You don’t understand. THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME. I like you would be fine to do it. IT IS FOR THE OTHER 99% OF USERS WHO WILL NOT.
I can tell Webmin/Virtualmin admins do not care about providing an adequate user experience, only about creating good features.
Features are important, but they do not matter to most users and unfortunately many like you just don’t get it, and therefore Webmin will NEVER get wide adoption, and will remain a small, niche product which will eventually go under when the owners run out of money. Tragic, but inevitable, unless someone like me adapts the UI, or the owners gain some sense and realize that MOST PEOPLE CARE MORE ABOUT THE USER INTERFACE THAN THE FEATURES, they ONLY care that it looks good and simply works, and NOTHING else. And that is why cPanel will continue to rule.
You still haven’t even looked at Virtualmin. I don’t know what to tell you, if you won’t even look at the product that competes with what you’re wanting to replace. Webmin is not a cPanel/WHM competitor. Completely different category. The UI is not built around web hosting.
I don’t have any interest in discussing ease of use for web hosting when you won’t even look at our product for web hosting, and if you continue to make these bizarre posts about Webmin (not a web hosting control panel) not being an easy to use web hosting control panel, I’m going to have block you for my own sanity. If you won’t look at Virtualmin (our web hosting control panel), I’m not inclined to have a conversation about what’s wrong with our approach.
Yes I have. What do you mean I haven’t looked at Virtualmin. And it looks identical. I have it installed. I have installed all 4 products:
Webmin
Virtualmin
Usermin
Cloudmin
The UI is nearly identical in all 4 products. I would say you don’t understand UI design, but that’s apparent by the current state of your UI.
Both the UI and UX are severely lacking even when compared to cPanel’s atrocious Jupiter theme they are about to force on users. I think that overall your product is good, it has just totally failed when it comes to usability for a wide audience, which is why it can never gain a wide userbase in the present state.
I am giving my assessment based on decades of experience that you don’t have in my fields, but you are ignoring this expertise, and that is why Webmin and related products will never achieve a wide userbase.
The failure of your product (0% market share qualifies as a failure, despite being around for decades) is due to your failure to listen to experts like myself.
It isn’t built around web hosting? What’s it built around, egg mcmuffins? All 4 products go on a web server, and are used for website hosting, server administration, and database administration, all of which are under the category of “web hosting”.
If you don’t understand that you literally have a 0% market share, and I am telling you THE REASON for it, and you refuse to listen, despite having an excellent product underneath, than I don’t know what else to tell you.
Interesting other facts:
cPanel has a 13.57% market share, but Plesk dominates the market with a 85.13% market share. It seems that lately, cPanel has run away most of their customers. Many probably tried Virtualmin (forgive me using the term “webmin” interchangeably), but ultimately those fleeing cPanel ended up using Plesk instead. And I told you the reason, if only you would listen. It is your UI/UX. Which is terrible despite the underlying product being excellent.
And by the way? Over the last 5 years I have spent nearly $2,500 on cPanel. I have known about Webmin/Virtualmin the whole time and tried it a couple times previously.
Why did I stay with cPanel? Usability. I don’t like it, and I want to leave every day. But usability keeps me around, although maybe not for much longer with the atrocious UI changes they are making to BOTH WHM and cPanel. And their support staff are likewise atrocious.
And Webmin is much closer to cPanel’s WHM than Virtualmin. Virtualmin is similar in function to the user side (user login for cPanel), whereas WHM is similar in function to cPanel’s WHM.
If you want to keep having a product that no one uses, ok, feel free. It’s just tragic. I did my best to help, but it sounds like it’s falling on deaf ears. I even offered to volunteer to make a better UI, but it sounds like you don’t even want me to volunteer my decades of UI/UX experience to your cause, which is unfortunate.
It appears that your decades of UI / UX experience amounts to merely replacing the Virtualmin UI with the UI of cPanel, from what I have been able to gather from your earlier messages.
Obviously no one in interested in doing that. I vote that this topic be closed by the admins.
We have roughly 150,000 active installations of Virtualmin. That’s the number of unique IPs downloading our software in a month. Webmin has millions of downloads a year (and probably on about a million servers…though we don’t have precise numbers for this data as it much of it gets anonymized through SourceForge download mirrors).
We’re not making as much money as cPanel or Plesk (it’s not even close), but, we’re on a lot of servers.
Again, you clearly have not used Virtualmin? I don’t know what you’re looking at.
Virtualmin takes the role of both WHM and cPanel. Webmin is a general purpose systems management tool, which does a wide variety of tasks that WHM does not do.
I don’t understand the need for this thread. I only came to Virtualmin as a newbie a couple of months ago. I paid for the pro licence as I feel it is only fair to pay for a product when it meets my needs. I can get around the interface for both Webmin and Virtualmin. I have needed support from the staff and other members but for that support to work I have provided full information about what has gone wrong. The errors were due to my inexperience and not the products. So come on, stop complaining about these products and work with the staff to fix your issues.
Why should other users used to the UI have to learn a other UI/ UX while you say you don’t like it?
Where you also did write both you payed for as Cpanel and VMIN don’t meet your needs, but it does for Miljions of other USERS.
Other example i try to explain:
Compare OUTLOOK and Thunderbird same discusssions for those who change to the other, but it is not the product it is the user mainly who has to learn a new other UX/UI interface yes or no?
IF UX/UI and those things are same for concurent APS this is no good while users people choose also based on differences if don’t like al are ( alsmost same kind of …) the same that is nonsens.
For cars you also have different dashboards… i hope that stay’s.?
YUP DOCS and howto’s, are some not complete or outdated, and that part of UI/UX is also important to have users known an experience the look and feel.
