Lease Only!!

[sagelike]

Do I understand this correctly?

You can now only lease Plesk server products? I checked the store and I can only lease various products, even the flippin addons.

I hope this isn't true but if that's the case, then I've made my last purchase of Plesk products. And I was looking at Plesk Expand.

This is apparently what happens when you remove all the competition and feel like you own the marketplace.

How does anyone else feel about this?

[alexmv7]

I'm not wory about this, becouse Plesk itself (disregarding of it's price) is a bunch of SWSOFT spamming and outdated free software with worst in the world support stuff. This was a very interesting software 2 years ago, but today it is dead.

[Hultenius]

Whoah.. $69.99/month PLUS $24.99/month for Power Pack (SpamAssassin can not be bought separately anymore).

Thats almost $100/month for ONE license.
Or $1140/year if you want to put it that way.

SWSoft/Parallels are serious about killing off Plesk.

[Sedrin]

Well, Parallels still offer Plesk Plus bundle - Unlimited domains, all additional features and 1 yr Email support included as a perpetual (one time fee) license.

They also do have a tade-in promo right now. It is possible to trade in any of your existing retail license, pay additional $699 and get a newly issued Plesk Plus one with 1 yr of SUS and Support.

Promo announcement: http://www.parallels.com/en/buyonline/plesk/

Rgs,

[faris]

Companies sometimes make bad decisions. This is one of them.

The removal of owned 30/100/300 licences and add-ons will result in (hopefully) a massive drop in revenue rather than an increase in revenue for them.

As a company you need to balance making money with putting people off and unfortunately this one tips the scales in the wrong direction.

You should email your sales rep if you agree this is the wrong thing to do. Never underestimate the power of the people.

[ThePhantom]

We are very surprised when we got an e-mail from our supplier telling us Parallels want us to charge for our licensee we already bought before.
Onetime fee has the meaning you not need to pay again.
If parallels will not change their mind we will be forced to get another control panel and they will lose a customer to their concurrent.
Plesk already gave us a lot of headace and the only reason we still use it is that we already paid big money for it.
I try to type very nice but in my head I hear the words very loud
ARE THEY CRAZY!!!!

[onsightdata]

Ok , I have not got any email on what is going on. I have purchased unlimited domains and the power addons etc. I have paid my money for updates etc. What has all changed?

[Sedrin]

Ok , I have not got any email on what is going on. I have purchased unlimited domains and the power addons etc. I have paid my money for updates etc. What has all changed?

For those who already have retail/one-time fee licenses actually NOTHING has changed. Those already purchased are still valid and will be. Just make sure you renew SUS on time. Licenses that are offered now are lease ones (except for Plesk Plus). That's it...

[faris]

Sedrin,

I think the confusion over that is partly to blame for this thread not exploding - the subject of the thread is not really appropriate for the actual problem, which is the withdrawal of 10, 30 and 300 owned lisences - which IS a real problem.

[joeybutterface]

It's probably not really a serious problem for a lot of us.

The product has already turned a lot of people off with all the in-built spam that is notoriously difficult to manage/hide. I have not exactly been enthusiastic about continuing to license more of our servers with Plesk. Now they have decided they don't want to sell us licenses anymore then I can only thank the company for making the final decision for me.

We'll continue to renew our licenses until no more of our servers are running Plesk then goodbye for good. :)

[philjohn]

Exactly, we decided a while ago that relying on another company that has started using questionable practices was not a good thing from a business stand-point.

We've actually started working on our own control panel to manage our servers after realising we use so little of the core plesk functionality (and had to use lots of manual work-arounds for broken parts anyway) that it would be the best way forward.

At the end of the day, all Plesk does is offer a somewhat pretty front-end to a bunch of pre-configured free software; it's not rocket science. The only reason we used it instead of manually setting things up is that clients like an interface to control things like email accounts, and it makes it easier for the support staff to not break things when changing accounts. We don't actually sell hosting, we only host our own apps - so our usage is probably not typical.

[joeybutterface]

My use of Plesk is very similar to your own. We don't run a web hosting business per say. Although we do host projects and applications for partners and clients across a reasonably large number of Linux-based servers.

My list of fixes to patch broken functionality has grown to three documents now. I have to run through the list every time we upgrade to a new version in the series.

We don't really need Plesk. But it's been convenient to use to automate management of portions of our infrastructure.

We have been working on our own software for many months already. We'll be turning up the heat on development now (it's been very casual until this point) so we can start migrating away from Plesk - now we wont be adding anymore Plesk servers.

[ladhani]

Hello,

The idea of lease means that somebody else can block use of an application, for example, in case of some stupid troubles with payments etc...

