I was bored tonight
Our Father, who art in the datacenter, hallowed be thy firewall, thy bandwidth come, thy download will be done, on PC as it is on MAC.
Give us this day our fast connection and forgive us our torrents, as we forgive those who leech from us and lead us not into lost packets, but deliver us from site not found, Amen
Twitpic is down, wonder if they got plagued by the same attacks as Twitter was having yesterday..
One of the guys at work was asking me about the old cPanel skins I had done, and if I had still any screenshots of it, I checked my blog but no reference to them was ever written, so I decided it was time to write and save these images, so I can look back on them when I am an old man and reminisce.
cPanel is today of course one of the leading Control Panels in the Web Hosting industry, it’s market share is equal or above that of Plesk, and the two basically own the overall CP market for mainstream hosting,
But when I first set my eyes on cPanel back in 99, it was a VDI.NET product (a datacenter in Clifton, NJ, specializing in hosting other hosts), cPnel looked nothing like the polished product it is today, instead it was more of a compilation of Perl scripts with an attempt of a GUI front-end, not that there was anything wrong with it, for the time it was already one of the most powerful CPs of it’s time, but with sysadmin work being moved from the confides of the shell into the “anybody-can-do-it” world of the browser, the front-end did not made justice to the back-end scripts, it was, at a lack of a better word “butt-ugly” and unintuitive.
At the time I was a webhost reseller utilizing the “Alabanza” platform, (talk about a missed opportunity there, Alabanza could have owned the hosting market today, but they became fat cats and decided to stop innovating and instead concentrated on skinning their existing clients of as much money as they could, they figured nothing better would ever come … man where they wrong), unhappy about the “surprise” charges and the fact your $400/mo server became a $800/mo server on the second year of ownership (yeah, brilliant idea Alabanza), i became looking for a solution elsewhere.
And I found it on VDI, problem was, their CP was just so awfully looking (yeah, cPanel), fortunately the programmer (Nick Koston) was a smart kid, and he had done the CP rely on internal “API-Like” calls to deploy the tools and content, leaving the framework of where that info is displayed, basically free to be messed about with .. and so the world of “skins” on cPanel was born.
I unfortunately dont have a screenshot of cpanel 2.0, but the very early on (1.0 ? 0.x ?) looked something like this:
Yeah, we have come a loooooong way haven’t we ?
So, Photoshop in one hand and a real basic understanding of HTML on the other, I set to create a new design from scratch, the idea was not just to beautify it, but also make it easier to use, mind this is before the likes of readily available cheap stock art or google image search, this was hard labor and 56Kb modem in mind.
So I did two versions, one called “default” and one called “iconic”
“Default”
“Iconic”
The reason for the two versions was simply, 56Kb modems where still a luxury, Cable modem trials has just begun and still a large amount of people browsed the web on 33.6Kb .. the “Iconic” theme, while great with it’s display of all the options on the frontpage, was heavy, I was afraid people would simply not have the patience for it, the default skin in the other hand was quicker, as it needed you to go to the sub-sections to load the other elements.
Ironically enough, the “Iconic” design became the standard, as speeds increased people loved the easy access to their tools, and most CP’s from there on all adopted a similar design.
Looking at it today one might call it “ugly” & “heavy” and for sure does not stack to some of today’s creative designs, but for the time, this was pure sweetness, people loved it and it just made managing your hosting account that much easier and pleasant.
Of course, the real work was done by Nick K, he is the one that created the CP, I simply polished it and made it easy to use 
Below are some more shots of the default theme (they marked as cPanel 4, but this started on 3 and went all the way to 7 or 8 I believe), and yes I created every single one of those icons, some by Photoshop, others on Lightwave 3D (notice my 3D Penguin ?).
What was the point ?
This of course was my introduction to Control Panels, in the years to come I had the pleasure and privilege to partner with Igor Seletsky and amongst other, develop the incredible H-SPhere Control Panel
Much better looking this time !!
And more recently, Tera-CP, a CP built on extJS with a Adobe Air client, made internally by our team at the UK2 Group, currently in use on 10TB.COM but soon to be used on more of the other brands in the group.
The culmination of 10 years of work, sheer perfection !, click HERE for a video
I was looking thru our logs today for (VPS.NET) sales, and found out that in for each successful sale, our fraud system stops on average 7.5 other sales from going thru.
We have several methods of stopping the fraudster from gaining access to an account, and even so once a while one of them manages to get by, usually our post-sale fraud measures catch them within a few hours anyway.
While those numbers are abysmal, the real mind boggling fact is .. those few that do get by, they never do anything with their account … so .. what is the point ?
