Brainstorm: Enhance VS CPanel/Blesta

Aliysa_Enhance

Hi Adrien, Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

In regards to performance, as managed hosting providers, I would imagine Runcloud/Gridpane make certain performance decisions for you. There’s no reason why a properly optimised Enhance system would be any slower. With a product like Enhance, which is almost a management level higher than an end user on Runcloud/Gridpane, we need to strike a balance between dictating to providers how they should run their servers while providing them with the freedom to customise settings/run their chosen hardware/ load their servers how they want based on their own commercial goals.

I’m not saying that there isn’t room for improvement here. For example, in the future Enhance may make performance suggestions, for example suggested my.cnf configuration based on the available RAM and intended use (mass hosting, managed hosting, etc).

Glad to hear you like the impersonation tool, there is certainly a lot of space in the market for innovation and we have lots of ideas which i’m sure will fall into this category!

As I see it, the fundamental differences between Enhance and other legacy platforms are:

Multi server, clustered, unlimited scalability
All websites and customers in a single interface
Role based access
API first
PHP/app containerisation and hard resource limiting as standard
Incremental backups as standard

We will be continuously developing the panel. Once key features are developed, you will notice more scheduled enhancements to existing features. We follow a “good enough isn’t good enough” approach.

Hope this helps!

Adrien

Aliysa_Enhance I truly appreciate the time you've spent addressing my concerns. Your reply has provided much-needed reassurance and has effectively cleared my doubts.

Just remains the issue of hard limits per Website instead of per entire package. This is harder to market because people like to have more than 1 site per package.

Adrien

I just got some help from @AdamM to check my Hetzner BM 7950X. His tweaks have improved my execution time from 3350 req/s to 4166 req/s. Now I am going to work on the DB optimization and will let you know if I was able to improve the Mysql query execution time which seems a bit high.

This shows that there's indeed some fine tuning to be done. Unfortunaltely I don't have the technical knowledge to do it on my own so this will def help:

Aliysa_Enhance suggested my.cnf configuration based on the available RAM and intended use (mass hosting, managed hosting, etc).

Before:

After:

necrom

In terms of performance, this isn't exclusive to the control panel and I think it has been justified the current approach (optimisation is down to the user and their particular use-case) and a recognition of a need to-do better here in the future (some sort of optimisation profiles recommended be applied through monitoring).

Email I'm not sure your concerns, I know there's a deviation away from traditional self-hosted email towards Google and Microsoft SaaS offerings, but there's very much still a need for those who want forwarding or more value / less productivity-focused email capability.

I have some difficulties with the packaging, but that comes with the immaturity of the product / takes time. I'd love to see granularity IN-packages but for now I have to live with granularity OF-packages. As I mentioned on another thread I think websites being containers and domains being hostnames needs tidying, then offering 1 container per package if you want fixed resources per package.

imho enhance needs to be cpanel compatible, it's the market leader and where the easier money lays, but agree that cpanel users should need to adapt to enhance and not the other way around.

Adrien

necrom I very much share everything you wrote. Regarding email, I consider it almost as a bank account and when you see all the hacks and threats going on, I don't feel small players like myself can ethically offer a reliable level of security to the client.

AdamM

Adrien
What performance problems do you have? What is the bottleneck? Databases?

I use Enhance and have done some optimisation techniques and have not had any performance issues.

necrom

Weirdly can't edit my comment, only just realised after submitting you were asking enhance team specifically.

Adrien

necrom Im very happy to rid your feedback as well.

AdamM

This is the result in Enhance.
It all depends on your server above all.

necrom

What is a good figure from this plugin? Do we assume everything but MySQL is cached and only look at raw computational power? Do the results correlate to TTFB? It might be saying how quickly a single page may load but doesn't consider few-faster-cores vs many-slower-cores and the ability to handle request volume? I'd be much more interested in k6 based benchmarks myself. I won't post my figures as they're substantially lower than both :o

AdamM

necrom for these results the most important is the high GHz of the CPU, as PHP is single threaded.

Adam

necrom Do we assume everything but MySQL is cached and only look at raw computational power?

A lot of benchmarking scripts will yield much better results on MariaDB compared to MySQL due to the query cache which MySQL removed in 8.0 but MariaDB have retained. This isn't necessarily representative of real world performance but we understand your users will be running these scripts and therefore the results matter. MariaDB support is coming.

necrom

AdamM Highlights one of the limitations of the enhance vCPU count limitations when compared with CL LVE if you run dissimilar hardware (the LVE --speed=nghz is not remarkably accurate but is more useful than just specifying the number of cores), likewise EP vs nPROC approach. Going from a Silver 4112 2.60G x 4 vCPU to a Gold 6252 2.1x 24 vCPU will be a perceived downgrade when for most it'd be a considerable upgrade.

DracoBlue

In my opinion, the enhance panel should be well optimized for performance right from the start.

Adrien

@necrom I share the points you've made except for the email. I consider it like a bank account in terms of the security it demands and the information often stored. Given the ever-increasing number of hacks and threats out there, it's tough to confidently guarantee the level of security our clients deserve, especially for us smaller players.

