Hello everyone, I have been using the free version of Virtualmin for over a year and I have to say I am very satisfied. In the past, I have used Plesk, WHM cPanel, and DirectAdmin (I am still using DirectAdmin on a VPS), but at the moment Virtualmin is my favorite.
I would like to ask for some clarifications about the PRO version, and specifically about the support. What does Virtualmin PRO support include? What are the channels to get support? And finally, if anyone here is using Virtualmin PRO, how are you finding it?
Pro users can send PMs to Staff. Those PMs receive priority support; we try to answer them first, and we have paid support staff whose primary job is making sure they’re answered in a timely manner (we’re a very small company, but we try to be very responsive).
Some of the benefits of having Pro support:
It’s private. You can be more forthcoming about your domains and problems, since you know it’s not public. i.e. it can be hard to answer DNS, SPF, etc. questions without knowing the domain name you’re talking about. Only a handful of trusted people will see your PMs (which is me, Jamie, Ilia, Eric Andreychek, and Peter Knowles). Jamie and Eric mostly only interact with Pro customers, except when we raise a topic to their attention here.
We can spend more time on Pro problems. We try to help everyone, regardless of license, but the reality is that all of us have other jobs (by necessity). Virtualmin doesn’t make a lot of money, but most of what money it does make is spent making sure Pro customers get help in a timely manner.
We’re much more likely to implement feature requests from Pro customers. Good ideas are good ideas whoever they come from, but good ideas from the kind of folks who value Virtualmin enough to pay for it are ideas we want to hear about (because we want to attract more of that kind of user, so we can afford to keep making Virtualmin).
It funds development. We’re not independently wealthy, we don’t have investor backing, we have to have other jobs. Without Pro customers, Virtualmin (and Webmin) gets a lot less attention.
And, there’s a Support module, as shown above. That allows you to easily send us a bunch of system information as part of your ticket, and also grant us access to your system in a safe way (without passwords, it installs our public keys for a limited time, so we can ssh in), though we very rarely ask for or want access, it can help in troubleshooting tricky bugs that we can’t reproduce locally.
Thank you for the responses, I find Virtualmin Pro very interesting, especially because of the priority support. Additionally, since I need to pay attention to the budget, it seems much more affordable than other “panels”.
