Hi everyone,

Two weeks ago, my co-founder and I left our jobs and are now working full-time on developing a new and modern server management and hosting control panel. We're calling it FreedomCP.

We've been using control panels and doing server administration for ten years. The existing control panels don't meet our needs or the needs of many people we know. However, before we get too far in development, we want to talk to people outside of our own networks.

Here are a few things we really want to know:

* Roughly speaking, what do you spend your time on and what are your major costs?
* What's in your technology stack?
* If you use a control panel, what do you like best about it? The least?
* What do you use for backups? For monitoring?
* What tools do you use to simplify management of multiple servers?
* Is there a tool you wish you had that would make you more efficient or solve a pain-point for you?

If you prefer a survey, we have one here: http://www.freedomcp.com/?linode_survey

We'd very much like to chat on the phone/skype for 10 or 15 minutes. We'd be happy to give you a $5 Starbucks credit for taking the time to talk on the phone with us.

Thanks!

Justin

This forum is for an unmanaged VPS provider. I imagine most people here know enough about server management that they do not need a control panel or if they do not have the knowledge then they probably pay someone to do the management for them. Find a better place to ask your questions.

I wouldn't bet on that. Odds are good that there are more users with some form of "control panel" than you'd expect. There's more to life than just cPanel

_________________

/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */

Hi - I just want to make sure you're aware of what may be an obvious point: target market.

Who is this control panel for? a) Utterly new users who never heard of htaccess, nginx, monit, etc... or b) intermediate users who did or could set these up on their own but don't do it every day so they need to look up syntaxes or c) advanced users who could do this in their sleep but might like the convenience of a GUI or fancy charts?

e.g. cpanel tries to cater to A & B I think by putting in advanced versions of different "modules" (e.g. DNS)

I think that's your main thing to figure out, since it will very largely affect what kind of product you develop. "Who is this for, what problem exactly is it trying to solve?"

A Control Panel needs to sit seamlessly on TOP of the OS.

Meaning all operations (app install/remove, user setups, file permissions, app configurations, etc) need to be possible via the CP or the CLI.

Any CP that restricts normal (i.e. CLI) operation is just plain crap.

_________________
Either provide enough details for people to help, or sit back and listen to the crickets chirp.
Security thru obscurity is a myth - and really really annoying.

Installing/removing/updating) software via the existing package configuration and management system for the distro in question (such as using apt-get or aptitude as a back-end) would be preferable; if the user should decide that he no longer wants the control panel, it should have managed the system in a logical way that a sysadmin might have, rather than relying on strange proprietary methods; at least then a system stripped of the control panel would still be manageable. Otherwise it's virtually a custom distro.

That seems like a rather cromulent thing to say, don't you think?

James

We definitely are building a control panel that will be useful and empowering for Linode users. We wouldn't be doing this if we thought we were building a clone of what already exists in the market. I appreciate everyone's feedback and the survey submissions. We'll be back with updates on our progress.