November 27th, 2020 at 5:36 AM
Most hosts provide a cPanel to their users. For many years, it's been laughable to even imagine a hosting provider (shared hosting that is) that would not include ONE, but these past few years, that seems to have changed. I'm seeing more and more providers hopping onto DirectAdmin instead.
I'm starting to look at the differences a lot more closely now. cPanel has the "brand name" advantage, but it appears that "brand name" isn't stopping new hosting providers from looking elsewhere. For the past few years, it's always been a perceived "budget" move for hosts to move away from the industry standard, but lately, it seems that DirectAdmin's rise can be attributed to much more than just better pricing. It actually looks like it's a very serious competitor now.
And NONE of that is even mentioning that DirectAdmin is also much more affordable. It's very tempting, I must admit.
Of course, I can't exactly dock CPanel either. It's clearly the industry standard for a reason, and seems to have very stable releases and a great deal of support included out of the box. For big-name hosting providers, it makes sense to use the enterprise, brand-name solution. But I must say that I am glad that a very viable competitor has arrived on the scenes. It's certainly great news for smaller hosting providers, and DirectAdmin makes a lot of sense for anyone using non-standard or bleeding-edge configurations as well. DirectAdmin is certainly the one I would use personally.
Anyone ever used a DirectAdmin host? How was your experience with it?
I'm starting to look at the differences a lot more closely now. cPanel has the "brand name" advantage, but it appears that "brand name" isn't stopping new hosting providers from looking elsewhere. For the past few years, it's always been a perceived "budget" move for hosts to move away from the industry standard, but lately, it seems that DirectAdmin's rise can be attributed to much more than just better pricing. It actually looks like it's a very serious competitor now.
- Its software compatibility is FAR better. It doesn't force a CentOS install (and supports Debian/Ubuntu installs as well). This is a huge deal because although both CentOS and Debian are equally well-established, they do a number of things differently. I'm very comfortable on a Debian server (for example), but CentOS is a bit of a mystery for me in some respects. I'm certainly not as experienced with it, so it's nice to have other options.
- DirectAdmin supports nginx out of the box, and has done so for years. CPanel responded by finally supporting it last year, but it likely isn't as well tested as DirectAdmin's implementation. This is a problem for cPanel becasue although Apache is fantastic for compatibility, is not good for performance. Most VPS users have long switched to using Nginx as a standard.
- DirectAdmin doesn't force you to use limited, outdated precompiled binaries. To be fair, stability is important, so I won't dock cPanel completely on this. But Directadmin doens't force archaic MySQL 5.x releases like CPanel does, and generally seems to be more "with the times." (To be fair, 5.7 is still maintained to this day, but it's lacking many of the improvements that MySQL has been making years. Pretty much anyone using MariaDB has already gotten over the hump of MySQL 5.x compatibility, so I'm surprised CPanel hasn't jumped on board yet.)
- The appearance is very streamlined and simple. I personally love the look of DA (on their newer "Evolution" design is sleek). This might just be an opinion, but CPanel simply looks more cluttered and outdated to me. And ease-of-use is an important factor for control panels that are used by millions of blog, forum, and business owners who are not Dev Ops engineers.
And NONE of that is even mentioning that DirectAdmin is also much more affordable. It's very tempting, I must admit.
Of course, I can't exactly dock CPanel either. It's clearly the industry standard for a reason, and seems to have very stable releases and a great deal of support included out of the box. For big-name hosting providers, it makes sense to use the enterprise, brand-name solution. But I must say that I am glad that a very viable competitor has arrived on the scenes. It's certainly great news for smaller hosting providers, and DirectAdmin makes a lot of sense for anyone using non-standard or bleeding-edge configurations as well. DirectAdmin is certainly the one I would use personally.
Anyone ever used a DirectAdmin host? How was your experience with it?
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