Member OP
CPanel renewal quote came in: triple last year. Route via their licensing adds 12ms to my blood pressure. Looking at DirectAdmin migration. Anyone done this with minimal client disruption?
Old ping: $45/year
New ping: $140/year
Route change: unacceptable
Oh man I remember when cPanel was basically free (well not free but you know what I mean) and everyone used it because it was the thing and now its just this bloated mess that keeps adding features nobody asked for (like the jupiter theme which honestly looks like a bad mobile app) and the pricing keeps going up because they know they have everyone locked in but heres the thing I actually tried DirectAdmin three years ago and it was fine really but then I had this one client who absolutely refused to learn anything new (you know the type, calls it "the cpanel" like its a physical object) and I ended up staying just for them and now im paying for it literally paying for it and Webmin exists too which I know people laugh at but honestly for my personal stuff I still use it unironically (dont tell anyone) because it does what I need and I dont have to think about per-account licensing and t
DirectAdmin filters attacks same as cPanel. 500Gbps scrubbed at Hetzner last month, panel irrelevant. Licensing overhead is the real DDoS.
Member
Did a fun little project last month: migrated 12 sites from cPanel to DirectAdmin on a NAT VPS. Took a weekend. Backup/restore worked fine, had to fix some DNS zones manually. It actually works.
Cost before: $168/year panel + $24 VPS
Cost after: $24/year panel + $18 VPSFor what it's worth, I've seen a 40% increase in DirectAdmin migration requests at KnownHost since January. They built an automated cPanel-to-DA transfer tool that handles email, databases, and zone files. Happy to share the workflow if useful.
— Admin
Before you migrate, check your resolver. CPanel and DirectAdmin handle DNS differently.
TTL on your SOA matters. Lower it to 300 before you start. Propagation will still happen, but controlled propagation beats surprise. Here's proof:
$ dig +short @ns1.example.com example.com SOACheck your resolver first. Always.
Member
Price very high for small reseller. DirectAdmin have API? Need automate account create for client. Anyone know if license work for multiple server or need separate?
Which DirectAdmin version handles the migration cleanly?
Licensing overhead is the real ddos, dan nailed it
I ran the migration on 1.662. The built-in cPanel importer worked for accounts under 5GB. Anything larger and I had to rsync /home manually. One gotcha: MySQL 8 auth methods. cPanel defaults to caching_sha2_password now, DirectAdmin still likes mysql_native_password for older PHP sites. Check before you cut over.