MediaServe

I too though Enhance was optimized to at least a certain extent, but it's not. Making it more clear that optimization from the get go is crucial will help IMO. Somewhere along the line somebody made an impression that Enhance is somewhat tuned out of the box. I don't remember where that came from, could have been even a user, but the impression was there, and until recently I didn't realize it needed a lot of tuning.

I've done a bit of MySQL tuning and just with a few settings (I need to do more but that's a start) and it's yielded tremendous improvements!

I didn't realize MySQL was completely default until a ticket revealed it with "The MySQL 8.0 defaults are very sensible which is why we don't customise them on installation."

badboybackagain

MediaServe Can you please suggest the tuning that you did. May be it will help me and others.

MediaServe

Adrien I don't necessary agree regarding email. We provide email along with hosting (cPanel currently but want to be free if it ASAP!) and we don't have many problems and I get alerts whenever the queue size on shared servers reaches 100 (rarely) so I can investigate before things get worse. We're not using any external smart hosts, just straight cPanel email.

What we do is provide sensible rate limits, no bulk emailing, and closely monitory IP reputation and mail queue sizes. cPanel stops the occasional mailbox compromise before it impacts IP reputation. Email is not a problem for us. Tickets related to email are insignificant.

necrom

Adrien I don't feel small players like myself can ethically offer a reliable level of security to the client.

There's easily accessible commercial anti-virus/anti-spam/archiving options that you can upsell via something like WHMCS marketplace or other programmes, one example being spamexperts (also cloudflare options that might one day integrate enhance but not tried those yet). We've been running mail servers for 20+ years and yes it's a pain and yes a customer with 1x website and 10x mailboxes generates nearly 10x the support of those with just 1x website but we have to do one to sell the other. I think it's a bit of both, we recognise compared to 20 years ago when we started that 1 person could provide a decent email service, and now you have companies like oxcloud and zoho employing hundreds of people just to make mail platforms, if customers want that level of integration and automation and complexity we need to make it easy for them and if they want something simple but robust we're here for them with enhance too. It's the same across many aspects of the industry, my job and that of enhance is to pick the best value of many things and make them work together in a way that delivers the customers needs, so things like email and server monitoring and cdn and cloud we shouldn't try reinvent the wheel.

Zoinkies

Processor GHz isn’t the only thing that makes a processor fast. My 3.1GHz still out performs a Epyc at 4GHz. On mine I get 6500~ queries per second, on Epyc it’s around 4000. Adding onto this, there is a lot more you can do on Intel chips for performance than AMD.

kyzoeadmin

Adrien What tips did you get care to share them or to write a how-to article on it. We run two shared hosting servers on Enhance, a VPs for a client who need to be independent from all other users and we offer email to all 500+ websites some use some don't, my overall thought is that i am very happy with it.

Off course there are some small things like the issue where spam it recognized but not moved to the spamfolder, or the ability to mark some words as spam in enhance, it would do wonders to a lot of people who get a massive amount of spam about German airco's....

One of the most requested features for me is SNI for the mailserver so the mailserver for every domain is reachable thru mail.domain.ext that would really help us a lot in migrating.

I did a little mysql Tuning mysel, not really my cup of tea, i would love to work together on some things, we plan on expanding more servers to enhance, the recent Elementor hack showed us the + side of containerization af 20 websites were hacked because of old Elementor installs, but the rest kept running without a issue.

Client are more than happy with the speeds they get. They are very happy with the backups system. We would love NginX with a reverse proxy, we would love directadmin imports and so on,

josedieguez

you need to understand you are not the only customer, i'm not the only customer.

You already made your mind, in like 10 comments, that you hate email services, and you don't want anything related to mail, that's totally fine, but that's your case. we deliver around 2 million mails per month, without problems (trough cpanel, DA en very small Enhance for now), and our thousands of clients would leave us, if we tell them "go hire Zoho, Google Workspace or whatever.

You also already made your mind of not spending money on LS, i could use the same comments as you agains't people without budget for LS, but i won't, because i know there is market for hosting+mail, hosting+apache hosting+OLS, etc etc.

It's good your feedback and concerns, even tough you repeat them a lot as if they were the only truth (i feel like that), but as some needs redis, others needs S3, others needs OLS, etc, we all want Enhance to be a better product, to use it in production with peace of mind, and be able to offer this new setup to customers.

Adrien

josedieguez Just to clarify, I won't be apologizing for leveraging this community to stimulate dialogue, draw comparisons, and challenge opinions. After all, the purpose of this community is to foster sharing and open dialogue, not censorship.

josedieguez You also already made your mind of not spending money on LS, i could use the same comments as you agains't people without budget for LS

Actually, I am using LS, not OLS. May I suggest a more civil discourse? It would be better if you asked about my preferences instead of assuming.

josedieguez It's good your feedback and concerns, even though you repeat them a lot as if they were the only truth (i feel like that)

It's often the case that the truth can be difficult to accept initially, so I can understand your sentiment. I'd advise you not to take things too personally.