As we’re all trying to recover from the cPanel sticker shock, DirectAdmin has been making improvements to their panel to help ease the transition for people.
The latest updates are to the new Evolution UI, adding an “icon grid” option to give users a more “cPanel” feel to things.
In their latest beta feed they’ve also integrated a cPanel importer so you just have to drop your cpmove files into a specific folder and it’s done.
The icons for sure need to be changed to something more fitting (they feel a little Windows 95’ish), but I think it’s a push in the right direction. No, the cPanel icons are trademarked to cPanel, using them will get you a C&D.
What else do you think DA needs to change to make a migration from cPanel to DirectAdmin better?
Remember, DA doesn’t have control over JetBackup or other 3rd party plugins.
My issue with DirectAdmin is the admin/reseller/user divided interface. I am getting used to it though now that I made a decision to not renew my cPanel license and clicking around like a maniac while moving sites. It gets a bit easier to like when using the “Display as list” menu, but I would love a more WHM-like interface where it’s easy to reach everything at one click. I also like how cPanel handles the account listing where you can login to your clients cPanel account with one click, and see the interface in the same way they see it.
One other thing I’m missing from cPanel is the one-click-phpMyAdmin-login where I can reach phpMyAdmin without having to login to a specific database, but I guess it’s not that important.
Other than the above I think DirectAdmin works great, at least for my needs.
Not sure if cpanel has this as I’ve only used cpanel reseller accounts and not had root access to a cpanel server…
I’d like to be able to easily disable certain functionality on a server wide basis (you can already do this on an account basis) - i.e. I don’t want to offer any email related services, so to be able to turn off the functionality would be great as it would save resources and be more secure.
Not sure how the messaging system works though and everyone seems to need at least 1 email account allocation otherwise it won’t let you set up new client accounts so I assume it’s fundamental to the way DA works.
As @Matsuri said, the whole admin / reseller / client divide is a little hard to figure out sometimes. You can end up 2 or 3 levels deep and it gets a bit confusing. I think it’s extra confusing because the interface looks the same regardless of the level you are at (except menu items of course). I think because on cpanel you have the difference in interface between WHM and cpanel it makes it a bit easier to keep track of in your head. Perhaps a small bit of interface work could just make this a bit easier to differentiate the levels of access.
The icon theme looks hot though, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with DA over the last few days. It’s certainly a great bit of software!
Looks dope. I don’t think icons looks old but gives a little lightweight feeling whereas cPanel icons are bold and with dark blue combinations looks solid.
Another thing, I’ll admit I haven’t used cPanel/WHM since I was paid to (some years) so maybe I’m forgetting, but isn’t that big DNS functionality screen (on WHM) basically just one big redirect? Every button achieves the same outcome, but formats it in such a way that makes “noobs” feel safe. Like a button that says “Edit MX Entry” and forwards to DNS table in edit mode, a button that says “Set Zone Time to Live (TTL)” and guess what it does? It forwards to the DNS table in edit mode…
I could be wrong. However it just makes me think of a bunch of abstraction, not real features. If you really like that, DA should be able to implement it easily. If you rely on that, it’s a bit weird if you have any knowledge at all that you aren’t happier looking at an actual DNS table.
A backup system that sends backups to Backblaze B2 or any S3-compatible object storage would be great.
Currently have custom scripts for some setups, but would rather much prefer a native solution without having to shell out bucks for JetBackup (when it becomes available for DA).
Yeah, a working offsite-backup solution with rotation would be just awesome. Tried to fiddle with the current backup solution this morning, but gave up on the Secure FTP-option which I couldn’t manage to work.
Tried to make one DA server backup to another DA server, and followed some guides at directadmin.com to replace the FTP server with ProFTPD with sftp support, but gave up on that after two hours. Now I’m running backups locally which I’ll move out automatically a few times per week. Does not feel like the best solution, but it’ll work I guess.
How has everyone else sorted out their DA backups?
Borg. 1 repository for all client data, another repository for the database (mysqldump --all-databases). Plug and play with any control panel, with the only difference being the location of the client data. I honestly never rely on built in backup solutions as they’re simply not very efficient. Using a centralized solution does have the drawback that it’s difficult for clients to access their own backups.
A hacky way to do backups to different remotes would be to use rclone’s serve ftp command over localhost (rclone serve ftp) then point DA to use that as the FTP destination.
Awesome. I tried a Storage box now too, and it worked great with ftps from one of the servers, but from the one I tried two days ago there was a dead end with errors this time as well. Turned out I needed to open a range of passive ports in the firewall, and now it works. Yay!
I know, that’s what I did with my second subdomain and that did work as expected. But since it’s a workaround rather than a solution I figured I’d stick to the feedback. Thanks for pointing it out, though! Might be of help to someone else .
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