First impressions about the DH control panel

#1

I have just signed up as a Dreamhost user, I am brand new and just had a couple of comments to make about my first impressions.

The first thing I noticed is that my control panel runs very slow, which makes things difficult to get all set up. Especially when every little feature is organized onto different pages and many of them I don’t get access to. I don’t get access to them because of the limitations of my account but they’re all right there cluttering up my work area.

I have to say it’s the ugliest control panel I’ve ever had to be looking at. Can you please go for a simpler design, get rid of the bevelled graphics and cheesy attempts at a business type of header. If it were just text that would be fine with me, perhaps it would load faster.

It is very hard to navigate, some of the help links don’t even take you to the right place. It’s even worse because the help shows up in the same window you were viewing, so afterwards you have to exit out and go back and watch your page load again.

Please do something about this atrocity of a control panel.

#2

What the heck?

I was logged into the Control Panel when I came here to make that post. I figured I’d still have been logged in, I had to make a seaporate account for the forum.

I made that post. See this is what I’m talking about. I am very disappointed so far I can only hope my website gets set up by me in a timely manner and the pages load faster than this once my website is up.

Thank you for reading.

#3

Mainly I think I’m disappointed that there do seem to be problems with this web host but nobody has stood up and said anything about it before I signed up. This is of course considering my first impressions are correct or not. This could of course certainly go either way for me now.

Could you tell me how I set up my Crazy Domain Insane hosting account to point additional domains to sub-folders? I cannot seem to get it to work it says I need to upgrade my account but I thought I had three of these I could do don’t I?

Any help is appreciated.

#4

Have you read through the forum? There have been lots of complains (and complements/defenders), and dreamhost is very good about not deleting them.

Your account may not be in the “approved” stage yet (which is why many of your menu choices dont work right now). In the bottom left hand corner of the panel, there should be an account status… It does take a few hours (or sometimes a day or two) to change over. then you should be able to add additional domains up to your limit.

-Jason

I40.com - Home Page
MP3Mystic - Personal Streaming Music server.
(No longer hosted with Dreamhost)

#5

[quote]Your account may not be in the “approved” stage yet (which is why many of
your menu choices dont work right now). In the bottom left hand corner of
the panel, there should be an account status… It does take a few hours (or
sometimes a day or two) to change over. then you should be able to add
additional domains up to your limit.

[/quote]

This is usually the case when someone sees “unusable” panel sections. I was able to find jesusexc’s account, and sure enough it was set to pending. I approved it, so he should be good to go now with our slow and hideously ugly web panel.

:>

  • Jeff @ DreamHost
  • DH Discussion Forum Admin
#6

ya its slow and ugly compared to other CP’s i used, which was cpanel and directadmin. Overrall, i rarely use the CP now and just let my site run. Everythings been cool though so theres no reason to complain.

GottaDeal.com Deals & Coupon Codes. Why Pay Retail?

#7

Last time I saw a CPanel it was a page full of McDonald’s cash register style icons, ack yuck bleh.

I can still read, and I do appreciate a nicely organized heirarchy.

Three cheers for the often-slow-as-hell DH web panel!

=]

[color=#0000CC]jason[/color]

#8

well, I have cpanel on my main site and have moved about 40 some odd sites here to dreamhost in the last two years. I do plan to move my main site over here (it expires in less than 15 days…so I will probably do it this weekend, just the thought of it being down scares me.)

I (mostly) like the way the panel works in dreamhost. I like its integration with the ease of granting permissions of other webids to my main webid. I like the way that portion looks and works. I technically don’t see the slow speed. To get stats on my site that has cpanel, I find I need to get up, log on to cpanel, go make coffee, let the animals out, etc…then come back and sometimes it’s still not up.

I will have to admit that it took a bit of fuss to find which web browsers works best with dreamhost’s webadmin panel. found that in ie, os9 mac I needed to use mozilla cause ie just doesn’t work. On OSX, I like Camino and Firefox…but haven’t really delved into all the OSX browsers yet. On windows, I just gave up logging onto the internet…too much time wasted making sure AV software was up to date and working and downloadig all those microsoft updates!

All in all, I like dreamhosts webadmin panel and see new things cropping up weekly (yeahhh, they finally changed the rewards section…now I can see things so much clearer — as I use that area to see when clients signed up, etc.)

well, just my opinion. it did take a bit to get used to and I will admit I didn’t like it in the beginning.

#9

(Jason)

[quote]Three cheers for the often-slow-as-hell DH web panel!

