I'm ill. Again! I already had to miss the Multipack's Christmas meal, and now I've got something else taking a swing at my immune system. I must be making up for all the past years of relatively sickness-free winters.
On a geekier note, I'm currently waiting for a new server to be provisioned from Hetzner.de so I can migrate some sites there from my current one at The Planet (avoid, avoid!). This site is hosted on it right now, and I've been having problem after problem with the system, seemingly down to the buggy-as-all-hell cPanel. I was at my wits' end, and just had the dubious pleasure of discovering that a simple reboot, while being a regular necessity for most Windows boxes, is also the magical cure for the most insoluble cPanel/WHM problems - or at least, it was in my case. I suspect some subtle hardware fault to be the root cause, but after a flawless reboot, there are no signs of problems (yet - touch wood). I'm going with DirectAdmin for the new server, as cPanel's parasitical nature is limiting me far too much now. It was good for a clueless green newbie nearly three years ago, but I have sufficient systems administration knowledge to ditch the training wheels now, I think. Maybe one of these days I'll even install a BSD... ;)
Now I'm going back to bed, and hopefully the copious amounts of chicken soup and Lemsips I've imbibed will soon bring my defences back up to snuff.
Sorry to hear you're ill. Hope you'll have more luck with the new server :)
Have to admit I havent had any problems with cpanel yet, and directadmin looks less user-friendly to me, but to each their own.
Thanks - luckily this bout of sickness is beginning to pass now. =) And Hetzner replied to me, saying I should be able to perform the remote installation and partitioning this week, hooray!
As for cPanel, I'll happily say that it's great when it comes to doing everything for you, and it does it very well, but I found it more trouble than it was worth (and very resource-hungry) as soon as I wanted to start customising installations of things.
The cluttered interface of cPanel turned me off it, too, because if all I want to do is add an email account, the page still loads dozens of icons (over SSL) for so many other functions I didn't need to use. It really needs a much better-organised default theme - I don't have the time, patience or energy to try them all out and find a good one. DirectAdmin's clean look was a breath of fresh air after that.
I guess only time will tell if I end up liking DA as much as I used to like cPanel, but it certainly suits my style much better. Having an aid rather than almost-an-A.I. leaves me freer to get my hands dirty, which is just what I like when it comes to system administration. :D