Many of the ideas you have here are great and I would love to be able to implement them. The things is that the MOFH API only exposes a small number of functions, and everything I know that’s possible is implemented already in the client area. If a feature isn’t available in the client area, it’s safe to assume that the API endpoints to configure it don’e exist.
There is already Softaculous integrated into the control panel. I agree, it’s not perfect.
But there is no API to create databases automatically, which means people would need to manually create databases and enter the database details.
And that’s exactly the kind of manual action I would like to avoid with an automatic script installer.
If the platform didn’t have an auto installer at all, I would have done this already. But even the current setup is integrated better in the panel than anything I could offer.
I’m sorry, but how do you see this integration work. I’m not that familiar with Yandex’s mail offering.
Are you saying I would have to sign up for one Yandex 360 account myself and provide individual email accounts to users? Because a quick check shows me they provide 1000 mail boxes for free, which is a lot for an individual person but useless for a hosting provider.
Or does Yandex have a reseller/partner program for this where I could offer Yandex 360 accounts to users? Because I can’t find that feature.
And finally, the platform doesn’t have an API to set MX records and the like, so I can’t help automate the setup for people. So what does having my own integration add then compared to signing up at Yandex directly?
I’ve used WHMCS for over 5 years on xvhost.com. I can say many things about it, but “better user experience” is not something I could never say.
The majority of tickets I got on xvhost.com were questions like “what are my nameservers”, “how can I login to cPanel”, “what’s my username”, “how can I reset my password”. These are all very common operations that WHMCS apparently doesn’t put in the places where people expect them to be.
I have received similar questions on InfinityFree as well. But then I changed the design of the panel so the information and the options were easier to find. So now you rarely see these kinds of questions.
That’s possible if you both talk directly to users and can quickly evolve the system in response. With WHMCS, I can’t do that, because you get a closed source system and a development team that, in my own experience, doesn’t respond well to bug reports and suggestions.
And don’t get me started about how poorly WHMCS fits with free hosting.
If there are things you like about WHMCS that are missing here, please do point them out. But “why don’t you just use WHMCS” feels like an insult to my experience and the effort I put in developing and fine tuning the platform I built.
That’s what I did. The client area is my own panel built on the MOFH API.
I’d love to implement all control panel functionality into it and create a clean, simple and unified experience, but that’s just not possible.
I would have done it already if I could. But again, no API method exist to install the new certificates.
I could, and have considered, integrating Freenom with my own panel.
The thing is that I see quite a number of reports here from people whose Freenom domains just stopped working for no reason. I don’t know what that’s all about, but it has made me hesitant to recommend people to use Freenom.
And if I can’t recommend Freenom, then I can’t in good conscience offer it as a feature, and potentially be on the hook for it if Freenom fails to deliver.
I generates additional hits for a little cosmetic tweak. I get why people want it, but I can’t consciously set is as the default.
This has also crossed my mind (minus the WHMCS part of course).
The thing is that so far I’ve gone by without having any kind of billing functionality. If I’m going to sell domain names, I’m going to need billing functionality, payment gateways, fraud prevention, and most likely customer support in case things go wrong.
Meanwhile, domain names are sold with very small margins. So it takes a lot of effort to setup and operate while generating almost no revenue.
It makes sense when you also sell hosting, which typically has higher margins, or can sell domains at such volumes where it becomes profitable through scale. But I have no ambitions to do either of those things.
You can’t integrate a control panel with another control panel. Control panels also manage server configuration. And if I had APIs to manage hosting accounts contents, I would implement my own control panel instead of trying the wrestle some off the shelf panel on top of it.
I checked that in the past but can’t find any partner program for hosting providers. I’ve seen hosting providers with Weebly in the past, but it seems that they’ve discontinued this program, or at least don’t accept new providers.
And then there is the problem of costs. Site.pro (and SitePad) charge a fee per website, which is negligible for premium hosting but impossible for free hosting.
Finally something that’s easy to do!
What kind of categories do you think the forum is lacking?
Have you ever wondered why all of the largest free hosting providers in the world use custom panels?
The current platform was built from scratch to sustainably offer free hosting. DirectAdmin itself is quite affordable, but making it work to providing free hosting for millions of websites is not easy.
Is it doable? Sure. But it would take a lot of effort to migrate all the platform optimizations to a different panel. And then having to pray that DirectAdmin doesn’t go the way of cPanel and start basing licensing on accounts instead of servers and bankrupt iFastNet as a result.
The panel isn’t perfect, but it works well for free hosting, and will keep working well.
. Instead the admin would rather become bankrupt (don’t take it to heart pls)
