Go PHP5 (alternate title: cPanel Sucks)

Written July 6, 2007 in php

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The PHP community has started promoting GoPHP5 — a website devoted to promoting the move to PHP5 and dropping compatibility with PHP4.

The site complains that “PHP 4 is still installed on a majority of shared web hosts.”

Want to know the reason for that? It’s cPanel, folks. Most shared web hosts use cPanel as their web hosting management software. Even though there’s great alternatives, cPanel is still stuck back in the days of Apache1.3.x and PHP4. They’ve got no incentives to move to better software (and indeed have been “working on” cPanel version 10 with updated support for years.
Yes, cPanel has PHP5. But it’s not a default option and it has to be set by WHM. And the first time a customer complains that they can’t run a PHP4 app they uploaded, the host just says “screw it” and swaps back to php4.

There’s three things that I think are sad about cPanel acting as an anchor and dragging the entire industry down.
First, cPanel sucks. It handles faults poorly, puts software in nonstandard places, can slow the server down majorly while doing backups and other simple tasks, makes the configuration files in many cases unreadable/editable by humans, … I could go on for days.

The second thing that’s sad is that Apache 2 is so much easier to automatically administer than Apache 1 ever was. Instead of hacking a giant vhosts or httpd.conf file, you can put a hundred individual vhost configurations in conf.d and gracefully restart the server — voila, your customers are online. Or just bypass vhost configurations and use directory-based vhosting. You can even skip the server restart.

The third thing that’s sad is that it’s created a generation of “system administrators” and “hosting company operators” who don’t know the first thing about administering a linux box, and are helpless when cPanel eventually shits the bed and folds in upon itself like the house of cards it is. One of my customers’ system admins was cussing at me via instant messenger the other day. His complaint: Now that I’ve pointed out to him how many bad things cPanel does, he actually has to learn how things should work and how to do them quickly the hard way.

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3 comments on ' Go PHP5 (alternate title: cPanel Sucks) '

Note that the latest editions of cPanel 11 (available on all build trees except STABLE as of writing) do support Apache 1.3, 2.0 and 2.2 along with concurrent PHP (running PHP 4 and 5 simultaneously). The default version of PHP can be set in WHM (default is 5). Future builds hope to make this control more fine-grained so individual users can have PHP 4 or PHP 5. I know many of our customers have mentioned publicly that they plan on phasing out PHP 4 support before PHP 4 reaches EOL on 8/8/08.

Additionally, backups, statistics generation and similar processes are performed in the background. If they are occupying too much CPU time - perhaps you may wish to only run 1 web stats program instead of 3 based off the preferences of your users/customers.

Many configuration files are now stored in human-readable formats such as YAML. EasyApache 3 is also much better accommodating of manual edits of configuration files than the previous EasyApache 1 (part of cPanel 10 and cPanel 11 Stage 1).

If you want to read more about the new EasyApache and PHP Configuration system, you can read the new documentation at:

http://www.cpanel.net/support/docs/ea/ea3/

Written by David Grega on November 09, 2007 at 1:34pm
Editor’s Note: This was posted six months ago, at which point cPanel 10 and cPanel 11 Stage 1 were neither publicly released or readily available. My comments about cPanel being a crutch still stand — and a quick perusal of any web hosting forum or cpanel’s own support forums will validate that.

Written by Karl Katzke on November 12, 2007 at 11:08am
Yea, fully agree.
So what if they have a new cpanel (ensim did the same thing)…the fact is they left old software on for years when much newer and more secure versions are ready.

Hell, php6 is about to come out. So in two years plesk, cpanel and ensim will finally go to php6 when php 8 is available.

Just the inablilty to apply security patches alone is enough to never use this stuff. If you have any real business going on and not just a content site, you need to never use this stuff.

Written by bob on March 27, 2008 at 3:14am