So we are looking at alternatives for simple 100 domain licenses that are unlimited in time (so can not be blocked due to stupid unforeseen thinks / Murphy's Law).

Does anyone have experiences with the Plesk clone: Cube Panel.

http://www.cubepanel.com/

They offer free 5 domain licenses and euro 160 for 100 domain license.

Say, more similiar to the old Plesk license model.

Thx!

[nibb]

I also agree. We have provisioned or last Plesk server and new servers will come probably with LxAdmin which is very more powerfull then plesk, works in VPS and is very cheap.

Plesk is built of free softwares that you can get for free and they charge you. They dont launch anything new with it since years. No only basic support for other mail softwares and stuff.

Not only is Plesk heavy priced but very unpersonal, plesk spams in the control panlel, inside the clients account, and now even putting favicon inside every website.

What will be next a
Powered by Plesk on every site hosted with plesk?

Not to mention we are talking about a paid panel here not a free one.

We would be very stupid to lease plesk that is almost non brandable and comes with outdated crap.

Cubepanel looks also interesting.

Also you see the bunch of crap they launch with other softwares like Sitebuilder? I received the email and it has 2 Major features !!!!

You can add SitePal and Buy Fotolia images. Wow what a big improvement. That must be someone from the NASA that adds affiliate programs and announces those as updates. No t to mention that Plesk gets all revenue from your clients !!!

Yes that is right. They add fotolia in Plesk too and you cannot put your affiliate link in Sitebuilder. They get all revenue.

Plesk has become the worst paid control panel in the industry. Go for LxAdmin or ISPConfig. They are free and rock in features. All plesk has is a nice interface. And im not willing to pay so much for it.

Im deciding to dump plesk since 2 years but this just gave me the THANK YOU Paralles. No wonder my hosting business it not growing. If you have such crap like plesk running. Sitebuilder will also see a bye a bye, anyway Google has the same tools for FREE

[hostex]

We use to buy our licenses and do the Plesk install but it's such a pain to install and the cost is so high (now higher) we lease most of our servers with Plesk from the data centers we use.

Right now we can get CPanel/WHM Fantastico w/ RVSkins for $28/mo. for unlimited domains and Plesk w/ Power Pack Unlimited Domains for $35/mo. from LT. We have a few customers with leased 30/100/300 domain licenses.

Does anyone know how will this affect those licenses?

I totally agree with all the above posts! They need to get a grip.

It's pretty crazy when the control panel costs as much as a low end server!!

[nibb]

I dont think licenses from datacenters will be affected since they buy thousands of licenses in millions. Parallels would not dare to raise prices to big hosting companies or datacenters since they actually decide what the market uses. They would just unplug the plug for plesk and millons of clients would stop using Plesk in a major draw back for the company. So no they will not raise prices to datacenters as far as i see it. Its simple, if they do people will not choose plesk anymore but Cpanel. Simple.

Actually i think the removing of prices if just because most people dont buy directly from Parralles, they do it from datacenters and resellers where you can get the leased license cheaper. What Parrallels is trying to do is to make people lease licenses not to own them.

Owning a license is just 1 big earning against leasing which is a recurring fee forever.

This way people would not buy licenses but lease them. And most do lease via datacenters. I still think this not a nice move of Paralles.
We wanted to buy 10x 100 domain licenses upfront so we could save a little instead of leasing.
I now and most people will agree that most business don't want to lease things for a long period of time. It increases your cost and your final prices. That means if you have a heavy capital of $$$ to invest its actually pretty dumm to buy the licenses, its cheaper to lease them. his is the model Paralles wants to bring into the market. Software as a Service.
But if they dont want people to buy directly anymore they should just remove the store and put a link to resellers or partners. Removing the options and force people to lease is not a smart move. I always read many magazines where the CEO of Parrallels puts all his bets to Software as a Service. So yes, they want people to pay each month instead of owning the licenses. I bet you that they will eventually remove the owned license and you will not be able to buy Plesk anymore but just to lease it.

They do this on HSPcomplete for example. You cannot own it. The trick you to so you think you own, you get a license and all but then you have to pay a maintaince fee every month and that is just the same as leasing. People are not stupid anyway. A hosting company cannot lease all of their softwares, if they would then they would not earn anything. Even said all this.....

