Greetings,
Started to use AAPanel in the idea that we could invest time and help the community improve the product, because no matter what others users here think or do, this thus beying a free service, is not really free, when it comes to the damage it can leave behind, hence this is not a ready togo product in production.
It looks to me like a playground for the devs to move from Pagoda another paid service accross Europe, thats how I see behind all the courtains and veils until now, so this has more to do with marketing, even this blog is part of that migration, hence it serves as support/incidents tracking for users.
This is nowhere for a product free or paid to be in production without:
PROPER documentation of critical areas: DNS/FIREWALLS/IO/NETWORKING/NAT/SPAM/MAILSERVERS VALIDATION/DKIM/DMARC/SPF
I had reported several important issues that were either missing or not present at all, one of the areas where are plenty of bugs would be the PowerDNS Manager, here like stated in previous posts, the developers were very quick to add basic entries, thus leaving behind functionality and thus not testing it, why I have the feeling someone should say BIG on aapannel site: THIS IS A BETA PRODUCT - DO NOT USE ON PRODUCTION
To review a few of the overall issues not fixed on past 1 year since we started using it:
DNS Manager area this is full of issues and bugs, missing records, overwrites and all done in a PRODUCTION SETUP?
why others users did not report such issues? I would say most of users in AAPanel are newbie to it, and surely not every sysadmin devops knows DNS in details, and they all go to 3rd party such as cloudflare, thus they should not call themselves sysadmins yet they do.
Why there is no real issue tracking system?
when can we see a complete Overview of Architecture?
Ports Opened / closed for production readiness.
Why none of the existing security standards for mail servers are not in place? ie: DMARC / DKIM and SPF, these should be prefilled at startup, and please be carefully, not all these records are only in TXT format, there are ways to customise these entries, was already mentioned months ago in another thread.
why I choosed to use this stack? Mainly due to the fact to give a chance to see a new approach at doing web services, yet Pagoda team have to know, in this world, lying or cheating people isnt going to get far the users.
the overall Pagoda is a free service in Asian markets, they do make a living from the selling of basic apps, such as Backups, DNS, Security plugins etc. Most of them ofcourse are open source themselves, just wrapped around.
Pagoda app goes with iOS app, that is advertised as English and Chinese app, I have reported this to them, was never fixed, and thus it needs a plugin to be deployed on aapanel server to work, all these have to be in fact translated, that said, they arent since I have recently checked the app again and not one single change were implemented.
In a modern time and fast paced world, those keeping users behing due to lack of time, money or ignorance will sooner or later feel the consequences.
again this is not about complaining, this is about ways to make this product better, yet if I got to the end of my nervs means someone here alto always polite, and eager to help, helped me in past, and thats why I write these lines, to get the help back, and make sure my voice is heard, if not we can move on to look into other products.
we are willing to even collaborate closely to developers to review all issues opened and see what can be done based on that.
The unexpected reboot from last week
The lack of a proper support/ticketing system
Testing OLD features mostly and not one single new emerging feature around Mail servers, DNS entries.
If I will be to pay someone, support be it, I would do so at any given time, when I see changes, beta releases, active developers or proactive.
If someone wants to see my contributions here they can feel free to do so, much of them were listened or replied to, yet thats it, a reply to my issues wont solve them.
Thank you, and please do not kill this product by ignoring valuable inputs from its users.
When you think we test this for over 1 year, and we do not think it is stable for production, would like to see the devs side on this.
Thus not having to do a complete code audit, because this is were we are heading now.
Deep audits of entire AAPanel code, hence we last time had issues with the server connecting remotely to servers without our approval. We hope that we did not inflicted any bad toughts on no one, again my desire is to see this product strive and beat the crap of the competency.
Lessons learned in over 10 years of Open Source FOSS user.
- If it is free is not better nor best solution
- some solutions cannot be free by design
- the most free softwares comes with great responsibilities
- whenever someone say something is free, expect to see under the facade, there are always small plans, tricks, modules to sale.
- free vs paid in enterprise systems, you cannot expect to make millios with something free, and not giving back to the community.
AAPanel has unlocked potential, yet they have an Asian mentality and approach, that is way to old compared to western ways of doing business, either learn and addapt fast, of within 1 year or so a newer better improved product can go out there, and do a total blast of the market.
While we see big players like cPanel screwing/building new strategies to make more money, one was to increase the minimal paid ammount from:
200 USD VPS/YEAR deployments to 45 USD / Month = 45x12 = 540 USD - 200 = 320 EXTRA to pay them yearly, now ofcourse all this happened short after cPanel was bought by Plesk and basically they closed the loop of BIG PLAYERS IN HOSTING INDUSTRY.
What is the deal with AAPanel, where is it heading, if you folks need Consultancy on European markets please let me know, happy to help with Marketing strategies, proper community building and knowledge management.
In other words, these forums are good for folks to chat about life, not to track down severities, SLAs and issues of any importancy in production.
So what would it be? Moving forward or backwards, let me know. And please solve the issues reported, not just leave them here to be covered by more posts.
Best,
Cosmin M.
UHL Hosting/Agency/Services