Should you offer multiple control panels to your customers?
Tags: Control Panel, CPanel, Direct Admin, Hosting, Plesk
Who doesn’t like choices? But that isn’t just necessary for you to offer multiple control panel with every hosting account that you offer. Having said that, let’s first find out the possibility of installing multiple control panels on one server.
Technically, you can install more than one control panel on a server but that’s a very bad approach. Primarily because each control panel works entirely different from any other control panel and the way they use the system services and resources to perform several administration related activities also tend to differ. So, if you plan to offer multiple control panels to your customer, do so but have separate servers or VPS for each type of control panel you wish to offer.
Secondly, don’t offer multiple control panels if you don’t know how each of them work as later on you would find it difficult to support each control panel that you had previously offered. The most popular control panels you may want to offer your customers are cPanel, Plesk and Direct Admin. cPanel being the easiest of all in terms of functionality and support. The learning curve associated with cPanel is relatively less when compared to other panels and support issues are also less.
An ideal approach, if you really want to offer multiple control panels, would be buying reseller accounts with each type of control panel you wish to offer and selling it to your end customers. This way you can start with minimal investment and support and later on stop offering the least chosen control panel to focus on the most requested control panel in terms of learning it yourself and supporting it.