I don't have a problem with this model if Plesk would rock and it would be so powerfull and full of features that people would beg you to sell them hosting with Plesk or people would only try to buy Plesk hostings. If this was true, then yes, most people would be still be happy to pay a big lease fee to plesk since, hey, its making you earn more money. Sadly this is not the real world. People still prefer Cpanel, Plesk is spammed everywhere, you have count how many times a link to swsoft.com and the name SW Soft appears on Plesk? Its everywhere. Also Plesk is horrible with support, you have to pay extra if you lease from a datacenter, not to mention that is doesnt bring anything new to the table. Most open source panels have the same features and most of paid panels have even more and better features then plesk. So this is what i blame plesk for. If they want to try to sell it as a service then they should give first class support for the money you pay, they should fix upgrades, fix bugs fast, and put new feautures that not a single panel has and the developing should be fast. Putting software as a service can work but not how they do it. If people pay each month money they expect something for it. Nobody wants to pay each month and dont see anything new, not be able to request support, use a panel full of spam, full of bugs (They still after 2 years did not fixed a MySQL database problem when you migrate sites from Plesk to Plesk panels, which plesk corrupts accents), not to hear your clients (2 years, this is the 3 year we dont see Postfix not ClamAV).
So you would have to be crazy to pay each month for something that is old, buggy, take forever to implement new technology and is with spam everywhere of Sw Soft.

This is just putting a pistol against your head, because you increase your costs for what? For something you can get for Free in other softwares. How can a free software be better then a lease panel that costs 69$ a month directly from Parrallels?

I know exactly the problem Parrallels is experimenting. They have grown so fast and are so big that vanity claimed into their heads. They think Plesk is the 1 number panel, that people die for it, and no matter what people will use it, just like Microsoft. They have copied the mode exactly. Expect that Microsoft gives you tons of paid things for free in the OS they release and plesk just give you open source software and free things. Microsoft clones a software and its in the next release, SW Soft implents the free version, buggy and decides peopl have to pay extra for it. Microsoft releases new features with time, plesk cannot even put basic things like a good interface to the anti spam filter.
Microsoft only makes you pay 1 time and then you have fixes and updates for free. Sw Soft makes you pay a leases license and then makes you pay for every addon, module or support extra. Microsoft is the OS that most people have into their computers, they only have Linux as competition, people that play games use Windows. Plesk is not the only one in the server world. They are hundreds of paid and free control panels. Most people hate Plesk because of the image they give with all their branding in the panel. Just talk in hosting forums, most people are cpanel lovers, most of my customers ask me to sell them cpanel and i only have plesk. So they are not the first panel in the industry. People want choices and Plesk is exactly the opposite. You are forced to their looks and their feautures, most thing you need to heavily mod the panel to make it work, so its terrible.

If Plesk doesnt come with a very big improvement on Plesk 9 or the new release my company will drop Plesk for good. If the new versions are just stupid bug fixes and affiliated links and paid services i have to buy extra for each single server then they can forget me. Im so loyal to this company that doesnt give me anything back. I dont even offer services with products that are not from Plesk. I only did this because i started with Plesk when it was still from the german company which where 100 times better then Sw Soft. Most new releases are really a joke. They put a new release to fix 10 bugs and in the windows version you see 50 new features on every release.

I remember someone said to me that maybe because plesk was so stable and it was so good that it did not needed any new features of releases. Juaz.

You want to me to put a list? I could write 10 word pages of just basics things that plesk doesnt do and other panels do like letting you choose the order the server loads indexes. Like index.htm, index.php or even let you configure which one to use. That is so basic and it doesnt so. Hotlinking? Well Cpanel has that since ages. I know you can do most things but without plesk so whats the use for if i have to do eveything manually. Then i just good without plesk. Remote MySQL option.
Postfix, ClamAv, etc, etc, etc.

[joeybutterface]

I'd say it's unlikely the company would alter the pricing dynamics for its largest data center customers. I'm sure they will still be able to license the software on similar terms as they do already. It would be a very dangerous game to play indeed if they tried hiking fees so significantly that existing models and client agreements would need to be changed with prices increased.

[joeybutterface]

nibb is right. Software as a service is all the rage in the industry. CEOs have been rubbing their hands gleefully at the prospects of raping customers of an ongoing monthly fee for the right to run the software with no ownership. It comes as no surprise to see Plesk now offered only on these terms.

Time or tell whether this will work with a control panel that needs to be licensed across an ever-growing multitude of servers every month. I'm fairly sure companies will be looking for alternatives when they discover Parallels wants to rape their business of a high monthly fee, month-after-month, for the right to deploy Plesk as a hosting solution.

It's certainly going to result in a significant increase in costs for every server you run over a period of time. When you start crunching those numbers, you'd have to be stupid to not evaluate alternative options in the marketplace.

