Hi,

Is the install of helm at SM sorted do people still have trouble with helm?

I like the helm interface and management features they could warrant extra cost and to some extent a bit of extra hassle, however having read a couple of threads about it it seems to be causing too much trouble for some people.

I am looking at purchasing a SuperXeon with windows 2003 standard leasing helm with the server rather than buying it.

If I get this machine what further config do i need to do to get helm working? By config i do not mean the use of helm to create reseller and client accounts etc, but the setup of helm to begin to create reseller and client packages and put up web sites.

The helm server I received was mostly setup when I got it. There were a few issues with finishing the setup through the control panel, but at least it was already setup to that point where I could log in right when I got the server. Be aware that this is the single server version and doesn't support some things such as redundant DNS without some additional expense and effort among a few other features.

Hi,
I got my new server with helm. I had the final setup done by Alertserv. He did a few hours setting up. I am sure the same setup would have taken me at least a week of learning with maybe a few errors along the way.

I am now going through the process of having to learn how to use the control panel. Although it only takes a short while to learn what it does, there are a few weeks learning its detailed use before its ready to go out to customers, unless you already know how to use helm.

I am finding that there is plenty of info about using helm from a reseller or end user perspective but not much from admin perspective.

I have been through and created resellers and end users, but it would not let me add domains. The test reseller and end user accounts that AlertServ created allow me to create domains so it is not a config problem. There is something that I am doing.

This is only my second day at Helm, I am sure I will understand it moer in a few days.

I had to play with my Helm server for more than just a few days to figure out enough to be able to utilize it. There's a little bit of a learning curve to it. It took a while longer to figure out than some control panels like cpanel.

But I realized it wouldn't do everything I wanted and had it deactivated and ended up replacing it with another control panel.

I have had my doubts as I have begun to use Helm that it is right for me. Primarily becasue I dont want to run a large hosting outfit but would like to provide some hosting and reselling.

Last night as I was experiencing problems and forseeing potential problems I went and chacked out the Plaesk 6.5 demo but the demo was worse than Helm and really unreliable. I do suspect that this was the plesk developers sloppy implementation of their demo for 6.5. Their demo for 7 works a lot better.

I am going to run helm for a while. I am certainly not going to start providing hosting until I know it is the system for me.

One of the major things I want to do medium term is automatically deploy websites where clients can purchase a pre designed web site online from an asp.net page and they can start using it without intervention from me. I am not sure if control panels have any relevance to this.

Could I ask what would it not do for you that made you change system and which system did you choose in the end Alex?

Some things I didn't like about Helm are:

1. it didn't allow for easy/cheap implementation of secondary nameserver since single server version of helm basically only supports it on the same server.
2. it didn't moniter all bandwidth as it basically only moniters web traffic and not ftp, mail, etc.
3 there is no 'helm' for linux and since i wanted to manage linux and windows, I preferred the same control panel on both.
4. too many pieces of software to actually buy to provide the services I wanted.

In the end, I had our helm license removed, cancelled our cpanel server and ordered a new RHE server with no control panel, and had HSphere installed on both linux and windows servers. This is something I had installed outside of SM since SM doesn't support HSphere specifically. There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to this decision also, so you'll have to decide for youself what options are best for you specifically. And if you thought helm was difficult, hsphere is even more so, but it has other benefits such as the included sitebuilder software among other things.

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

It is very difficult to choose without experience. It is too early to say with Helm. It will at least allow me to deploy and work with websites and applications until I understand my own requirements a bit more and to see if Helm will meet those requirements. It is also easy to get "buyers remorse".

I shall have to view this as a period of testing. If Helm suits me then that is a bonus. If not I shall have to be prepared for the extra expense and time lost in having to replace the control panel.

These aren't so bad and its the same when one gets involved in any new area.

I have been looking at plesk 7 as an alternative. I will have to wait for this anyway as it seems to be only RC1 at the moment.

One of the things I liked about plesk was also the site builder.

Do you find this a useful/profitable feature?

There are a lot of people that are fine with Helm. It's a matter of each persons requirements and preferences. Helm does have good potential and is just in its infancy compared to some control panels. The multi-server license works on a server clustering principle which is the same philosophy HSphere works on and is the philosophy some enterprises use for large scale integration whereas the single server license SM provides is a scaled down version and is more similar to the typical single server control panels many hosts use such as cpanel, plesk, etc.

Btw, I found Helm to have better 'eye candy' than Plesk, but not only the look, more potential features. Plesk is more of a simplistic control panel that is supposed to be fairly stable, but missing some features some control panels may have. Personally, I found Plesk to be one of my least favorite, but one of the easier ones to use. Frankly, from a customer viewpoint, I actually found Cobalt to be one of my favorite control panels. Sadly though, they've basically discontinued this product line.

