Pre-Purchase

General Interworx Control Panel Info General Inquries
1

I am fed up with Plesk, and I cannot stand cpanel.

I have been poking in every once in a while to watch the progress of your panel every since I first seen SagoNet adopt it a while back.

I love how you are community oriented in the design of your product and don’t run wild like some of the other solutions.

I have a few questions though:

  1. I seen that in a clustered enviroment subdomains are disabled in siteworks?

  2. What other functionality is lost because of a fully clustered loadbalanced solution?

  3. I see you are working on a High availabilty solution. That is exactly what we have been searching for. Any idea on the time frame of it’s release?

  4. If I purchase your system for a 3 server cluster, how difficult will it be to migrate to the high available cluster later on?

  5. Multi-Domain hosting, I offer unlimited domains to all our clients, in fact everything is unlimited. The only restriction is hard drive space and bandwidth. How does your control panel handle this? Is it like plesk where they can have a single login and manage all their domains from there?

  6. So mysql is ran off a single box in this setup? the manager? How practicle is this? Most clients we have are database driven sites. then the box has to handle load balancing as well? Seems like the manager will run out of resources way before the rest of the cluster.

I would like to know more details about the recommended hardware setup for your planned high availability solution, before I go purchasing the hardware for your current load balanced solution.

2

to add the the multi domain hosting, will the client have a single login name and password for all domains, and will they be able to add new domains on their own.

Right now Modernbill creates their initial domain and then they can add domains as they wish.

Plesk it was nice because they could manage all domains from one account.

Cpanel it sucks because it is a cheasy “Addon domains” which host the extra domains from a directory inside the initial ftp account.

sure Cpanel has “Reseller” but clients get too confused using WHM and Cpanel and the Reseller accounts are a pain in the arse. Modernbill cannot even auto setup this types of accounts correctly it always has to be manual.

How does your system compare to both of these panels? Can you provide a way for me to test this before I purchase?

3
  1. I seen that in a clustered enviroment subdomains are disabled in siteworks?
  2. What other functionality is lost because of a fully clustered loadbalanced solution?

In the current version subdomains are disabled as are some account editing features that have to be done on each node. This will change in the next release where we will re-add features taking out for clustering initially.

  1. I see you are working on a High availabilty solution. That is exactly what we have been searching for. Any idea on the time frame of it’s release?

We don’t have any ETA at this point.

  1. If I purchase your system for a 3 server cluster, how difficult will it be to migrate to the high available cluster later on?

I’m honestly not sure at this point. We will make every effort to make upgrading easy, but since the system isn’t yet done I can’t comment on how easy/difficult it will be. Upgrading will be an option, so in that sense we will have an upgrade path that works.

  1. Multi-Domain hosting, I offer unlimited domains to all our clients, in fact everything is unlimited. The only restriction is hard drive space and bandwidth. How does your control panel handle this? Is it like plesk where they can have a single login and manage all their domains from there?

Multi-domain don’t exist in the current release, but will be in the next release. When the feature is released there will be a single login where a user can manage all of their domains.

  1. So mysql is ran off a single box in this setup? the manager? How practicle is this? Most clients we have are database driven sites. then the box has to handle load balancing as well? Seems like the manager will run out of resources way before the rest of the cluster.

It depends on what the cluster is doing. For most web apps (boards, etc) we see the PHP processing / heavy IO as one of the main bottlenecks when all services are on a single box. The current solution wasn’t meant to be HA or an “end all” solution by any means but it does a good job of breaking up the load over multiple boxes, which is exactly what it was designed for.

Re: modernbill and iworx-cp, it will work much like plesk where the 1st domain is created and then subsequent domains can be created from the interface proper.

Chris

4

K,

thank you for the good info. I am going to hold off for the HA solution though.

I don’t want to purchase a bunch of equipment just to have to change the entire setup to accomodate the differences.

One question about the HA though, will it be able to perform on only 2 boxes?

and do real time mirroring between the 2. Instead of having to have a huge cluster with a NAS or SAN

which unless you host 1000’s of websites a NAS or SAN solution is not a cost effective business model.

Reason I ask is we don’t host a lot of sites but still want to be able to offer a fully redundant solution at an affordable price.

So 2x Dual Xeon, loadbalanced HA Cluster would be nice.

5

A 2 server HA setup will be possible, but if you were worried about a single server MySQL setup the 2 server setup won’t really solve that problem. Either way we’ll let you know when the HA solution is ready.

Chris

6

I thought it was possible to load balance an SQL server, so that wont be implemented I take it.

Or you are referring to the Disk IO