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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCMENT
Date: 9th October 2007
This document is designed to explain some decisions we have made regarding our legacy hosting control panel system - Our "Reseller Control Panel" tool and our "SiteAdmin" tool.
The Siteadmin/RCP was developed in-house about seven years ago. It was fairly pioneering at the time with few hosts able to provide such a service.
Our legacy control panel system - "SiteAdmin" |
Now, it is a different story. There are several software vendors who dedicate their time and resources in providing solutions to hosting providers such as Interhost and so we have been looking at outsourcing this aspect of our business to one of these software vendors.
Two years ago we started testing products from several companies and for the last eighteen months we have focused on solutions from a company called SW-Soft (www.swsoft.com). It is without doubt that SW-Soft are the largest software vendor dedicated to the website and e-mail hosting industry.
As a result of this, we have been serving hosting packages based on an SW-Soft products such as Plesk (see www.plesk.com) and Virtuozzo (Dedicated server virtualisation - or Virtual Private Servers).
So now we are going to set an official "End of Life" for our own software (The RCP - or Reseller Control Panel, and the Siteadmin tool).
The official end of life is hereby set to 31st December 2009. And by this time our intention is that we will have moved all sites over to the SW-Soft solution called Plesk. This gives us more than 14 months to migrate the websites to the new system. The Plesk software is a replacement for both the Reseller Control Panel and the Siteadmin parts of your hosting environment.
In preparation for the migration we have put together video tutorials for e-learning purposes. Although Plesk is very simple to use, these tutorials will show you how to achieve many of the tasks you are used to doing now (such as creating password protected folders and setting up email addresses).
One of the main reasons for us out-sourcing the development of our control panel and backend systems is that it takes the burden of maintaining the thousands of lines of code in the software. Bug fixing and security enhancements are extremely time consuming - time we would rather spend supporting our loyal clients and improving the network.
The "Plesk" control panel system |
So we have invested in a "Gold Partnership" program with SW-Soft. What this means is that we have the top level of importance in the support chain. If something goes wrong with the software which we cannot fix in-house, then the priority support offered by SW-Soft is available to us 24/7.
If the website you host with us is on the "Siteadmin" system, your hosting environment will be changing for the better in terms of stability and in terms of features. We are preparing a document now which will outline all the added benefits, as well as outlining the very few features which will not be available in the same way.
We feel that this will be a great step forward in terms of security and stability for your hosting environment. We also feel that ultimately it will allow us to provide you with a better service..
We will shortly be providing further information about the new system and the exact technical steps we will be using to migrate the sites to the new systems. For peace of mind, we will state now that our goal is to perform the migrations with zero downtime for your sites and e-mail.
In the meantime, please let us know any questions you may have so that I may compile an FAQ if needs be. Also, it will be extremely helpful if you could log into your Reseller Control Panel (if you are a reseller) and remove any dormant websites so that these will not be needlessly migrated.
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