What are the advantages apart from price over DirectAdmin?

Splunge

Hi new here and looking at perhaps purchasing a licence to trial out Enhance. Long time DA user and cPanel hater. What would be optimal setup? I have access to plenty of servers and wondered what the optimal setup would be? I read that it requires a control server, DNS servers , Database server etc. What specs should each be? Real happy your preferred OS is ubuntu as that's my goto. Would 1 control server, 3 DNS, 1 DB and X amount of hosting servers be the right way to go? 1 last question is are DNS zones hosted counted towards domain counts? Not that it really matters, just nice to know, especially as everything is getting silly price wise now

cPFence

Splunge

What Orlando and JohnB said. I’ll just add that Enhance gives you one panel to manage all your servers, which makes clustered setups incredibly easy. It’s a big time saver for us. Once we moved to a panel built for multi-server management, we never really looked back at the traditional panels. It’s still missing a few things, sure, but the core features are solid and already cover most day-to-day needs.

Another thing worth mentioning is the ols integration. It’s pretty unique to enhance and it helped us drop a lot of our enterprise litespeed licenses, which led to even more savings without sacrificing performance.

gmakhs

Splunge
Enhance can't compete against DA and CL setup, in terms of what features and flexibility you can offer to your clients,
so enhance does offer better cluster management, questionably better backups but apart from that nothing else that will set you ahead of the competition, (except for maybe wordpress hosting).

Also if you host in Dedicated server it ain't that much cheaper (considering 400 acc per server)

Also enhance has bugged UI and half baked features that in my case annoy users that come from Cpanel or DA, like the half baked file manager that doesnt overwrite files on extract and the half baked next js integration without git support, and the impossibility of using different php version per folder.

Also enhance doesn't limit or show email disk usage corectly, user cant change their email password from roundcube and the list can go on......

so the main issue is that enhance doesnt run proper QA or develop new features correctly and that effects your business image to your clients which is the worst thing ever, also they dont focus on fixing small UI bugs that exist for years now

Orlando

For an initial hosting environment, my recommendation would be as follows:

The CP server (VPS)
2-3 DNS servers (VPS)
An Application (web, email and database) server (Dedicated)

It’s recommended to keep the database role on the same web server to minimize latency but if you really want them to be separate you need to ensure that both the App server and the DB server are in the same data center and connected via a private network.

The folks at @cPFence wrote a great guide with tips to setup your initial Enhance installation: 20 Tips to Set Up Your Enhance Server Like a Pro

As for your question regarding the Pros vs DA or cPanel, here are some as I see it:

1- Initial entry fee is much lower.
2- You only pay for the websites your clients create, not for servers.
3- The panel itself doesn’t have to use resources from where your clients are actually hosting their websites, since they can be on separate servers.
4- In Enhance you can create clustered setups.
5- Enhance includes lots of things out of the box that in DA and cP you have to pay for separately, like website containerization and resource limits (CloudLinux in cP and DA), useful backup manager (JetBackup in cP and DA), WordPress manager (WP Toolkit or Softaculous in cP and DA), etc.

Now, of course there are cons like cPanel and DirectAdmin can be more feature rich on some regards and there’s more plugins for some billing software that are made to work with cP and DA but not for Enhance. Also the community for Enhance is much smaller than for the bigger panels, so there’s much less information and tutorials regarding Enhance.

Right now, the biggest gripe I have with Enhance is the lack of any 3rd party integration not counting AV software. Right now there’s no way to use software like Softaculous or Website Builders with Enhance.

All in all, I think Enhance is a great software with a big future and most of the cons I listed are simply because Enhance is a newer software compared to the big panels and it should only get better as time passes.

JohnB

It all depends on what and how much you're hosting and a lot of other factors. Someone qualified to manage hosting knows these answers. Trying to run hosting without the neccassary server admin skills and experience is a recipe for disaster whether the panel is Cpanel, DirectAdmin, or Enhance.

Reseller hosting is a good option and Enhance supports it.

As for Enhance vs other panels. Its reasonably priced unlike Cpanel and their long history of price increases. Its also innovative unlike other panels which don't evolve (but increase prices) even yearly.