[nibb]

Exactly. We have made numbers and using Plesk will just increase the final costs no matter what you do. And we get Parallels leases for a heavy discounted price, still theres no way t cut costs with Parallels. Plesk is very unusable just like it comes. To make it real usefull you have to buy almost all extra options, tha includes antivirus, several languages and other addons. Parallels charges for every single and extra feature. A complete Plesk server with all features costs at least 3 times as implementing other software. Not to mention Parallels makes their software highly unconfigurable inside the system so you have a very hard time to change from Plesk and are forced to use Parallels extras like Sitebuilder and Virtuozzo. Sure it will work with addons from other companies but they dont work well. You basically are tight to buy Parallels addons for life. Also I dont know how much times the Sw Soft name appears in the software, in Sitebuilder you cannot even remove it. And the Virtuozzo Spam that was the to much. We had to move from Plesk when they decided to rob our clients. I dont think its fear to brand more the Parallels names then my brand. Im the one that pays the server, hardware, bandwith and pay my staff to support every single client just to heavy market the Parallels name even more then me that i provide the service. Not to mention that i pay Parallels for this. So basically i pay them to steal my brand and force people to buy directly from Parallels, leave me cut off and to make the ? question marks on people heads on why i dont offer virtuozzo or other producst from Parallels. Hey if put so much branding inside my services they must be good. People just dont know im forced to it. Thinks have to changed in 2 years. And they will not change. This is the model Parallels is trying to approach.
They will not succed and probably will go to the old model back once they see sales have dropped heavily. They even mentioned this before. They want to try to migrate each one of their clients to a Virtuozzo platform. This makes sense with the current prices. If you buy Virtuozzo accounts you get basically Plesk for free. They try to make people decide to use Virtuozzo that already is cheaper and comes with Plesk then putting plesk alone a server. The trick is that Virtuozzo is license on a per basis account so that means if you have 1000 clients you are sharing the profit of those 1000 clients with Parallels. Parallels implements his products not because they improve them or make them better, they decide its easier to erase competition. You all have seing how many control panels they have bought. Eventually they will let those panels die. And very fast. Instead of putting money on developing they have just put the money on buying out the competition.
So dont expect Plesk to improve anytime soon.

We are already moving servers away from Parallels and all that has to do with this company. Competition is eating us alive with prices and we cannot downgrade prices any further just because our costs are to expensive in software leasing. I recommend people to look for alternatives, even when Plesk makes major improvements they are always a step behind on tecnology. They are so slow that when something appears in Plesk its being a long time since the industry has adopted that feature. One of the reasons we choosed Plesk some years ago was because it was cheap and secure. This has all changed now. Its expensive and unsecure and so buggy to the point some things like Spamassasin just dont work. I hope someone reads this sometime. I still dont understand how management is done in this company, they must be real morons or have lack of understing completely on how the hosting world works. They have digged their own grave with this. I hope you all have a nice experience with Plesk. As for me it has being a nightmare for several years and im doing just what anyone smart enough would do. Drop this company.
No wonder why several companies including number one hosting companies have their own control panel developed inhouse. You just have to have a bunch of servers to realize it would costs you less to pay a developing team them pay Parallels. And the CEO of Parallels wondered why companies like 1and1 still have their own custom software and there is allot of companies that still dont use Plesk. This guy must be an drug addict. Why would someone pay thousands of dollars to Parallels if they can develop their own things? Why would someone share for free a % of all your incomes? Its not like implementing Plesk is cheap, it will costs you less to pay programmers to develop things the way you want it. Imagine, you can get plesk complete for more or less 1200$. A company with 100 servers would donate to Parallels 120.000$. I dont know in what world they live but with 120.000$ i can pay another programmer company to develop a control panel that would be even better then Plesk. Not to mention the maintaince fee and all the addons you have to pay. No matter how you see it, stay on Parallels and you will share your profit always. They will try to get your money by any means. Im sure if they could they would charge you a fee for every time you access Plesk or even based on how much bandwith you consume, your bandwith that you pay !!!! If they could they would charge you for letting you change the colors or by hour you run the software in your servers. Software as a Service can work but not this way. Imagine the license servers from Parallels fails. You will be on the mercy of Parallels forever will everything you want to do in the server to the point it actually costs you more to remove this crap software then change to a new software. Im jumping of this boat now before its to late and im not coming back that is for sure.

