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

So as such, time has come to start a blog (located at http://vps.net/blog), to keep everybody informed on the latest and greatest features we are working on for the VPS Cloud, as such, during the upcoming days and weeks, we will post details on the new website, the Cloud features, the user interface, and much more.

VPS.net is a new brand by that great hosting outfit that I work for (yeah, we are great, get used to it), the UK2 Group, owners of 10TB, UK2.NET, Midphase, etc ..

So keep checking that blog page every day (or even several times a day, things are moving fast), we expect to release VPS.net LIVE on January 31st, but will be looking for beta testers in the upcoming few weeks

Here is the news report by “thewhir“

UK-2 Names Senior Usability Officer

By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com

October 15, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — UK Internet solutions provider UK-2 Group (www.uk2.net) announced on Monday it has named Carlos Rego in the company’s newly created role of Senior Usability Officer.

In the press release, the specifications of the position and respective duties are somewhat vague, simply stating that “Rego will be responsible for redefining the web hosting end user experience.”

Rego is the former managing director of Positive Software automation division of Comodo, which was acquired by Parallels.

“In an industry where many players are as indistinct as the nodes of the Internet, Carlos is one of those rare few who can point out actual achievements,” says Ditlev Bredahl, managing director of the UK-2Group. “His work at Positive Software elevated H-Sphere from obscurity to one of the top control panels in the industry. He has demonstrably built up several companies and we look forward to a similar contribution here at UK-2 Group.”

Rego was also one of the pioneers of redundant and split web services, which are now industry standards, and implemented software capable of cloud/grid based environments, years before it became a hot topic.

Occasionally in the hosting industry, companies will create an entirely new position, complete with its own unique job title, to fulfill a needed role.

Some companies will create these new positions as a quick fix solution to consolidating several duties into one role, while others develop the new roles to focus and prioritize key activities.

Mosso, Rackspace Hosting’s cloud computing division, is another company that recently created a new role, naming 20-year technology veteran Bruce Runyan the company’s chief uptime officer.

UK-2 Group provides domain name registration and web hosting services to a wide customer base through its several hosting brands, which include UK2.net, US2.net, Midphase.com and Resell.biz.

Earlier this month, the company announced it recently acquired Web host Dotable, bringing with it over 10,000 domains.

Not too shabby

I’m quite pleased, even so the server is in Ireland, ping times are in the low 30ms regions, here are a PING test from my location

64 bytes from 82.195.xxx: icmp_seq=7 ttl=56 time=33.289 ms
64 bytes from 82.195.xxx: icmp_seq=8 ttl=56 time=34.724 ms
64 bytes from 82.195.xxx: icmp_seq=9 ttl=56 time=33.542 ms

Now here is my ping test to a site in a Manchester datacenter (30 miles away from me)

64 bytes from 85.159.xxx: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=29.258 ms
64 bytes from 85.159.xxx: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=28.759 ms
64 bytes from 85.159.xxx: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=27.768 ms

So, thanks for 365′s superb peering, it’s only 4-6ms more .. amazing ..

I have been doing some testing to the server for a few days now, nothing had broken and lagged down, so far, it’s all gree, I am hoping to start moving my Live sites to it this weekend, here are some specs:

Processor #1 Vendor: GenuineIntel

Processor #1 Name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5140 @ 2.33GHz

Processor #1 speed: 2332.701 MHz

Processor #1 cache size: 4096 KB

Memory: 1031608k/1048576k available (2081k kernel code, 16072k reserved, 868k data, 220k init, 131008k highmem)

And the best !!

/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 7.7G

fas940head4:/vol/nas0/rcnlnas0 10GB

The first Volume suppose to be 10GB, but not a problem at the moment, can easily be changed later on when I need it, thats of course the root drive in the HP EVA system, the second is a backup drive NFS volume, with it’s own network interface … cant beat that