Plesk vs. DNP (Dot Net Panel) now WebSitePanel

Wiindows hosting and windows hosting panel

This one is hard to handle and hard to explain as opinions are divided here. This could be probably compared to the epic fight between the Intel and AMD processors but on a lower scale. Plesk and DNP are control panels used for administrating your servers whether it is a shared hosting, VPS or dedicated server. The differences between these two control panels are very obvious and they vary from one version to another. But there are some main key features that one software has and the other one hasn’t which brings us to picking out which one is generally the best suited and which is best suited for you personally.

Let’s start with them features of the Plesk:

Prices: Plesk can end up cheaper than the DNP if the hosting provider is using Virtuozzo VPS platform. Plesk and Virtuozzo are made by the same manufacture giving you a great discount with Plesk if you have Virtuozzo, and most of nowadays hosting companies are using Virtuozzo automatically giving you the discount.

Additional Features: Plesk has a feature that DNP doesn’t support and that is additional software integration. There is an option that gives you the possibility of installing additional options on Plesk by buying additional software that you need.

Third Party support: Plesk also allows for the use of third-party applications which will allow you to configure your Plesk installation to function exactly the way you want it to, right down to which applications are used for specific services that are important to the running of the websites which you are hosting – for example, Plesk uses the MailEnable mail server by default, but you may wish to use the SmarterMail email server and webmail interface so that you are able to make use of the extra features, and SmarterMail is just one of several email servers supported by Plesk.

Those where the advantages of Plesk over DNP and here are the advantages of the DNP over Plesk:

The thing that can get the customers confused is the price, as DNP is free, now it is open source and it's name is WebSite Panel. 

One of the two greatest advantages of DNP is its interface and the uptime. First, the interface of the DNP can be a bit trickier than the one in Plesk, but mastering it means more control over your account and the loading time to it is way shorter than the one of the Plesk. The other thing the uptime is probably the strongest and best advantage of the DNP over Plesk. This has been made possible due to the clustering technology that DNP uses and Plesk doesn’t. As an end result you get 100% higher (faster) uptime, which is a part of one of the most important features of a server, and that is reliability.

As many of the customers have discovered the great benefits of using Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft’s Hyper-V people are deciding themselves for DNP as he has the support for using those two technologies and Plesk doesn’t. Without DNP these two technologies would be worthless, as there is a way to go around this, but that requires ordering and setting up a special control panel, which can cost you dearly.

Another is the compatibility with the .NET framework as DNP is based on ASP.NET and it also supports the new .NET 4 version. 

Sumary

Summarizing it all together, you will probably see that each of the Panels has their advantages depending on what you need. Plesk has a pretty solid foundation on which it is built and usable on all of the hosting services (shared, VPS and dedicated), while DNP had a few minor problems with the VPS hosting, but in our companies case to use it to full potential using DNP is unavoidable as Hyper-V is a part of the package.

Finally it is up to you to decide the best control panel that you can use and the one that is the most affordable with the options that is given and the options that can be added to them. Summarizing the line of your and the possibilities of the control panel will give you a clear decision which control panel should you use.

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