[hostex]

Thank you for all the input. I looked at cpanel and it's pretty much the same deal. $1499 for a license or $425 yr. for a lease which works out to about $35/mo. Then again it's unlimited domains. $29.99 per month for a Plesk 30 domain lease is steep. It's a slap in the face for small providers who try to compete with DC's that charge $10/mo for the same. In fact it's one of the reasons we stopped leasing servers from dell and put them in local co-lo space (we can not get Plesk licenses from them) and started leasing servers with Plesk from remote DC's. (we also get HW and reboots)

The point above about Windows and updates being free make Windows sound like a bargain with you compare the long term cost to Plesk. (By no means am I a big fan for MS but we get many years of updates from them for free).

I think the whole concept of add-on's at additional costs in the long run may have hurt Plesk software. If these where all included for free (including sitebuilder) it would have cut into the cpanel market and the cost for their SUS renewals still brought in monthly income and new features would make renewing the SUS worth the cost. Let's face it, if you have 10 servers collocated and need unlimited domain licenses @ $70 ea. that's $700/mo. How can a small company compete when large DC's that I would guess pay about $200/mo. for the same 10 licenses...

Thanks again for all the input. Just my two cents. Wait, if I lease those two cents how much could I make?

Don't worry, I know this thread would die if I had two lease my two cents so my input is free and includes free updates!

[stiller]

I do not understand how they can be so foolish. It is exactly the small to medium providers which they are hurting most that should be their primary market. Big DC's can afford to develop their own software and/or look at enterprise solutions. They doubled the price on Virtuozzo licenses, so now I am looking at Sun containers, Xen, VMWare, you name it. People will also start looking at alternatives to Plesk, so suddenly the market looks much better for competing products; Cpanel, Directadmin, etc.

Also, we had made preparations for a large-scale Virtuozzo roll-out, but now, with margins suddenly dropped by 10%, it's not looking so interesting anymore, since the price of a VE has gone up and the price of Plesk has risen insanely compared to the monthly cost of a VE. It's just not viable anymore, so we'll be looking at other products.

[porkchop]

I just want to add my voice to (and agreement with) the opinions expressed here in this thread. This is an utterly outrageous move on their part.

I do have a seemingly obvious question: If we "own" a Plesk license what happens on the SUS date ("key expiration")? do the sites and the control panel go offline? If so, then this action amounts to extortion.

ALSO: If the CP and sites do go offline on the expiration date, then it can be argued that we never "owned" the licenses to begin with, and SWSoft - or whatever you wanna call 'em - sold under fraudulent terms. If you own something, your ownership cannot be revoked. That's the cornerstone of the Western system, property ownership is sacrosanct.

In any event, I regard the Plesk investment as a buried cost. We're actively investigating alternatives at the moment. Under any other set of circumstances I would have suggested some grass roots activism, i.e. petitions, and the like. However, Plesk may have done us all a favor, albeit indirectly, forcing us to look for something else...less buggy, less prone to dying as soon as you upgrade it...and so forth.

In a nutshell - and please pardon the profanity; "**** 'em"

/porky

[nibb]

I dont think your sites and panel will go offline. Just the admin side i think gets disabled. But dont wonder if all your sites have a "License deactivated" in the future.

The way plesk is build is very intrusive, they can even put advertising or deactivate all your sites remotely. You are on their hands. And yes, you never owned the panel. Why do you think you cannot remove those copyright marks all over the panel. You can that on other panels since you pay it. This is not violating the law, the one that has to know that Plesk is Parallels copyright is only the client of Parallels the owner of the license, why should your clients know about this, they did not paid for the panel. Simple, its advertising for them.

We all are looking for other solutions. Parallels just wants a big share of the cake from all our clients. Price raises are just a way to force us to raise the plans prices in a market that everyone is lowering.

Just do what hurts them more. Impact their pocket. Once they realize they had a major drop down they will want to change back but it will be to late. I think they dont care since imagine a big company that implemented Parallels products. It would costs them more to migrate then to just keep using the products. This is extortion but i dont care how much it costs us to move away, we are probably have the money back in no time with other solutions.

If they think this Zend encoded crap is so great they are wrong. Any 10 year old can decode the Plesk panel and make a custom clone of it and just keep developing it yourself.

[fusionhosting]

I just got caught by this when hitting their web page to purchase additional 30 domain licenses. The current promo and notice was extremely confusing, wasn't until I spoke to a sells rep it became clear what they're doing.

Even with the old purchases and SUS that was already pretty steep in terms of the product/service they were offering.

Now the only option they're offering in an unlimited plesk license which more than triples the monthly cost and more than quadruples the purchase price for an 'unlimited' license that my customers don't even need?

Basically they're just raising the floor on their monthly billing so you can't get away with a owned license unless you're paying them $200+/yr SUS ($16.6/mo per), or $30+/mo lease per license.