If people are going to try to buy hosting with a stolen credit card, you’d expect them to use it to further exploit other revenue streams, be SPAM or hosting fake baking logins, but on the cases that we seen go by, the accounts just sit there, a VPS is created by nothing is ever uploaded, or in most cases even accessed (using it to try and access other VM’s is also out of the question, we use Xen in a cloud setup, you just cant see who is around you).
So it begs the question .. why ? why would anybody steal somebody else’s identity and card details to buy something they never use ?
I guess for some people this is just a sick game to see how far they can go … unfortunately it is a costly game for providers, as they the ones who have to invest in yet more costly fraud prevention technology and pay the premiums for dealing on a high risk merchant market, of course those extra costs then have to be filtered down to the mass public who buys their stuff legit, AKA .. the rest of us.
So my advise, if you know anybody who steals CC info, dont bother reporting them to the authorities … beat them up instead, make sure to break a few typing fingers …
Yes .. I advocate violence towards a fraudster… 
So I asked one of our Tera CP developers, who is working on the new VPS.NET integration, to create me a “TEXT” area on the Cloud Servers section that would show to clients who dont have any cloud servers.
The idea is to place some nice text explaining what Cloud Servers are and why people should but it.
He did it, but he called it SPAM !!
No respect I tell ya…
For the past few weeks I have been working on the upcoming CDN offering we (UK2 Group) are working on, one of my newest favorite features is called “Origin Pull”.
Origin Pull basically means when somebody hits your site for the first time via one of the CDN pop’s, all of it’s new (referenced) content is cached by the CDN and will, from then on, be served by the CDN network directly (via the closest pop).
Originally I was not keen on it, as I did not understood it, I preferred the option to upload to the CDN directly, but the more I use it, the more I like it, also enjoy retaining the control over the content on my own storage.
Cool Stuff.
A couple of weeks ago, we announced the final pricing for VPS.NET .. this was not an easy exercise either, it took allot of work and study to determine what prices we had to set that where both attractive to customers while at the same time ensuring our product was profitable.
But it seems that for some people we might have as well put a few prices on a cork-board and trow darts at it, where it landed .. that was the price.
It’s not that simple, when pricing a product of this magnitude (a Cloud) one needs first to gather all the costs associated with deploying and maintaining the product, then you need to account for the growth period (remember, one will deploy a cloud system that costed millions of dollars to setup, but you will have 0 clients that first day .. with $0 revenue incoming), it takes months, sometimes years, to recuperate initial costs, while at the same time you have staff and ongoing expenses that ned to be meet as well.
Not, if you compare the traditional VPS market, a traditional VPS provider will buy or lease a server, costing a few hundred dollars to a few thousand and sell out “chunks” of that server, very minimal initial capex and usually they will break even within weeks.
How in the world then do people expect Cloud computing to be priced identical to standard VPS ?, it’s simple .. in general people dont !, those who cannot afford it do !.
It seems that we have now a new generation of people that believe if there is something in the internet that they cannot afford it, then the price is wrong, sorry, but thats not the case, sometimes your budget only really allows for mediocre.
I have instead focused on asking those people who “actually” signed up and their reaction could not be any more different, they love the product and they believe (like us) the pricing is actually it’ strongest point, the initial cost these days for anybody to get into a cloud setup is the hundreds of dollars per month, we reduced it to $30 !!!.
My team and I get demoralized when we read of people blasting us because we dont match the price of a traditional VPS setup, and for a while we did try to see if the math added up, could be be any cheaper ?, no, it does not add up, why would we sell at a loss ?, we are competitively priced and will stop dwelling on what a few leeches are screaming about and concentrate on providing a great product for those people who see the real value of our offering.
I too sometimes browse ebay for that elusive DB9 for a VW Bug price … but it’s just not going to happen.
Who says thieves dont work hard ? here is a good example of how desperate fraudster are, this gem of a person utilized 7 different credit cards until one went thru.
The appalling thing is the last one’s details where so good, and the owner is most certainly still oblivious that the cars is stolen, that the anti-fraud systems had no problem passing it thru :p
We are implementing stronger fraud checking, but this is scary, imagine how many cards that a-hole must have ….
No comment needed…
It’s been many months of hard work, countless revisions of code and design and an incredible amount of people and feedback, but finally last night we released VPS.NET.
Ok, we calling it a “Public Beta”, but it only means we are still missing a few bits, what’s there is solid and working fine !
I am incredibly proud with what we achieved there, going “Cloud” for a VPS setting was a risky new idea, but once that once it sunk in, we knew we had a winner, and above all, we knew we had cracked the trend of things to come.
Now I wish I could say it’s “DONE” .. but it’s not yet, still have loads of ideas and cool features to add, man this has been fun
A grand design .. better see some awards for it !!