Migrating from an Ensim setup / Selecting a control panel

C

CodeWallah

New Member
I'm currently hosted on a dedicated Ensim box that's been sponsored for us up until now, with about 30 sites of ours on it, most of them small and without e-mails but some with up to 10 e-mail addresses. We're looking at a mid-range VPS solution.

I notice in your FAQ you say:

Will you migrate my hosting account/websites from another provider?

Yes. Please follow the normal order procedure. Once you receive the welcome email please contact support via email at supportxknownhost.com for migration assistance.
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Expecting you to migrate all that is obviously a tall order, but I am open for shock surprises. Otherwise, do you have suggestions on migrating from Ensim without doing it the hard way? The sites themselves are not an issue, the e-mail accounts are the general PITA we need to cope with.

--

Also:

- Which control panel do you personally recommend of the three? We are quite tech savyy.

- How do you bill bandwidth overages?

- Is PHP 5 supported?

- I haven't heard complaints on support times, but can I ask, how many people are onboard the staff?
 
We can help only with same control panel migration such as Plesk to Plesk or cPanel to cPanel. In case of cross platform migration all we can do is to try to answer possible questions about data structure, etc.
Do you have root level access to the source Ensim machine? If yes, cPanel has some (might be quite outdated) migration wizard for Ensim -> cPanel accounts transfer but I personally had to experience with it and can't comment how good it works.

As for the rest of your questions:
- If you offer shared or reseller hosting, then I would definitely suggest to go with cPanel;

- Our billing dept sends bw usage notifications once your VPS reaches 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% and 100% of traffic limit. If you see that you're going over you limit you have a choice to upgrade whole VPS to higher hosting plan (with higher bw limits), add bandwidth add-on to the existing VPS or your account will be invoiced for bandwidth overusage on the package anniversary date;

- By default all VPS's are provisioned with PHP v4.x.x, in case of cPanel you can upgrade to PHP v5.x.x in just a couple clicks in your control panel;

- We currently have 5 techs and cover 24x7. Guaranteed ticket response time is 24 hours however majority of support tickets is processed in less than 1-2 hours.

Regards,
Paul
 
Thanks for the answers, Paul.

I do have root access to the Ensim box. Or, I used to have, and the fact that I currently don't contributes to why we're moving -- I am assuming (hoping) I can arrange for it though. I'll read up on that converter -- thanks for the tip.

We have a situation where the bulk of the sites are managed by myself, with perhaps five that are hosted for others. We don't really need a lot of power reseller/shared hosting-wise, as long as the basics such as e-mail control are available. Does that influence your recommendation? How do the two compare on your servers w/ resource usage and stability?

Would PHP 5.x cause any issues on DirectAdmin? Having it installed shouldn't be an issue for us.
 
With root access things might be a bit easier if cPanel's transfer wizard will work correctly. I run couple searches on cPanel forums and found that transfer wizard won't bring MySQL databases but haven't found anything about problems with mail configuration.

If you can manage everything manually, then having no control panel running inside the VPS will save some resources and final VPS price will be a bit less as there will be no need to pay license fees and you probably will be able to host more sites as more resources will be available. However having control panel might make day to day operations easier and might save quite good amount of time if you'll decide to migrate somewhere else.

PHP 5 is supported by DA, here is a link to DA forums with information regarding the upgrade: http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=5663

Regards,
Paul
 
Thanks for those answers! I'll be ordering shortly – the possible cPanel wizard aside, still on the panels:

1. Do you have on which of the three admin panels one would want to take? As a power user, with rather minute shared hosting needs: With focus on light resource usage and possibilities for configuration (can be command line, as long as the system doesn't impose silly limits on what can be done). I gather cPanel is the heaviest of the lot with some 130 MB of memory in use just for its being there. I'm looking at the VPS L plan w/ 192 MB total RAM, which leaves a pretty slim slice for the sites themselves. Any links / clues on the resource usage of the other two panels? I hear much good about DirectAdmin.

2. Does your setup allow so-called "overselling"? I don't really intend to oversell (as most of the accounts are mine anyway), but would like to have some flexibility instead of imposing hard space limits on each account. Yes, and perhaps some accounts can also be set up without a space limit at all?

3. Webmin without any other panels, does that offer an option for an individual site owner to create e-mails etc. at all?
 
1. Every control panel (except webmin which is not a hosting control panel) imposes some configuration restrictions. If you'd like to be able to control most of the things from command like and still have powerful control panel, then cPanel should be your choice. DirectAdmin is very light and fast but isn't that popular as cPanel and might confuse in the beginning and all these admin / reseller / user levels are implemented in a bit unusual (but might be convenient) way. Plesk and cPanel uses approx the same amount of memory but in general this depends on number of features installed. If you take base versions of Plesk and cPanel, then Plesk will take a bit less RAM but if you will install things like spamassassin, antivirus, etc, then cPanel VPS will win;

2. It is up to you how to setup control panel and your accounts within your own VPS. We limit only maximum amount of memory, disk space and traffic that can be consumed by your account. VPS is like a dedicated server with small number of technology-related limitations like inability to upgrade/change system kernel, etc.
You definitely can setup accounts with unlimited disk/traffic limits inside your VPS.

3. Not really. Webmin is not a hosting control panel but just a web interface to configuration files which also offers some (very small) automation. I.e. you can create DNS zone in Webmin from blank file or use a pre-defined zone template. However this automation cannot be even close compared to what cPanel, Plesk or DirectAdmin offers. Please also note that you should be familiar with different services and their configuration files structure to be able to use webmin.

Regards,
Paul
 
KnownHost-P said:
Guaranteed ticket response time is 24 hours however majority of support tickets is processed in less than 1-2 hours.
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CodeWallah,

almost always i get a response to a ticket within 30 minutes, fastest time was 2 minutes for me....and longest was 3 hours.....
 
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