Only thing they really have going for their CP is usability and design, everything else about the product is pretty mediocre, and the Plesk upsell in your own CP along with inserting PPC ads into landing pages is just awful treatment of your own customers.

I looked at virtuozzo several years ago and the pricing them was ok to base a business off of, I declined at that time for another option, and now am pretty damn glad after seeing the price jump. With as competitive as our industry is especially on pricing I just don't see the reasoning for this other than Parallels trying to push some really high profit figures at the expense of squeezing and alienating their customer base.

[64bithost.com]

So I am totally frustrated with this whole process. The only thing to do with a problem is to solve it rather than to point fingers at the people who created the problem in the first place.

So I challenge Parallels.com to let the consumers come up with a better pricing stucture that Parallels.com will use from this day forward. I say this, and most people will think I am off my rocker but, it will help out the small business person if they do. It is a matter of mathmatics and it needs to be solved. something they did not responsibly do by asking us in the first place.

There was no survey as to if we wanted a new pricing structure or if we could even give our input for that matter. I do remember a survey on SaaS which 30% said that they would not use it and 70% said they would. Not historically good numbers for a software company but then again neither was Microsofts ME.

So come on Parallels.com...let us decide the pricing stucture. Because I know I could solve it.

[nibb]

That is a joke right?

Since when does Parallels asks something their customers?

If you think they will change their pricing structure they wont. Actually it will go worst. They are going to remove owned licenses completely eventually and you will only have the lease options.

And then they will eventually remove Plesk for Non VPS. That means Plesk running directly on the server will not work anymore. You will have Plesk only as an option inside VPS servers. And of course those will be Virtuozzo so you will have to buy Virtuozzo and Plesk inside it.

Be prepared for a couple thousands. Or if you are a small business they will negotiate with you based on a % of your incomes. Lets say 10% of your incomes is the minimum they deal i think.

[rr1024]

http://groups.google.com/group/server_vps_hlp/
founded a new group for plesk and cPanel

[renhack]

Thats it? 26 replies. As of next month we are migrating away from HSPc and Plesk and will offer Hosting Controller only. We will phase Plesk out of our offerings completely as our SUS's expire. Our main reason for using Plesk was for consistency across platforms. We can get the same functionality elsewhere. It's not like were losing out on fantastic support!

[porkchop]

Forgive me for asking this again, but I have an SUS expiring in May, so some fast decisions have to be made in the weeks between now and then....

WHEN the SUS expires - does anyone know definitively whether theAdmin CP and/or domains will go offline?
OR:
Will it simply be a CP installation that is ineligible for any support or updates (as would be the case previously if anyone didn't renew SUS)

I'd hate to wait for May1 and do nothing, only to find out that 300+ domains just became inaccessible. My mind can't get around the appalling consequences of that. It would also perhaps be the single most hostile thing any software company could possibly do.....but Parallels have proved themselves in that department [somewhat] in the past, so I'd believe that the possibility exists.

Folks??

[renhack]

Your sites will remain online. What they haven't mentioned is the future of SUS. I'm assuming they will phase that out since future versions will be SAAS only. This is the main reason why we are leaving. Since we lease VPS and dedicated servers to our customers we can't justify the expense of providing Plesk if we incur monthly lease fees for our entire install base. It's not like anyone has ever asked for Plesk by name.

[porkchop]

Your sites will remain online.
That sounds somewhat reassuring, although I'm still worried about the Admin CP also for fairly obvious reasons! :D

What they haven't mentioned is the future of SUS. I'm assuming they will phase that out since future versions will be SAAS only.
I'd say that's a fairly logical assumption.

This is the main reason why we are leaving. Since we lease VPS and dedicated servers to our customers we can't justify the expense of providing Plesk if we incur monthly lease fees for our entire install base. It's not like anyone has ever asked for Plesk by name.
Basically the same (or broadly similar) situation here.

/porky

[nibb]

Same here. Nobody really asks for this products by name. We are not going to stop offering Parallels products for people that ask for them, but we are going to put them a very high tag price just like they pass it to us. So if someone wants a Plesk panel on a VPS or server he is going probably pay the double, and for the troubles and support time it costs us the Plesk products we are going probably offer it for 3 times the costs of other products. So we assure ourselfs that nobody chooses this products or if they do they should be willing to pay a high price for it. We are going to migrate our platforms as well and just give for free or with a very low price tag other solutions. We did the same with Plesk. We gave plesk very cheap and Cpanel very high. Now we are going to revert this and just incentive the use of Cpanel or the panel we choose for each solution.

We also cannot afford to raise the whole platform prices. And as this company Parallels is slowly sinking its best to run as fast as possible before the whole Titanic sinks.

