The Planet should develop it's own control panel that has all the features of cPanel, but it will support Apache, Nginx, Lighttpd. cPanel only supports Apache and millions of users around the world are now using Nginx and Lighttpd.

Currently there is no hosting control panel that supports both Nginx and Lighttpd.

TP should develop one that allows users to disable Apache then with a click of a button, allow users to choose Nginx or Lighttpd. It should run on Linux(redhat, centos, ubuntu, debian, etc), Freebsd, and Windows.

It's cheaper to resell cPanel, good idea though.

It is a good idea. I suspect though that the effort would be huge - it would certainly require a clearly focused effort by the Planet and a great expansion of the development team. On the other hand, the Planet is now a big company and cpanel started this way, way back when, right? Their profits must be quite impressive now and probably will continue to grow for some time.

I'm not sure what to make of ensim, plesk, and hsphere being bought out by parallels -- does that make an opening in the market, or is the nature of any market when it gets mature to come down to 2 big players?

I think there's certainly some game that can be played. But the problem is that people are happy with cPanel, or Plesk. And they've had years of practice to perfect the software. I don't know if you're a cPanel user or not, but cPanel is much more than just a control panel. There's thousands of smaller backend scripts and what not that really make it a server management tool as well.

It just seems like ThePlanet would have to invest way too much and in doing so could also lose reselling/selling cPanel as part of a package for new servers. Which could hurt them even more, that just the cost of creating and marketing a new server control panel.

How about we just focus on one Control Panel at once.