I'm not sure why the forum recommended this thread as it's so old, but for new users here I thought I'd throw in my two cents.
I'm still relatively new to Enhance. I've been testing it for the last year, but that was with a bit over a dozen sites on it over 3 hosts, so I've not had to troubleshoot much, and performance has been great as you'd expect.
I started doing web hosting back in the last century. Mostly a couple of big forums (for which CentminMod works great with nginx). I started when the best performance I could get (well, afford) was an EqualLogic array with 16 SCSI drives configured as RAID10.
Storage was expensive and slow. Performant web sites, at least for the really busy ones, means lots of RAM and optimizing the database until you couldn't optimize it any more, and making sure Apache was running near optimally. Thankfully we don't live in that period any more - nowadays increased performance is pretty cheap, and acceptable performance doesn't require nearly the effort we used to have to put into it.
I've used H-Sphere (before it got bought out), Plesk (briefly), C-Panel, VirtualMin, and most recently DirectAdmin. All of these worked, but what I've been hoping for was a simple system that was clustered more like we do with servers. It used to be buying a server meant redundant power supplies, RAID array, and buying enough memory that you hopefully wouldn't outgrow the box. What I wanted was a simple hosting panel that would allow me to cluster my sites and manage them as a single client base, rather than on a server-by-server basis. I don't like to limit clients - if you get featured on Good Morning America an your traffic increases 1000x with no notice (this has happened to me) I want to have the resources in reserve to handle those request and give a good experience to every web site visitor. If your site crashes, then I've failed you.
That's hard to do in a price-sensitive way with a traditional control panel, but it's pretty easy with Enhance:
- Backups are great. Automated, and recovering from a server failure is fast.
- I can put XX users on a server, and as they grow over time (or the hardware starts to get stale and software requirements go up) I can move web sites between servers in real time, transparently, and keep resource usage under control.
- The control panel gives just enough control to users. I don't need to update the available PHP versions (supporting a maximum of four) like I do with DirectAdmin - users can simply use the drop-down.
- I love how easy it is to swap from one web server to another. I love that I can use OpenLitespeed, then upgrade to a paid Litespeed version when it makes sense to do so. It's a simple thing, and a tweaked NGINX is great, but for simple WordPress web sites Litespeed is just self-tuning, and the default LSCache module (which I can have installed automatically on account setup) handles everything most clients need.
- Containerization of each customer is huge from a security perspective. That eliminates the biggest downside of shared hosting in my opinion - allowing a compromised user to affect his neighbors.
- I discovered cpGuard and love the way it handles updating ModSec rules and choosing a reasonable set of them (something I couldn't get to happen on DirectAdmin with the security alternative there). I love the way cpGuard can monitor WordPress installations, track vulnerabilities in plugins, and automatically upgrade them after whatever I consider a reasonable delay is. Lots of folks don't want to pay for managed wordpress and this protects them quite a bit.
- Sometimes I do stupid shit (like installing a server inside my cluster using its internal-non-routable IP address) and Adam has always been patient and helpful in dealing with me, even though I'm paying the minimum.
I'm confident enough that I'm ramping things up now and hope to be Enhance Only by next week. It works, and it's got some very reasonable assumptions behind the design assumptions that work well with how I see web hosting and the world at large.
It's the best I've seen. And it's priced in a way that I don't feel that the VC firm that bought the panel is trying to pull an Oracle and raise prices just to the point that most of my margin is going to them.
I'd like Enhance even if they did things like charge per help desk ticket to help their margins. It's pretty solid and I don't need that much help most of the time.
