cPanel/Plesk or not

We have been having recurring problems with our Dolphin installation on a VPS hosted by a reputable, fairly large company. But the issues continue, so I have concluded that the best thing is to move to hosting by a Dolphin-friendly outfit. I was just about to pull the trigger when I came across this:

http://www.anchor.com.au/hosting/development/we_hate_plesk_and_cpanel

Since our recent problems seem to be related to configuration changes "no-one" seems to have made, I'm wondering if cPanel is the culprit, and we will continue to have problems no matter where we go, if we get cPanel or Plesk installed. But if I don't, how can I set up additional sites and their e-mail accounts, etc? These are simple needs, but I am nowhere near being a system administrator and have no idea how to do this without cPanel.

So, what do you recommend? Is there another way I can handle this?

I use webmin on VPS and it works fine and is easy to use.

Sorry-- to make things easier I should have given the relevant excerpts from the article. Slightly edited for clarity:

"CPanel takes an innovative approach to patch application. Normally, when an application is released, as bugs are found patches are released. Concurrently new versions of the same application are released. When a new version is released at first it wont have any bugs but over time they are found and patches are subsequently released. The cycle goes on. Normally, application vendors continue to release patches for both the new and the old versions of the applications they have released for the supported life (variable in length, but often up to 7 years) of the application. CPanel takes a different approach, rather than applying the patches to the existing versions of the applications, it simply upgrades them to the newest version in which bugs have not yet been found.
Why is this a problem? Take a hosting server which contains potentially hundreds of different websites all built by different website developers. A hosting company can't (and won't) test version upgrades on every site because it's simply not possible. They apply the updates and every time risk breaking (or simply do) many of the websites they host due incompatibilities in client code between application versions.

There are many more technical gripes that we have and it seems we're not alone. To move on to the indirect problems which are caused by these two programs:

• For the unsuspecting customer of a web hosting company that is entirely reliant on cpanel/plesk to provide services, what results is what becomes a fairly standard answer to complex problems.
  • Q. My application is slow/broken/not working/doing strange things? A. It must be your application. The real answer way well lie in the configuration of the server which the cpanel/plesk host is unable to perform or understand.
  • Recurrent server outages. Why? Updates were applied that broke the server which in turn took far longer than they should have to rectify.

I'm currently trying to choose a control panel so I'd be interested in any advice people have. So far one person has recommended Plesk as it's well documented / supported and a lot of people are familiar with it, which could be handy as I'm not a techie and will need outside support from time to time. Another has said that Plesk is awful and has recommended I use webmin instead. But I understand that cPanel has advantages when it comes to backups and server moves etc, but it's a very costly option for a single site.

Well I have a contract with my hosting company that updates the software for me if I don't do it after period of time.
If there are updates i get a message.

I have complete control of my VPS with webmin.
But Cpanel and Plesk are more common... and there is more documentation to find.

I have worked with both plesk and cpanel & have found that both need to have auto updates turned off and need to be done manually or they can affect your perfectly set up and running dolphin sites. cpanel is better but more complicated to set accounts up on if you intent to rent out portions of your server to recoup some of the cost automatic billing systems will cost you on both platforms plesk is cheaper  plesk is very easy to use and to set up new accounts I am unable to say which is more secure as they both have holes but plesk is free on most server packages cpanel will cost you upwards of $25 a month

good luck

Hello all,

Thank you for you very helpful replies. They bring up two further questions:

1) Is it possible to "roll back" to an earlier version of cPanel on my existing VPS, to check if that was the source of problems, and

2) If I move to a Dolphin -friendly host, but migrate the cPanel as well, will that just migrate my problems too?

Brian

have a look at ISPConfig ...