As for the site builder, since I've just started working with it, I haven't advertised it nor really deployed it yet, but I believe this to be a potentially useful service since it's not provided by many hosts. So many hosts use cpanel, which doesn't provide any kind of site building software and I've already had this type of service requested. Basically, it's good for a host to attract customers, maybe not so good for a designer since some customers may opt to design their own sites instead of paying the designer. It's a similar idea as to all the cpanel hosts who install fantastico. They may attract more customers because the customers can install their own scripts, but that host loses potential income that could have had from installing the scripts for the customer.

It was precisely the learning curve and the too much to implement some simple things like account setup which got me to remove Helm from my server and went to Ensim for Windows instead.

I love Ensim because it installs what is needed for hosting out of the box. It gives you control over the Mail server you want to use and it really works as promised. My needs are pretty basic and although I do host my clients' sites, I do not have resellers so Helm was an overkill. However, cost or cost wise, Ensim is expensive because of its number of sites licenses while Helm is priced for unlimited deploy.

I guess in the end, what you could do is to look at all the control panels available in the market, be it somehing SM offers and what they do not offer and see which would meet your needs. Most of those control panel developers have online demos which you could try.

From the ensim demos I tried a while back, I think I'd prefer that over Plesk unless Plesk has changed quite a bit in these recent versions. Both should be fairly easy to use, quite a bit easier than Helm or Hsphere. SM, at one point, did support Ensim, but evidentially were having issues with it so they dropped it.

From what I read, Plesk for Windows was trying to make Windows comply to the Linux environment and things were implemented quite differently from what they should be in Windows. Plesk is good if you want an all-inclusive package but the downfall is that it does not quite give you the leeway to use applications to tailor to your needs.

Ensim does give you some control of the mail server to use and a few other servers.

Yup, Ensim is a better control panel, in my opinion, if you compare it with Plesk but sadly what's best is not always supported by SM I guess it is a business thing.

Hi

I have had helm installed for one week now. I am getting the hang of it but it is still not ready to go in the sense that I originally meant.

As a complete noob I was wondering if it would come already set up on the server, but it doesnt. It needs some setting up from there. I paid to get this done.

From that point it was ready to start creating hosting plans. It has taken me about a week with quite considerable play time on the system to become familiar with the main workings of Helm.

I am warming to it although the control panel for ordinary clients causes more confusion than its worth. Good for power users. I think I will keep it hidden from some of my ordinary web clients. They get stuck on the welcome message even.

I will update you in a week

Is ensim a self install or is there a service like acunett for windows admin? What mailserver would you recommend?

I've been thinking of setting up a windows machine and this thread is providing a lot of usefull info. Thanks, everybody!

-- David

Ensim is a self-installed but the reseller I got it from installed it for me.

As for mail server, I am using Mail Enable Professional which works great for my needs.

Uh oh...I was afraid of that. There's a fair share of misinformation and over-hyping going on in this thread.

In response to alex042's post:

1. Implementation of a secondary nameserver is simple. Yes, Helm requires you to have a remote license for every server which it controls, however, there's nothing that says you can't have server 2 pull the DNS information from server 1 without interaction from Helm thus removing the need for a remote license.

2. Yes, this is true. It only monitors web traffic, but that is where the majority of bandwidth goes. AFAIK, that's how most other control panels do it. Ensim for Windows doesn't do any bandwidth monitoring at all. Helm is maturing very rapidly and they expect to have bandwidth monitoring for all services implemented by version 4 of their software which is expected to come out early next year.

3. You can't really blame WHA for this one. Helm is as good as it is, because it uses native Windows technologies. Ensim and Plesk feel like clunky Linux to Windows hacks, imo. Things it needs like COM and file sharing access are not available in Linux. They plan to eliminate this need in version 4 which will use remote applications a la HSphere to communicate with remote servers. A Linux version will most likely become possible then.

4. While you may have needed more high-class services than others, that doesn't neccessarily mean everybody else will. IIS, IIS FTP, MSDNS, MailEnable, AWStats seem to suit most people just fine. Unless you have a need for IMAP or SFTP, those software options should take care of most people's needs


I don't really want to beat up on eddy2099 because he's a nice guy, but he tends to hype Ensim WWP a bit too much. If you're a web designer and just need to host your clients' websites then it might be a good choice to automate the site creation process, but for the kind of pricing Ensim charges, you might as well do everything yourself and save yourself some money. It offers very little functionality from the administrator's aspect and even less from the user's aspect. I found it a bit misleading that Ensim advertised it as a "web hosting" control panel. It doesn't monitor bandwidth usage, it doesn't support the creation of subdomains, and the user is given 1 mysql database and 1 ftp account and cannot create any more than that. It's really more of an IIS control panel as Ensim seemed to focus on allowing the user to adjust the more technical aspects of the site, such as keep-alive, reverse dns, default documents, and footer settings.

