named-based virtual hosts for HTTP

[thetrusteeco]

Hey Paul thanks for posting the link to www.i-mscp.net.  It's good to here the development is preceding.  There are a lot of OpenSource panels strewn across the web that seem dead.

I know this isn't a i-mscp forum or even a i-mscp thread, but if you don't mind, 1 quick question:

Are you aware of any plans to implement an API for the Script Installer?  Use: auto-installing scripts like WordPress/Joomla via API from the billing system during sign-up.

[Paul]

Not sure. There is more and more built into the API all the time. It can do hooks and things, and it's some simple code to have the wordpress, etc. provisioning initiated, so to have that run from a whmcs hook in the i-mscp/whmcs billing module shouldn't be too far fetched. we could try to figure it out, or give a dev a few bucks to make it, since it's not on the roadmap. they knock things out pretty quick, and it's not like it's not supported after that. everyone strives to make things better. and it's a lot easier to tweak the code that's been made after it's put together. my Perl scripting isn't that great, but once they've made something, I can change/enhance it. That would be a nice feature. I know those things have been made in the past year for cpanel. The software installer on this is I think less than a year old.