an ehcp story from serversnstuff.com and mebbinet

Thanks to serversnstuff.com for this nice review:

Easy Hosting Control Panel, or ECHP for short, has loads of potential. The project has been ongoing since 2006 and lately been showing a lot of cool new features.
Rememer – it’s free

ECHP offers lots of the features that you can find on professional control panels such as cPanel, DirectAdmin and Plesk and even though it doesn’t quite add up to the standard of these three i have to constantly remind myself that EHCP is 100% free of charge. For beeing a free product, there’s no doubt about it… EHCP is awesome!
Suitable for individuals or small businesses

This control panel is suitable for individuals that wants to administrate their own webserver but lack some of the experience needed working with terminal commands. With it’s graphical interface beginner administrators can take care of many of the “day-to-day” tasks related to administrating a server directly in their browser without buying expensive licenses for a hosting control panel.

ECHP has all the features needed to use it in a small hosting business so it can of course also be used to make money even though much of the work (setting up accounts) needs to be done manually since there’s no integration with systems like WHMCS, ClientExec or ModernBill.

This all sound pretty amazing, but of course there’s some negative stuff as well (even though they are not many). My biggest issue dealing with EHCP is that i get this feeling of messy content everywhere i go.

Inside the control panel itself you have the option choosing between multiple templates that will create the look and feel of the control panel. Some of these are very nice, some of them really ulgy. But they all feel a bit messy to me. They need more work done to the design before they can measure up to the competition. While it is possible to change the look and feel of the templates i should not have to do this just to get a clean, good looking and logical interface to work with.

The same problem also applies to their official website unfortunately. The content inside the website is good, but sometimes it’s sooo hard to find it, and when you do, the risk of it beeing part enligsh part turkish or some other language is big. I’m also suprised to see that not much work has gone into SEO.
Lacks a graphical profile

The team behind EHCP seems to be really qualified and they produce a really good product, but in my opinion they are in desperate need of a project manager that can pull everything together. Tidy up your website and give it a fresh new design, remove all ads inside control panel (i know you want to earn money – but it looks unprofessional the way it’s done right now), and get somebody to design a really good looking template. Give the template a profile that is consistant with the look and feel of your own website – creating a graphical profile.

Will this make the control panel function better? No! But never underestimate the power of a professional look and feel to your product. This will take you a long way when customers are choosing between two different solutions.
Integrate with other solutions

If you implement these changes there should be no problem working on getting integrated with customer control panels such as WHMCS or ModernBill. A integration for these systems would boost downloads of your product for sure.
To sum up

When it comes down to it, i really like EHCP. This is a great hosting control panel that only needs to “grow up” to be a serious contender. Don’t be fooled by it’s messy content and sometimes ugly look and feel, because the code behind those coloured pixels is solid and gives you a lot of features to play around with.

This review has been done on version 0.29.15.4
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EHCP (Easy Hosting Control Panel) is a project that i have been following for a while because i think it’s got potential. This is a 100% free, open source hosting control panel that can be installed on Debian and Ubuntu systems. It offers a lot of cool features that you can recognize from the more established control panles such as cPanel and DirectAdmin.

Even though it’s not yet as good as the professional alternatives (cPanel, DirectAdmin, Plesk and so on) in my opinion, EHCP is a great (and cheap) way to get started with your small hosting business. I would say though, that EHCP is more suitable for users that wants to administrate their own server with a few domain names on it, but lack the experience of working with the terminal. By installing EHCP you will get a graphical interface to work with where you can solve many of the “day-to-day” tasks that comes with running your own server.

Another cool thing is that the EHCP community seems to be growing rapidly. Their forum and blog posts are attracting more and more questions/comments which usually is a good sign of many people using their solution. The EHCP team does a great job of replying to all questions and sometimes i get amazed of the level of the support they are offering (after all EHCP is free of charge). According to themselves, EHCP has been downloaded more than 20 000 times. Great job!

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For good system security it’s extremely important that you keep your operating system up to date. The beauty of EHCP is that all of the packages that get’s installed by it can be managed through apt-get as usual. This means that all you have to do in order to keep your operating system and all of the packages used by EHCP up to date is:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

It doesn’t get much easier then that!

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These posts taken from
http://www.serversnstuff.com/product-review/ehcp/
and
http://www.serversnstuff.com/2011/07/how-to-install-ehcp/

For mebbinet posts, check:
http://mebbinet.blogspot.com/2011/12/easy-hosting-control-panel.html
http://mebbinet.blogspot.com/2012/01/ehcp-domain-creation-and-management.html

thanks all. We will be what you expect, “keep up the good work… ” I hear this many times…