Feedback & Suggestions

[chani]

Hello,

I'm new here, so don't kill me if I'm in the wrong thread or if I write stuff which is written already. :-) I searched for some nice administration interface and found ispCP. After testing it some weeks I decided to move all of my customers to a new container where I installed ispCP (OpenVZ Container with Debian, Sysvinit replaced by runit (for service supervision), I switched from courier to dovecot and from squirrelmail to roundcube, I fixed the security issues as explained in the forum). Currently I'm thinking about switching from proftpd to pure-ftpd (because I've been a pure-ftpd user for many years - however, I'm not sure whether traffic acounting would still work, I have to check how that's done in ispCP).

Now, as I'm using ispCP it's time to take some resumee and which thread would fit better? Suggestions:

1. Adding eMail/FTP Accounts
The most asked question of my customers is: "What is my username?". If you click (I got the german version here) "FTP Zugänge" (ftp accounts) followed by "FTP-Zugang anlegen" (add ftp account) you're getting a form where you have to enter your "Benutzername" (username). A lot of customers think that's the final username, while the username is "username@domain.tld". So my first suggestion is: Either add some explaining text "your username will be username@$yourdomain.tld" or maybe rearrange the form a little bit by putting the domain part on the right of the username instead of below it with just a drop down of all domains (no need to know whether its the main domain or just a domain alias).

2. Backups
Currently I'm searching (but I haven't found yet) whether it's possible to store more than one backup (there are daily backups, so if a customer made something wrong at 6:00 pm day 1, and he notices it at 8:00 am day 2 the backup at night was useless). I'll probably just write a cronjob which is storing some of the backups in another folder. However, it would be a nice feature if you could enter an amount and interval for backups.

3. Reseller Overview (Benutzerverwaltung, no idea what it is called in English, maybe "accounts"?)
a) If I'm in this view,I see the "webspace" used by each customer. One of these customers is using 864 MB while he should use only 500 MB. It would be useful if this would be colored "red", so that you could easily see which customer is using more than he/she/it should.
b) In the same view displaying webspace is cool. However, to see the traffic, I need to click "details", and I think traffic is more important than webspace (at least in my opinion). So my suggestion is: Add the traffic to this list as well. Because this list is for a fast overview and if I need to click statistics or details to get the traffic a customer used, the overview is only an space information and a link holder, but not really an overview.

4. webmaster@domain.tld
Some of my customers are using webmaster@domain.tld as their primary email account, but you can define it only as forward (of course a workaround is to add an account and forward mails of webmaster@ to this one...however, this requires me to explain it to the customer and the customer needs to do additional work to get his/her mails "sent" from webmaster@domain.tld.

5. Bookings (is this the right word?)
I guess everyone who's doing webhosting, has also bookings on his/her website. Now I would like to automate the process. So if a new customer buys a webhosting package on my page, this user should be added in ispCP automatically (after verification, of course, which I'd do in my own admin interface). For "adding users to ispCP" I haven't found an API or something like that yet. Maybe someone could point me to it, if it exists, and if not: You know my suggestion. If you guys need help writing some API, I'd gladly offer my help. Just write to me.

So. I hope my English is understandable. I think the switch to ispCP was the best thing to do for me. It's all working like a charm, good job.