Siteground published their own personal WHMCS/cPanel

armandorg

As they mention, took them 3 years and hired a team of 20 people to release their own personal WHMCS/cPanel.

Here it goes:
https://siteground.com/blog/new-client-area-and-site-tools/

InceptionHosting

The first of many no doubt, it comes as no surprise to me that cPanel starting to charge 0.30 /month per account to customs with hundreds of thousands of accounts drive them to hire their own devs and replace cPanel.

That will leave a hole in cPanels revenue that will be hard to ignore, imagine what will happen when 1 or 2 more of the big customers reveal they have done the same thing because you can be sure they are working on it.

mezoology

Siteground was working on this for some time as OP mentioned, they even began to send patches of 'new customers' to the new panel in early 2019, when they began to move to GCP.
And sent bigger patches of customers in mid-2019 (I was one of those).
As cPanel should already have seen this coming and continued to raise prices? or they didn't.
Somehow in both scenarios, cPanel got a big fat curvey 'L'. as you know Siteground is one of the massive cPanel clients.

WSCallum

@AnthonySmith said:
The first of many no doubt, it comes as no surprise to me that cPanel starting to charge 0.30 /month per account to customs with hundreds of thousands of accounts drive them to hire their own devs and replace cPanel.

That will leave a hole in cPanels revenue that will be hard to ignore, imagine what will happen when 1 or 2 more of the big customers reveal they have done the same thing because you can be sure they are working on it.

By the time this happens Oakley will have ran for the hills with their investment returned god knows how many times over and cPanel will be the titanic.

corbpie

20 people and 3 years?!

lentro

@corbpie said:
20 people and 3 years?!

Yeah, sounds a bit excessive to me. They could have built basically just a front end to integrate with Virtualmin. Literally a team of five could do it in six months.

ggkee

@lentro said:

@corbpie said:
20 people and 3 years?!

Yeah, sounds a bit excessive to me. They could have built basically just a front end to integrate with Virtualmin. Literally a team of five could do it in six months.

It is easier said than done. Go ahead, hire 5 to do it in 6 months and be cPanel competitor. It should worth the risk and investment.

lentro

@ggkee said:

@lentro said:

@corbpie said:
20 people and 3 years?!

Yeah, sounds a bit excessive to me. They could have built basically just a front end to integrate with Virtualmin. Literally a team of five could do it in six months.

It is easier said than done. Go ahead, hire 5 to do it in 6 months and be cPanel competitor. It should worth the risk and investment.

It already exists - For my hosting service, I just use the WHMCS module + Virtualmin. What they did was like adding front end stuff on top of that, which I don't think is necessary.

bikegremlin

@armandorg said:
As they mention, took them 3 years and hired a team of 20 people to release their own personal WHMCS/cPanel.

Here it goes:
https://siteground.com/blog/new-client-area-and-site-tools/

It seems fairly limited compared to cPanel. Can't say I like it. Not very intuitive, nor does it allow simple things - like database export/download, to name just one from the top of my head.

I would bet a beer that it was designed to prevent customers from messing anything (which isn't too bad in and of itself), and to prevent them from leaving without "saying goodbye" (i.e. requesting their backups/exports) - which does suck.

iVlad

It took them 3 years and 20 people to make a minimal control panel that looks like a half baked cpanel. I mean, I don't mean to sound harsh. I do like the design, but it has a long way before it can replace cPanel.

seenu

They should have taken an open source control panel and started modifying it for their needs.
that way... they would have save some money.

but they know their requirements much more than all of us.

LeonDynamic

I do actually wonder how many clients actually log into a control panel after setting up the services they need. My guess not many.
You will also get those clients that like to push every button they see or add every option, without understanding what it does or the impact it could have to their account or website. I think the future is a minimalist client control panel. Look at cPanel it has too many icons in the user dashboard and looks overwhelming. One of the many reasons I prefer the DirectAdmin user dashboard and the look of the Siteground panel.

SagnikS

@lentro said: They could have built basically just a front end to integrate with Virtualmin.

Virtualmin doesn't scale up well, at all. And it has a bunch of inconsistencies which pretty much make it unusable for large scale production usage.

vpsgeek3333

The end is nigh for cPanel & CHIMPS.