Supposed to be this hard to create new sites?

Hi everyone,

Long time server admin, first time trying out ISPConfig. Have been using Virtualmin / Webmin for a long time so I'm used to quite a bit of power. I'm looking for a decent panel for clients that don't typically manage sites; ISP initially looked like a good option.

After a mammoth amount of jumping through the step by step process (no installer script or anything yet?) I finally get it up and running (sort of, DNS issues still somewhere). While I do like how straight forward everything appears to look, it seems that absolutely everything has to be done manually?

For example, what's going on with DNS creation when you create a new site? All I can find when I search around are requests from 5 to 8 odd years ago to add the feature so am I right in thinking that needs to be setup completely separately from the "site". This question also covers email as none of that seems to be created with a new site either.

Not sure if I've gone wrong or if I've misunderstood what ISPConfig is supposed to be about but I was ultimately looking for something fairly straightforward but reasonably powerful - when someone who doesn't "admin" sites most of the time needs to manage their own stuff, even to me it kind of seems intuitive and obvious that setting up a new site should actually, you know, setup the new website; DNS, email and all!

Finally, when do settings actually save? On changing anything, I seem to get a message at the top informing me "The following changes are not yet populated to all servers" that doesn't go away until I log out and back in again (if I re-open a page after changing something before logging out it will revert to the previous settings - I assume that's a genuine bug?)

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the granularity of things here and there are certainly a number of key power admin options available through the gui but I (and a lot of others) use something like this to save time when setting up websites a lot - if it's a multi-part process to setup a website with DNS and email and the usual goodies, it just seems quicker and easier to do over SSH?

I certainly don't want to give up on it immediately, there sure are a lot of (respected) people who talk highly of it so I just wanted to share some thoughts and get some advice; I'll do a fresh install to be sure I've not got a bum setup too.

 

But there are. Find them on page https://www.ispconfig.org/documentation/ under heading "auto installation scripts". The caveat is, that those autoinstallers only work properly when the starting conditions are met. It seems quite a few users run the autoinstaller on a server that already has some setups done, and in this situation the scripts fail.

Nothing. Creating a website does not automatically create DNS or Email entries.

Changes are saved do database every minute, there is cron job running that does that. But I have never seen the behaviour you describe. There is a red ball with number at top of ISPConfig window, which goes away when changes are saved.

It is. I do not believe you could do it faster and easier over SSH. And if you can, you can create plugin to ISPConfig that does the same.
There is ISPConfig Manual available for purchase.

 

I too am a Webmin/virtualmin (Pro) user. I also have a Centos-Webpanel (pro) system as well.

in all fairness, one chooses ISP Config for (dare i say "slightly") different reasons to the above panels. For me one of those reasons is to learn, however, that is by no means its only use, far from it.

One thing i cannot fault with this panel is its incredibly extensive list of tutorials and a massive user manual. I think that when one considers reliability (something Centos-Web panel completely lacks), and i am by no means an expert-just my opinion, ISPConfig would have to be the rock that buildings sit upon. Its extremely reliable and I think probably one of the least likely panels where a user can very easily stuff things up from the GUI! (a big failing in Virtualmin).

It does tend to be exhausting in terms of some of the more powerful administrative management, and certainly setup has been to blame for this, however, the last time i ran the installer on a fresh system, it was actually very very fast and efficient.

I would like to see a little more functionality within the GUI...along the lines of Centos-Web Panel would be nice. I know this will ruffle a few "saints feathers" but one sore point is the lack of a built in file manager. The arguments here almost always talk about "clients can just use ftp", however, I dont give a damn about clients...Im trying to speed up my administration, and doing that with root access direct from panel file manager is more superior by a long long way! (this is the main reason why i dont use ISPConfig on a larger scale)

in all honesty, if someone could buy out Virtualmin, Centos-webpanel, ISPConfig, and Vestacp and then combine the best of 4 into one, and also add in the provisioning/billing module from ISPSystems, i believe cpanel would become a thing of the past!

 

Maybe I am old school, but I tend to prefer a good old SSH client over a web based file manager, which adds to the complexity of a system, hence makes it more insecure But that's just my 2 cents.