LOL @jyghckyvckudsa I happen to know a little about marketing data. (A company I worked for once had a not-so-little subsidiary: D&B Market Data )
What you shared is complete garbage.
Datanyze is using info scraped from zoominfo
Zoominfo is using info scraped from all over, with no checking at all
Just look at the description of who Virtualmin supposedly is: it’s identical to BetterHost Telecom in Austria.
Look at who Virtualmin’s competitors are: Webmin is one LOL.
Look at the “data” on users. Yeah… only 18 companies use VirtualMin.
You may know a little about UI/UX*** but you sure know nothing about this business.
I too would like to see some improvements in Webmin/Virtualmin UI/UX. I’ve been taking the time to actually learn the existing model so I can eventually make helpful suggestions. Burning your bridges, particularly with obviously wrong claims, says more about you than anyone in this community.
I hope that you learn a lesson or two from this interaction.
Peace out.
Pete
*** (I kinda doubt that you are a UI/UX expert at this point… I’m NOT a UI/UX expert. I say that because I know people who ARE)…
I don’t know if someone mentioned proxmox, that’s what I use. Install one Debian based virtualmin, fully working, turning it into template ( you just need to remove some stuff so when deployed as new machine it will grab all network and other settings as you would install manually directly from virtual machine settings) and wualla, deployments within less then one minute (on SSD) nothing complicated. Ain’t touch the crapware like virtual box years, that’s for amateur home labs…
@jyghckyvckudsa I think you just keep this thread rolling and too long which most of people will avoid as forum thread with 70+ response and no solution is like no it still didn’t work for them, let’s search solved issues…
you know what one of my real friends told me and he is keep saying this every time till this day when I mention one line of kernels code twice on video chat? Talking is cheap, show me the code.
Basically when you ready with all super duper fluffy whatever, contact vmin staff and show them, make repo public, with proper documentation and post it somewhere here, be it even YouTube video on how to or anything, I’m sure you will get attention and response - otherwise have fantastic day.
Proxmox looks very expensive in comparison to Cloudmin - and perhaps with less features?
The ability to run Cloudmin on a primary server that manages multiple bare metal servers and the virtual machines running on those servers (including docker instances), and/or AWS or Google Compute instances or buckets, and then on top of it all, also manages each Virtualmin and Webmin install (plus even more features), is what sets Cloudmin apart here.
They’re kinda targeted at different audiences, I think (at least last time I looked at Proxmox), but I’m under the impression that Proxmox is good at what it does. Cloudmin was built for web hosting providers and web devs; the delegation and integration with Virtualmin are the key features, not really the virtualization itself (though we do support a lot of virtualization types, more than any product I know of…but, that’s irrelevant to most people who tend to pick one virtualization tech and use it across the board, so it might be misplaced resource allocation to support all these different options).
We’ve kinda neglected Cloudmin over the past couple/few years, as we simply have a lot less Cloudmin users than Virtualmin, and we have very limited resources. So, Proxmox is probably more up to date and they definitely have more users than Cloudmin, so for people who just need to manage virtual machines on a small scale, and don’t need the delegation and Virtualmin integration of Cloudmin, it may be a better fit, even at a higher price.
But, now that Virtualmin 7 is within hours/days of being ready to call stable (we just need a new virtual-server, Webmin, and virtualmin-nginx release, and an update to virtualmin-config and the yum groups…all code is committed but packaging/deploy isn’t done, so it’s close), we plan to focus on refactoring the Cloudmin installer to use the same model as Virtualmin (yum groups or metapackages, along with a fork of virtualmin-config for Cloudmin), which is more reliable, easier to maintain, and provides better feedback to the user during install (to catch problems before they’re trying to do things with it and failing because the install actually failed).
And, the low price is maybe part of the problem with Cloudmin. We don’t charge enough to make it worth devoting resources to it! Virtualmin makes ten times the revenue (and has even more than ten times the users), so we end up spending at least ten times as much time on it. If we could hire one more person, we could do great things with Cloudmin, but that’s not realistic, since I’m already subsidizing Virtualmin salaries from income from my other job.
If I just needed KVM virtualisation, I’d go for RHEL (or clone) and Cockpit. It works really well and without additional costs.
I agree, the cost for a Cloudmin license is too low for what it does, so increasing the price of Cloudmin makes perfect sense in order to support it’s evolution.
Perhaps a market research form to see what current customers would pay would be a good idea
In the last few weeks I’ve used-
WHM/ cPanel
TrueNAS Scale
Proxmox
VirtualMin
Honestly I would have stayed with cPanel if the prices and support were just a touch better.
I actually paid for some Proxmox licenses and figured I would use that, but had some issues. I probably won’t re-subscribe, and just quietly- the interface is deeply ugly for a Mac guy…
TrueNAS Scale is gorgeous, and I think they are on to a winner with bundling a single Kubernetes node. But the one time I needed support, the agent was actively hostile, shut down my ticket and gave me a warning. Like WTF dude? To be clear, I had met the (difficult) ticket requirements, was polite, and just needed some explanation…
Virtualmin - I had some issues migrating cPanel accounts but this is probably an issue at the source. It’s a decent if not fabulous interface- improvements would be welcome, but dude do you really think you’re going to get a job by pouring poo on the existing system? It’s functional, you can try it for free, it has a mind blowing number of features and the people in the forums are fantastic.
ALL of those things are more important than pretty icons.
I’m pretty sure I’ll stay with the 'Min ecosystem, and I’ll be happy to pay for it once that decision is made. I do think you’re missing a lot of potential customers with the state of the docs though, I almost didn’t download it.
But I came here to say thank you, not to criticise
The docs are a work in progress, if there are any areas you’d like to see improved specifically, feel free to let us know. Since that is outside the scope of this thread, I’d ask that you create a new one with these suggestions.