One of the main reasons a company raises so much their prices is because they have financial problems. It would not surprise me with all the companies they bought. They need to cash the money back in somehow. Also the policies and products are getting worst and worst. You all see they dont even care to read their own forums. What can someone expect from a company like this.

But i just imagine their CEO Sergei saying "Let them cry as much as they want, still a very big % of idiots is going to use our products and we are going to make them so heavily complicated so they can never change, then we are going to ripe them as much as we can of all the incomes they made. Basically let them work for us and give us a % of their work each month"

This slavery really. I can see Parallels as a communist company that slaves their customers so they work their asses off to pay each month their licenses, as they dont do anything at all for the money. Just to collect a very big % of all our incomes each month, or our hard earned work. Hell.... Even the color is Red and the company is from Russia !!!!

We are moving back to liberty.... To the States....

Cpanel here we come....

[64bithost.com]

If you own a few licenses and are going to Cpanel I need the following items:


Plesk 8.3 inside Virtuozzo unlimited - as many as I can get
Vittuozzo 4.0 licenses unlimited - as many as I can get

I do not wish to pay retail so I will pay for what I can get.

Chris

[porkchop]

We're probably going to implement DirectAdmin.

Reasons: (as we see them so far)

1. Their licenses are flat fee, unlimited domains, which is as it should be. The pricing is nice, and from a European perspective, we also like that it's in $USD. Errr...[cough]...sorry about that. The license model is one we like. Monthly/Quarterly/Annual - or lifetime (but we see no reason to go the lifetime route, it makes no sense) Yes, it's a subscription - or a lease - depending on how you look at it, but it contains a bigtime value component altogether missing in Parallels, and the cost is sane.

2. Their tech support appears to be first rate - as far as we know from colleagues who are existing customers. WE polled those we know who HAVE experienced problems, all uniformly report that their issues were dealt with quickly and in a wholly professional manner.

3. Oddity: They perform the installation - free - although the licensee can do so him/herself should they so wish.

4. D/A personnel - both sales and support - seem eager to engage their customers and prospects. That's a welcome piece of news!! :)

5. The have the best help site I have ever seen - period. http://www.site-helper.com/

6. Forums: Chinese Laundry list! select what subject you would like to read about or blab about, it's out there on the forums. Plenty of expertise available for newbies to hosting or newbies to Direct Admin. Busy forums and lots of closed issues are good!

7. Forums for feature suggestions on next version of D/A "what would you like to see in there".

8. Oh yeah, we like the interface too, we (and the clients we've exposed to the CP thus far) can definitely live with the interface. It's flexible, and in some cases even more so than Plesk.

9. Skins: Plenty of 'em, or roll your own. What's not to like about that?

10. An open attitude in general: characterized seemingly as: "we would like to talk to you, so whatever it is; 'bring it on' and we'll air it out and see where we go with it". After the deafness of Plesk, we like that a whole lot. Plus, they are not going to talk to Parallels, so D/A isn't likely to get swallowed up by the leviathan. We Hope - We Hope. :D

Potential Downsides:
(either definite negatives, or questions which are thus far unresolved)

1. Migration: We've heard that there is a Plesk -> DirectAdmin script in existence which can act as a migration manager. If that's untrue, or the script has a high failure incidence then migration, simply put, is going to be a *****.

2. Exim. And we thought qmail was bad (hell after all the years of fighting with Plesk I was finally achieving something close to a state of peace with qmail).

3. No migration manager (yet).

4. Backup/Restore is nowhere near as versatile as Plesk (but to be fair it does what it has to, and a site or reseller =in toto= can be backed up and restored, just not as easily as we're used to).

I don't have one single shred of guilt at posting this reasoning in a Plesk forum, because Parallels brought this post in particular, and this thread - and the scenario in general - upon themselves. Predators invite bad behavior from their "prey" that got away. [/me disrespectfully sticks his tongue out at Sergei & Co].

/porky

[WaDavid]

Here is a nice MTA comparison: http://shearer.org/MTA_Comparison

I don't think you have to worry about exim, I am just uncertain with qmail not receiving anymore updates.

Currently though on most other servers we run which is not plesk, we use postfix and I feel quite comfortable with it.

[renhack]

So i called my dedicated sales rep last friday to vent my frustrations. Had to leave a message of course. I politely asked for a return call because i had some licensing questions.

6 days later and no response. Why is this not surprising?

[ArizonaSky]

I've been using Plesk since version 2 and I can say that no piece of software has caused me more sleepless nights and wasted more of my time than Plesk. I've finally decided after this last issue with the licenses that I've had enough and will let all my licenses expire.

