Moving from Alabanza to Cpanel/NOCSoft

[yamx]

Hi there

We run a web development agency which has a small hosting arm. We have been using Alabanza for around 4 years now and have about 70 clients and sites running on this machine. The machine itself is a Pentium II 400, so a little old and we are paying $450/month for this, PLUS they are charging us $1/month for every control panel we use. Their support is awful and they have refused to upgrade (or let us upgrade) PHP on the server, so we are stuck with PHP3. They did tell us that if we moved to a new server (costing $750 per month!!) this would have PHP4 installed. I don\'t think so! So, we have decided to look for other options and came across cpanel, which looks excellent. I do have a few questions, if that\'s OK, and would love to hear from people who have moved from Alabanza to see how easy/difficult the transition was. here\'s my questions and sorry for the length pre-amble!...

1. Most important - will we have the ability to upgrade PHP & MySQL on the server without affecting CPanel?

2. Will there be an upgrade path (and if so at what cost) to NocSoft?

3. Are there any comparisons between Cpanel and Plesk? (Sorry, I know this is a support forum which is why I\'m asking for a link, not an opinion)

4. If you had existing clients on another server (hopefully an Alabanza one) how easy was it to move these clients and are there any issues that we must look at (technically) that could trip us up?

5. Are there trial versions of cpanel and web host manager that can be downloaded and trialed (such as limited to 1 IP address and domain) as this would really help?

That\'s it for now. really excited that I may have found a way of escaping the Alabanza clutches!

 

[wscreate]

I cannot answer your questions directly. However, I will let you know that I used to be with Alabanza. The fact that they charge per each control panel is a farce! As soon as they implemented that, we moved all 1500 web sites to Cobalt RaQ servers. We then migrated to CPanel. I will tell you this, the move was not easy, but I am so happy that we did this. Our profit margin is a bit better.

However, the support is dependent on the vendor for Cpanel. There are 4 vendors, I think. Talk to each vendor before you choose one.

 

[Brian Farkas]

We used to be an alabanza client before we made the move... The data itself can be moved over pretty easily through scripts- but clients will have to set up their mailboxes/mailing lists again. Overall, our experience has been that as long as you communicate with the clients and let them know what\'s going on, they will be pretty understanding if any minor problems surface along the way.

 

[rpmws]

I bailed out of Alabanza when they refused to answer support and right after they started billing me for 450 CPs. I was there for 3 years ... I remember those old 400 boxes and I rember just 18 month ago I was running PHP1 and the first sql. I feel your pain.

But you only have 70 to move. Easy and you can move the mail and the password files as well. You will have some coping and pasting to do in the password files but you will figure it out if you look at the 2 sets for each server. BUT they will have to start using [email protected] as the POP login. That will tee them off. I do advise NOT to try to replicate the /menu link. You can set that up as a script alias just like /cpanel and /kpanel and /controlpanel . BUT the problem I found is if you use /menu on a cpanel server you will find that any file name with that \"menu\" string anywhere in it \"menu\" will trigger the cp. You will be suprised how many people have files of folder names with \"menu\" in it. Not too many people use the string \"cpanel\" in their filenames. Although I have had one guy do it and freak out on me.

Make that move .. do them one at a time for the first 10 or so and get the hang of it. The whole bunch can be done in one night. Don\'t forget to dump those mySQL db\'s. Got any using AlaFart? if you do let me know. I have that figured out as well. The alacart databases are stored in the \"shop\" db. Need root to see it. It will show you all the carts and databases associated with those carts. With 2 hours of configuring and some well known replacement scripts old alafart (modified) will run on anything until you can get something better like http://theexchangeproject.org set up. After all Alacart is based on 1992 web technoligy. It does support images now I hear. I think they added a logo? wow!!!

Good luck and I ma glad to hear you are busting out of that hell hole. And just to let you know in my opinion .. I would pay more money than Alabanza charges just to get some freedom if I had to. Turns out you can just about cut your bills bt 65% easy.

[Edited on 11/9/01 by rpmws]