That wasn't what made me switch control panels, though. I didn't like from the beginning that Ensim charged per-domain. I started off with a 20 domain license and it was something like $30 more for a 100 domain license and even more money for a 200 user license. They did this without even supporting subdomains and their workaround was always to "create the subdomain as a full domain." So, I had customers with 5 different logins, each for a different subdomain of their site. It just got ridiculous and, of course, I hit 20 domains in no time, but I didn't have to upgrade because customers actually started leaving me because they disliked the control panel so much. Another thing that really got under my skin was Ensim's upgrade policy. It's been a LONG TIME since they've released an update to their control panel for Windows 2003. Of course, when they released it, they considered it a new version and all users of the 2000-compatible version had to pay a lot of money to upgrade. I'm sure when the new version of WWP comes out, again, users will have to pay a lot of money to upgrade. It was such a breathe of fresh air to switch to Helm and get updates and new features every single month for FREE. Problems get fixed and the control panel just keeps getting better. I know one particular bug with editing the email information that actually shipped with Ensim. You tell them about it and they want $50 before they'll even look at the problem. It got so bad that MailEnable had to fix Ensim's Python script themselves. I also ran into issues with trying to get SSL to work in Ensim. I purchased a cert from GeoTrust and tried to apply it to Ensim. It wouldn't work at all. I asked GeoTrust support about it and they tried various things with me and even went as far as reissuing the cert. Eventually they decided that it must be a problem with Ensim and I had to go to them for support with the issue. So, I asked on their forum and the response I got (from a moderator) was to "avoid GeoTrust certificates like the plague. GeoTrust sucks, it's their fault" basically. He just wouldn't accept that there was the possibility it could be Ensim's fault. So, I became fed up with him and asked the server provider's support (I wasn't with SM at the time). Their response was that they couldn't help me, but they had seen that very same problem with a lot of Ensim WWP servers before.

Anyways, I realize that's a rather roundabout way of making a point, but I really dislike Ensim WWP and I highly disrespect their company and business practices and after seeing them release something like Ensim Ignite, I'm fairly confident that they could care less about thier customers' needs. They are only concerned with making money.

Since my last post on this thread I have made lots of progress with Helm and it appears to be doing most of the thing I want.

It is difficult as a noob to know whats what but many of the complaints I had read about Helm seem to have been fixed in my release anyway. Pre propogation access is annoying but other than that I am finding it to be very good.

While you are familiarising yourself with it, you curse its apparent complexity and the hoops you have to jump thru but soon enough you become familiar with it and begin to discover easy ways to navigate around and perform tasks.

noob -2.5 weeks and counting

I am not saying that Ensim is the best control panel out there for Windows. I used it because it meets my needs. As I stressed before in the other threads and that is to visit all the available control panel website, do a comprehensive studies of what they do and cannot do by testing the onsite demo then make an informed decision. What works for someone might not work for others.

I have not tested Plesk so I cannot comment. I did tried Helm but it was nightmarish during the time I had it and things were breaking left and right and once they got those things resolved, it took several days to comprehend what was going on. It seems that they have fixed most of the issues as of late.

My clients are pretty specialized ones and the projects that I handled are pretty short term and since we build everything from scratch, we were able to work around the Ensim limitation. What it cannot do, we do it by hand in Windows.

Bandwidth monitoring would probably be an important component which definitely is lacking in Ensim. Apart from my own sites, my clients are pretty low traffic so that is not a concern. We do not bill for bandwidth as we just bill per project.

Ensim does have its shortcoming but what I like about it is that it works right out of the box for most things. The licensing fees is pretty high compared to most and updates are slow too.

I however do not have any problems using Geotrust SSL with Ensim. I have installed over 15 SSL on the machine with Ensim already. What seems to be the problem you encountered ?

One of the things I like about HSphere on Windows is that basically the only services I need to run are the web and ftp servers since all other servers are run elsewhere. This means I don't have to worry about all the other bandwidth monitoring, I can close up a bunch of ports, and there's less overall overhead on the server.

As for DNS, I was told that MSDNS wouldn't automatically pull from another server and I'd have to purchase something else unless I wanted to manually add every zone. But I shouldnt need to worry about this with HSphere since DNS is on another server anyway.

Also, regarding licensing, this depends on amount of customers people plan on putting on the servers. Something with unlimited accounts and a monthly fee, like with cpanel, might be better for those who are hosting a lot of customers on their servers, whereas those with a license per account such as Ensim might be better suited for hosts with fewer customers per servers. Then there are some licenses like with Hphere where you purchase licenses per account but can put however many accounts on the servers you want so you're not buying a 250-pack per server as with Ensim and are instead buying a 250-pack for your cluster which could be 1 server or 5 servers, or more so you don't have to waste licenses if you figure out a particular server can't handle 250 accounts. I'm not sure which I prefer, but I guess each have their benefits.

Hi,

One year later, I am revisiting this post becasue i know quite a lot more about HELM now.

In general I think it is great and as previous posters have mentioned it is getting better all the time. Adding components like Helm extensions and Helm toolbox solves the minor issues that the system has like pre propagation access.

I would recommend Helm. It took me a long time to become familiar with it, but I cant imagine any of the other control panels beign any easier.

Any suggestions for someone who knows IIS6 but is new to helm and is still trying to get it set up to work...

RTM