Future and development of Enhance - discussion - Enhance Control Panel

Future and development of Enhance - discussion

Ned

To users who use Enhance

What attracted you to Enhance and why do you use it?

Having the ability to offer managed VPS for a good price was key
The UI, Onboarding, and experience is great for end-users, especially those who are a bit overwhelmed by cpanel/DA and others, giving them an easy-to-use solution without something custom is great.
Clustered setup is a big plus, We can offload all mailing to a dedicated machine as well as all SQL to a dedicated machine for best performance

Do you think Enhance has a bright future?

Absolutely, There is still a few key features which are yet to come but they have a unique fit in the market

How do you want Enhance to develop?

NGINX Support needs to come quicker, LSWS is great to have but I think many of us moving here are trying to escape the grip of the cPanel/LiteSpeed/CloudLinux trio -
Offering in-house solutions for things like outgoing/incoming mail protection, anti malware and wordpress toolkit is a difficult task but doing it in house without having to worry about third parties is what I think enhance should be trying to do

Overall happy with the product, Still early stages but great team and they've hit roadmap items pretty consistently - hopefully they can keep it up 🙂

Adrien

kyzoeadmin Hello Peter! I owe you. Really happy of the move. Yet to migrate all my sites. Im testing with one at the moment.

AdamM

Hi. Does the Enhance team have any way to advertise Enhance and get new customers?
The more customers means more profit for you and more opportunities, to be more precise, more programmers to work even faster with development Enhance control panel.

I came across Enhance by accident on Twitter, if it wasn't for that I wouldn't have known about you guys

jayjayuk

have been watching Enhance, but looking to spin up our first server.

kyzoeadmin

jayjayuk i think you will not regret it.

Ned

Popping the question out there to see if anyone else is waiting on NGINX - I've seen it be bumped back a few times but personally, it's the major motivator for me to move to Enhance fully, Maybe if enough of us want it they could look into bringing it further up the dev cycle?

For all the tests I've done NGINX comes out on top in either price or performance, usually both and further down the line the enhance team could do some cool stuff with it.

Load Balancer Server type/application
High availability clusters
Cache Servers
NGINX Unity for Node/Ruby/Python

Apache kinda sux out of the box, LS/OLS are decent but not great for a product which has a main selling point of no per server costs, NGINX is just as performant out of the box but can scale ridiculously especially in a cluster, Is free and open source - just makes a ton of sense for it to be a bit higher on the list for me.

Any thoughts/discussion welcome 🙂

necrom

Ned We use nginx extensively for all of those things and <3 it, but for application hosting the lack of .htaccess support is major negative for some customers (so much that we lost customers as result) so we came full circle back to Apache for all but the most performance/scaling sensitive. How do you handle .htaccess support?

Ned

necrom We use nginx extensively for all of those things and <3 it, but for application hosting the lack of .htaccess support is major negative for some customers (so much that we lost customers as result) so we came full circle back to Apache for all but the most performance/scaling sensitive. How do you handle .htaccess support

DirectAdmin provides a handful of htaccess rule converters and has a great one for WordPress and FastCGI, This is how we have handled it so far, Comes with pretty much everything you need outside of custom scripts.

Depending on what you need there's also rewriters available for Apache -> NGINX (an idea for you @Adam to include a tool for this on servers with NGINX)

Curious if you'd be hosting anything that couldn't be solved with the rewriter and what edge cases you might have, We're 90% WordPress and the others usually CodeIgniter/Laravel

Adam We are also adding support for Nginx as the primary web server.

Is the March roadmap still looking likley? Keen for this 😃

kyzoeadmin

We are still on Apache, we used LS on directadmin, but could get the performance everybody is talking about. So we tried Nginx with apache at runcloud, which is slightly slower then nginx itself, but have the ability to keep using .htacces... but we are talking like 100 - 250 ms slower

Maybe that is a option.

AdamM

kyzoeadmin can't you use nginx proxy to apache? then you can still use htaccess and the performance and speed will increase

kyzoeadmin

actually i was wrong they'll do that on runcloud.

Adam

With all of these solutions, the key to performance is cache control. LiteSpeed/OpenLiteSpeed can handle incredible traffic volumes when serving from cache but once you hit the PHP application and talk to the database that will consume CPU and memory as a multiple of the number of concurrent requests you are handling.

One upcoming feature in Enhance (not yet roadmapped) is the ability to modify the default web server ports from 443/80 to a custom port. This would enable you to use Nginx or another caching proxy in front of Apache (or even LiteSpeed/OpenLiteSpeed).

We are also adding support for Nginx as the primary web server.

In time we may also be able to develop caching solutions for Apache which can be configured and controlled directly from the panel.

AdamM

If someone cares about "free" performance, I think OpenLiteSpeed is the best option.
I made a simple benchmark for a clean wordpress site with OpenLiteSpeed and litespeed cache plugin 2 days ago.
The result for me was satisfactory. OpenLiteSpeed handled 502k requests per minute, only for 4 cpu and 2 workers.
But OpenLiteSpeed has just a few downsides. Such as no htaccess auto reload. This can be a problem if you have many clients on the server.
@Adam mentioned that they are working on an auto-reload function so it will be a very good feature.

Ned

AdamM If someone cares about "free" performance, I think OpenLiteSpeed is the best option.
I made a simple benchmark for a clean wordpress site with OpenLiteSpeed and litespeed cache plugin 2 days ago.
The result for me was satisfactory. OpenLiteSpeed handled 502k requests per minute, only for 4 cpu and 2 workers.
But OpenLiteSpeed has just a few downsides. Such as no htaccess auto reload. This can be a problem if you have many clients on the server.

Curious what this benchmark looks like when you run it on something like SlickStack or Webinoly on NGINX?

Happy to give it a go if you let me know your testing method and where the VPS was hosted to best compare

Especially with WordPress NGINX config can be made to work around htaccess as a whole

Adrien

What could be beneficial is for all Enhance LSWS users to purchase together our LiteSpeed license at a significant discount. If we were 10 companies buying 2–3 licenses a year, I'm sure the LiteSpeed team would give us a better deal.

AdamM

Ned
This was when I was still using Plesk and ARM cpu in Oracle Cloud.
the tools example loader.io or h2load

Friends, version 9.0.0 has just been released, a big update 🤩
Thank you to the Enhance team.

mike

AdamM interested to know if you dumped plesk or oracle ARM or both. are you using enhance on production websites ? how is it going so far ?

AdamM

mike
I abandoned plesk because it doesn't develop, it doesn't have any new important features, prices are constantly increasing and it's not adapted to modern solutions like clustering.
I would like to continue using the arm processor but enhance does not support it yet and many software.

Adrien

mike Are you still testing Enhance? If not recently, you should jump in again and maybe move a few client sites that are open to beta. That is what I did. I'm hosting 3 client prod sites to make sure I really test Enhance.
The newly released Enhance V9.0 works very well so far. In my opinion, Enhance is production-ready and already ahead of so many other CPs on the market. We're getting there in terms of features.
Security: I've plugged in a third-party provider, and I have VirusDie LTD as a backup.
Monitoring: I'd love to see Enhance integrate with New Relic and also send an email to the website owner when a site is down. At the moment, I use BetterUptime for uptime monitoring.
What logging feature are you referring to? What critical features are you missing to move?

mike

@AdamM i am feeling the same with plesk. but i feel enhance is still not production ready. so many critical things missing. what are you using for security, logging, monitoring etc.. i am trying to abandon plesk but its not working :o)