Will you be offering Paid Support Options?
Why are your Paid Support Option currently unavailable?
I am actually new to Webmin Products.
Over the last 8 days, I think I have installed, and re-installed Webmin or Virtualmin 3-5 times.
I am not very savvy on Hosting/DNS/SSL technology, and having issues in this area.
I am now really frustrated!
I hope that you will offer a support option soon, but I will look in the “Jobs” section for a support option person I can hire for a job there.
So, I spent, about, 20-40 hours ( Not Kidding) with all those installs. At , let’s say 20 per hour as an average, plus your time for the emails you have read and replied to, offering paid support could have remedied the problem many times over in savings. And, it is advantageous to you to offer paid support because it takes away many of the variables in people situation because you can require domain host, web hosting, and VPS logins, see and change the settings yourself, and know what you are working with.
You could offer freelance contract people for installs and support and take a 20-30% Fee to help generate revenue for your infrastructure/products.
Also, I am not a huge fan of forums because it is chopped up info, and often misguided or even outright bad info.
It would be nice if some guides with screenshots were done.
A product like Snagit can take interval 10 seconds shots while walking through setups scenarios guides steps.
A guide for setting up and verifying each server type setup.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, and I think “Paid Support” options are advantageous to you as well as new and existing customers.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve struggled to get things going! I unfortunately don’t have the time available to be able to offer you the dedicated support you need, but I have been using Webmin/Virtualmin for over 10 years, and have stood up dozens of servers in that time from scratch. I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have.
When giving other people recommendations for a server management GUI in the past, I have generally made the case that Webmin is an ideal choice because while it provides a convenient way to perform and automate most every common administration task, it does not layer so much abstraction on top of things that it obviates the advantages and power of maintaining your own server. While the UI can be a little intimidating at first, it becomes very intuitive after you get used to it. The search bars on the menu panel are very effective if you’re having a hard time finding something.
I have several Linode stackscripts that automate the initial deployment and setup of things. They are essentially shell scripts that can be easily adapted for most any Debian-based server and include initial configurations for setting up all of the prerequisites, securing the server, adding firewall rules, etc… I’d be happy to share these if it would help?
Probably not, at least not the way we did it in the past. We simply don’t have the staff for it. Virtualmin Pro includes support via our issue tracker, and that goes well beyond what we can do in the forums for GPL users, but still has limits (we won’t become your sysadmin…we just answer questions and prioritize solving any problems you run into).
Because we’re overworked and underpaid.
We don’t have the staff, and we don’t have the resources to hire the staff. It is possible we will begin offering commercial support in the vein of Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, etc. but, I should warn you the pricing on that kind of support will likely take your breath away if you aren’t a corporation with a decent budget for this kind of thing (e.g. thousands per year, minimum).
The kind of per-incident support we offered in the past caused pain due to mismatched expectations. e.g. we were charging, I think, $50 for 3 support incidents for Virtualmin GPL, which we intended to be “we will answer your questions about GPL the same way we answer questions about Pro” but was often interpreted closer to “we will become your sysadmin” or “we will be available 24/7” or “we will talk to you on the phone”. Since we don’t have any junior level support folks (nobody has less than a decade of experience, and all but one of us has 20+ years experience), there was no way to make it work. It cost us money and goodwill, basically. That was my fault, of course…I didn’t communicate the offering well, didn’t price it appropriately, and didn’t provide the tooling necessary to streamline the process (but there’s only so many hours in the day, and I am mostly working for free at this point).
Anyway, our support offering in the past just made everybody frustrated, so we stopped until we could figure out how better to handle providing what people wanted in a way that could realistically make money. When the new billing system goes live, we will rethink the support question. I doubt it will satisfy many users who are doing this as a hobby, however, as it will not be cheap (it’ll be cheap compared to spending 40 hours on something, but not cheap compared to, e.g. our Pro licenses).
I thought at my domain host porkbun or at my web hosting CPanel that I just add an A Record or Cname Record or my VPS IP,
and that it should work for doing my VPS Virtualmin install.
I actually did have this setup working at one time but my VPS was called APP.wayneburlingame.com at the time.
I do not blame the virtualmin product in any way… it is a USER ( Me) error and my lack of skills with hosting/DNS type info.
I am not wanting to be a hosting provider, I bought the product to just help do Linux Server setup and administrative tasks on my VPS.
I’ll try and verify my DNS info is correct first and may get with you again to see about getting the scripts.
You can share them if you like, or maybe drop them in cloud storage somewhere?
Joe I bought a license to ease your burden on all my questions.
but I understand a license does not integrate Virtualmin staff as personal sysadmins for me.
Thanks for the awesome clarification. It clarifies things and this post may help others as well.
I know I am not going to buy enterprise support as I am just a hobbyist learning… so excuse my while I put on my “Forum Eyeglasses” and continue reading…
If you give me some details about your scenario, I can offer some specific advice. If like me, you’re using Webmin on a hosted VPS in order to serve websites/services that you are managing, then here are a few items that tripped me up early on:
Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, don’t bother with the BIND server. Manage your DNS records with your registrar or using something like Google Cloud DNS or Cloudflare. This just requires setting up A and AAAA records for your domains in your DNS service prior to creating the virtual host.
If your server’s networking has it enabled, don’t forget to add IPv6 AAAA records for your domains, and use something like https://dnschecker.org to make sure your domains are resolving correctly to both IPv4 and IPv6. This is especially important if you’re using LetsEncrypt for SSL certificates. If you aren’t sure, check the “Network Interfaces” section Webmin’s dashboard. Your records should match the external IP addresses indicated there.
Postfix/Dovecot servers for email are also an area I would avoid unless there’s a specific reason you need them. Even if you get your configurations just right, outside email services will likely not play nice with email coming from your server. I use MXRoute for affordable hosted email services that I can resell to clients.
If you know you aren’t using a particular feature like BIND or Postfix/Dovecot, be sure to disable those items for new virtual hosts under Virtualmin>System Settings>Features & Plugins. After that, you can prevent the services from starting up under Webmin>System>Bootup & Shutdown. You can uninstall the packages if you’d like after that.
I will methodically go through this list of information, and verify as I go.
I am setting up a fresh new Ubuntu installation now.
When you mentioned not using BIND, and just entering A/AAA records that struck a nerve as my potential issue. As I said before, I at one time had everything working, and I only recall adding an A record, then doing my installation per Virtualmin Documentation and all went smoothly.
I’ll go through your instructions and thank you for taking the time to write it all out clearly, I know a detailed post can be time consuming.
I bought a license to ease your burden on all my questions. 