I've patiently waited for a change in the attitude that Plesk treats their clients with and sadly it never came and it's another big reason I am leaving.

The constant buggy upgrades that leave me in dread every time I do an upgrade have been torturing. Every time I fix one of their issues they change things again and the process starts all over. The really stupid bugs too just show that there wasn't much common sense or testing of the software before it was released. If upgrades with Ubuntu, WHMCS and Webmin go so well why can't they with Plesk? Why should I pay even more now for such poor software?

So a few days ago I started looking for an alternative CP that supports Ubuntu and came across virtualmin and I installed it and couldn't be happier. It has so many more options that I need than Plesk has and it doesn't screw around with the OS nearly as much as Plesk either. The learning curve was a little bit higher but I'm mastering it pretty well after only a few days.

To think a control panel that actually makes an admins life easier, I could get use to this. I actually feel like they want my business, that's a nice feeling too...

[ladhani]

Are there more people out there who have switched from Plesk to Virtualmin?
And are you using the GPL or the Pro version?

Please help us drop Plesk, please share your experiences.

Thanks!

[renhack]

bump. Still no reply to this thread from anyone in parallels.

[faris]

This is a user-to-user forum.

Although Parallels staff may take a look from time to time, the idea of these forums is for users to use them to help each over.

Faris.

[joeybutterface]

They do respond when it suits them.

Obviously this is not a topic they want to discuss.

[sergius]

Gentlemen,

Parallels has never changed or raised prices for our base Plesk product in company history (7+ years). We recently did make a decision to discontinue sales of any domain count except for unlimited domains within our Plesk Plus edition; as we are aligning our business model more closely with our customers and partners who also do not "sell" their services but rather offer them on the subscription basis. In fact even prior to the decision, over 90% of Plesk licenses were leased.

Parallels does offer significant discounts (and other benefits) through our partner program and focused on our partners as primary distribution channel for Parallels Plesk. I'd encourage you to contact sales and enquire about our Partner program (http://www.parallels.com/en/partners/become/).

[johnf]

Aligning?? That's simply ridicolous.. the only reason for this shameful move is that you want to increase your profits..you don't care of your customers, maybe you want to keep only the big ones.
Please think once again of what you are doing to your loyal customers!

[chaoztc]

Gentlemen,
Parallels has never changed or raised prices for our base Plesk product in company history (7+ years). We recently did make a decision to discontinue sales of any domain count except for unlimited domains within our Plesk Plus edition; as we are aligning our business model more closely with our customers and partners who also do not "sell" their services but rather offer them on the subscription basis. In fact even prior to the decision, over 90% of Plesk licenses were leased.

Swsoft started 1,5 year ago to move us to leased, but too expensive.

Parallels does offer significant discounts (and other benefits) through our partner program and focused on our partners as primary distribution channel for Parallels Plesk. I'd encourage you to contact sales and enquire about our Partner program (http://www.parallels.com/en/partners/become/).

Yes, but only if I have silver, gold, whatever contracts and pay minumum $$ each month.
Sorry, to expensive for a small company, because we do not need this amout of licenses but have pay it.

I do not want to leave swsoft, but I have to.
I sell domains for 12 eur, without taxes for 10, and buy them for 9,5; but the hspc-account-monthly lease is now
much higher than revenue.
If I increase domain-prices, to have an revenue, I'm out of business.
This new business program only helps big big hosting companies, but small ones loose their business.

byebye swoft.

[64bithost.com]

I want you to personally email me through the parallels system or contact me through AOL AIM I want to show you how to make a profit using the Parallels system.

Best regards

Chris

[manarak]

as we are aligning our business model more closely with our customers and partners who also do not "sell" their services but rather offer them on the subscription basis. In fact even prior to the decision, over 90% of Plesk licenses were leased.

The statement is seriously ridiculous.

We all understood you want recurring revenues.
The math is easy to do: I paid 189 dollars or something for my 30-domains license, which I have been using for over 30 months now. That's about 6,3 USD per month.
You just discontinued the volume-pricing that was adequate for my business (30 Domains), and now you are offering me a lease, which means an increase by 535% (supposing my use is limited to 30 months).

Second, you say that the sold licences were only 10% of your business. So... why is it important to you to do this step if the outcome is alledgedly negligible anyway?
It just doesn't fit.

Plus, you, SW-Soft, are doing a mistake.
Small internet start ups like mine could start with a bought 30 or 100 domain license. When these businesses grow, they would purchase more Plesk products.
But now those small businesses will use other products.

bye bye Plesk