As previously posted, ViUX Hosting attended HostingCon 2006 to gather information on the various control panels; and after conducting exhaustive comparisons, research, and testing… we have selected Plesk to be our new control panel, along with Virtuozzo and HSPcomplete (later – Parallels Business Automation Standard) – from SWsoft (later – Parallels).

ViUX Hosting has used Hosting Controller as our control panel for Shared, Shared Reseller, and Dedicated Windows hosting services for several years. In fact, (to date) Hosting Controller is the only control panel that we have ever offered, going back to before most web hosting providers offered any control panel at all – being that Hosting Controller was one of (if not) the first Windows control panel available. This and its cost effectiveness made it an obvious choice for us when we were looking to automate our hosting systems and provide more features – so many years ago. However times have changed!

Now there are many excellent Windows control panels on the market, including: Helm; H-Sphere; Plesk; Ensim; etc… and Hosting Controller’s current version (6.x) simply does not compare well against any of them.

In recent years Hosting Controller has been eclipsed by its competitors in the Windows control panel market. Since last year, and at HostingCon 2005 in Chicago, Advanced Communications (the maker of Hosting Controller) has been promoting version 7 of Hosting Controller, as their vehicle back to the top of the Windows control panel market. While this may very well prove to be true… we have no reason to believe that it will be and have lost our patience for waiting, as a year has come and gone and there is still no set release date for version 7 of Hosting Controller – and they did not even bother to attend HostingCon 2006 in Las Vegas.

We have had many problems over the years with Hosting Controller, as it seems that each new “Hot Fix” designed to correct “bugs” and other problems, only seems to add more of the same… often times without even fixing those for which the “fix” was intended. Therefore we made the decision that should HostingCon 2006 arrive and version 7 of Hosting Controller was still not released, or if it was released, but was no better or more reliable than version 6.x – that we would attend HostingCon this year for the primary purpose of finding a new control panel.

To that end, we compared all of the major Windows control panel systems and Plesk came out on top (at least for us anyway). Our new control panel platform will be controlled by HSPcomplete (now – Odin Business Automation Standard) and Plesk, both running inside Virtuozzo – all from SWsoft (later – Parallels). This switch to Plesk will also mean that many other changes are coming (all for the better), and details of these will be provided soon.