About the ongoing madness associated with hosting companies and their moves away from cPanel.
Liqudiweb, SiteGround, Godaddy, and a number of others are going through some rather painful growing pains in trying to jump ship away from cPanel. And customers are feeling that pain first hand. Tales of migration nightmares are rampant in the forums.
Last year’s cPanel rate changes have literally forced many hosts to take drastic action, by either hanging their hats on unproven control panels or by developing their own (aka, the” Godaddy’s Model”).
If you’ve lived in the hosting industry for a while, you are well aware of the Godaddy “control panel problem”. It’s just not easy to develop an easy to use, secure control panel, with all of the features web design professionals require. Toss in email management and DNS management and support and you’ve got a support training nightmare that seemingly never ends.
It’s not technology that makes a hosting company work, it’s people that make it work.
Sure, you can go with the “cloud” hosting solution route, geek out on self-training, Youtube videos ad nauseam, and run wild with a host that provides no support in a crisis. Who’s got time for that! I’m in the business to make money and serve my clients by giving them the best possible long-term options, so I can get more clients and make more money with the least amount of effort.
So back to conventional hosting. cPanel is the highest grade solution. But moving from the nearly perfect well-supported solution to a mediocre and rushed alternative, well, the results are fairly easy to predict.
So back to the subject at hand. Liquidweb and others are trying. And maybe in a year or two, they’ll have trained their people well enough to succeed in the transition process from something that’s well supported and relatively easy to manage to their flavor of the month control panel option.
For the time being, if you are with a host who is in the transition away from cPanel, get ready for a rough ride. Or, end the pain today by simply moving to an established cPanel host who is more zen in accepting what works best for their customers.
Thought for the day. Does your host value you as a customer, or consider you an expendable beta tester for their new control panel?
Your thoughts?