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[Admin]

Thank you all for the replies! I really appreciate the feedback!

@Oxy

Prevent users from deleting or renaming critical folders

With me it’s the other way around, I can’t delete several folders from the ex-domains because the system doesn’t allow me, and it allows users in cases where it’s undesirable.

There has been some flip-flopping over the years when it comes to making it possible to delete critical folders.

When creating a new site, all is good with protected folders. But when deleting a domain, what are you supposed to do? Should we:

• Delete the domain directory right away, potentially nuking someone’s site without warning?
• Don’t delete the domain directory? But now there is a directory that serves no purpose and cannot be deleted.
• Make the directory writeable only when the corresponding domain is deleted? That’s only more confusing. And can get messy when people add a domain, remove it, and then add it again.

@Oxy

The first confusion is because at the first creation, the hosting acc files go to htdocs, when another domain is added, then a problem arises because they are used to looking only for htdocs and stuffing files into it instead of "yourdomain/htdocs"

I recently saw some panel, I think it was custom, always setup domain specific directories, and simply created a symlink from public_html/www to the directory of the initial domain. That’s a lot better than the cPanel model where multi domain support feels like an afterthought.

Still, this is probably a hard sell for iFastNet, both because it’s more difficult to implement and because they want to stay closer to the cPanel model.

@Greenreader9

In the past, you always talked about how having a menu of options was too confusing for people, and they did not understand how to find what they were looking for. I think you were right back then, and it still holds true today. Especially on mobile, it is much more difficult to find anything, or modify anything on your account without opening the menu bar, which some people probably assume is the main menu, not the account editor menu.

@Greenreader9

Also, when you first started doing it, I though migrating all the control panel features into the CA was a good idea (And I know we’ve talked regarding this before), but I’m starting to think it’s not as good of an idea anymore. Unless the client area implementation of it is better (like bypassing weird requirements for URLs and such that the vP has), why duplicate it and add another menu option that makes it harder to people to find what they are looking for?

I’m also struggling with how to present it well. Talking about making menus simple is easy when you don’t have a lot of functionality yet.

At this point, having the control panel button visible so prominently is more out of historic reasons than out of functional necessity, because every single feature available in the control panel is also available in the client area (albeit slightly differently usually).

I do stand by that many of the client area implementations are better than the VistaPanel implementations. The client area SSL/TLS menu nicely integrates with the Free SSL feature, and the Redirects and Protected Directories features are just more versatile than the VP counterparts.

Hopping back and forth between the control panel and the client area for specific features seems like an even more confusing mess than the current situation.

I really think that there are more sensible options to make these features accessible than cPanel’s “here is a grid of 50 icons, now you go figure out what you need and what they do”. But I haven’t really seen that many examples of panels that really do it well.

@Greenreader9

Removing the option to add a custom domain at account creation is also a change I disagree with (but you do what you want to do, I have no power outside of this forum anyways) as it makes it too confusing for people. You advertise custom domain support, then make it hard to add it. Yes, you have the custom domains can be added later message, but once the account is created it’s not clear how to actually go about adding the domain.

@EdwardHamHam

It also probably doesn’t help that a lot of premium hosting providers give you the option to add a custom domain at sign-up. Granted this is free hosting and expectations should be different, but if someone who wants to start a website is told by their more experienced friend “this is how it usually works” I could see why the deviation would throw them off track (Not to mention they do it that way so using a custom domain is easier). InfinityFree had that option for a moment but removed it. Yes, the client area does say you can add one later, but I know from my experience in customer service that many customers are great at missing things that have to be read like that, especially in the tech industry.

On that note, I’ve actually been curious about why it was removed. I remember you mentioning that it was done to “reduce friction”…

@Admin

This was done to reduce friction in the account creation process. And if you wanted to add your domain with CNAME verification, you had to go this route anyway.

…if you don’t mind me asking, what exactly does that mean? Was it simply causing extra stress on the server and iFastNet told you to remove it, or was there something else going on?

By “reducing friction”, I had hoped to make it easier for users. This is twofold:

Firstly, setting up an account should be simple, fast and easy. If you want to host a custom domain, then having to first update your nameservers, wait a day, and then try creating the account again, seemed like a frustrating road block.

Yes, I know that with premium hosting, this is normal. However, those 1) don’t require the domain to be setup beforehand and 2) can then try to sell you a domain name along with the hosting account so you can pay for them together. When you don’t sell domains and don’t have a payment step, it changes the context a lot.

The other issue is feature parity with adding domains later. When adding domains later on, you can choose between CNAME verification and nameserver verification. But during the account creation stage, you can only only verify by setting nameservers. Especially for those who can’t do nameserver verification, that’s not a nice way to find out. Having only one way to add custom domains where you have all the options seems like a cleaner way to do it.

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As I’ve been writing and contemplating this, I have gotten some ideas on how to improve this. Displaying the domains list more prominently could help, but also perhaps creating a “pseudo control panel” with a different menu structure could work.