[/quote]

Not so quick! We’re still processing the submission of the first cheer…

:>

(gonewthewind)

[quote]I will have to admit that it took a bit of fuss to find which web browsers works
best with dreamhost’s webadmin panel. found that in ie, os9 mac I needed
to use mozilla cause ie just doesn’t work.

[/quote]

I find this interesting, as the last time we redesigned the panel IE on the Mac was probably one of the most well-tested browsers (mainly because that’s what I was using at the time). What did you see?

FWIW, we’re always willing to make changes to our rather ugly/scary/non-standard HTML to work with browsers, even somewhat “non-mainstream” ones.

Just the other day I made some changes at the behest of an Opera user, despite the fact that nobody here at DH actively uses it and it’s not heavily used by our customers. While we’re a bit beyond supporting Netscape v4.5 at this point (much to my relief), don’t ever be afraid to let us know if something doesn’t work.

  • Jeff @ DreamHost
  • DH Discussion Forum Admin
#10

I’m curious—does the DH panel support alt tags and other Bobby-compliance-ness? If not, it’d be a great thing to add.

#11

[quote]I’m curious—does the DH panel support alt tags and other Bobby-
compliance-ness? If not, it’d be a great thing to add.

[/quote]

Sadly, while there likely are some alt-tags, I wouldn’t imagine that they are consistently used in any way that would be lauded by accessibility experts. To be honest, our panel HTML - some of which I had a part in writing, many many moons ago - is pretty ugly. It works in almost all cases, but it’s not something I like to think about.

Simply put, it was written very much in the late 1990s tag soup tradition of web design. :>

My dream is that some day we would replace it with XHTML transitional compliant mark-up (with nice, lightweight CSS-based presentation!), consistent use of ALT tags for accessibility, etc. However, this would be a gargantuan job and there isn’t much of a business case for it vis a vis all of the other things people ask for (and the amount of man power we can extend to these sorts of things) so it could be a while.

  • Jeff @ DreamHost
  • DH Discussion Forum Admin
#12

um, I need to go back about 1.5 years to my support tickets…but I will let you (jeff @ dreamhost) know what was written about IE and Mac OS9. I got many (MANY) server time outs…still do, yes I still try on OS9, as this is my main computer and my employees get to play on the newer computers…They only allow me to sit behind this old G4…lol

I will post what was written in the support ticket results from dreamhost. But, I must add, (dreamhost) was correct about the browser issue and it works wonderfully on Mozilla in OS9 : )

Now, can i get VPN access for the Macintosh Yet???

it was…
Security Failure. Data Decryption Error which is what happens on internet explorer

#13

Haha it really is slow and hideously ugly.

I’ve got things running now and I think I’m pretty happy with my services after all. First impressions aren’t everything in this case.

Also I’ve taken a go at XHTML Stricting (not Transitionalizing) the dreamhost webpanel. It’s not perfect but it does help demonstrate that this wouldn’t be so difficult for you to take on. Spiff up the CSS a little bit and add a few images you should be good to go.

http://www.milkcubedesign.com/dreamhost_test/

:slight_smile:

First use of my new webspace. Thanks Dreamhost!

A lot of it really needs to be recoded, like adding membership to the forums with membership to dreamhost account. I think your biggest downfall is the number of items in that left menu if you could trim it up a bit and increase the legibility of the website I would be more happy.

On second thought better add a background color up on that thing I put together.

#14

You know what would be really cool? If DH would open up the source for the panel and let some of the dedicated customers work something out, with a clause that DH may or may not use any part of the result to improve the actual live panel.

Would we the customers embrace such an initiative? (I think so.) Would we cooperatively work to create a good design in terms of a) technical functionality, b) functional and visual usability, and finally c) standards-compliant and attractive graphical design? (I’m not sure.) Would we be able to create something useful, valuable, extensible, and give it back to DH as their property? (I think not.)

Would DH support such an initiative? (I think not.) DH needs to provide specifications and requirements, and perhaps special access to some stuff(?), as well as publicize their proprietary we-hosting-admin code. The benefit to DH would come if and only if the customers can produce anything useful; the cost to DH would be to reveal their code and spend time on the specs/requirements/customer-questions/development-support.

TorbenGB
Try out DreamHost with a free WebID – Prices, options

#15

this is a good idea doing this though would open up the code too much for hackers. when the code is open to the public then they more easily figure out what needs to be done to circumvent security.

it’s easier for one or two people to code a webpage rather than many in any case.

#16

There’s no need for tables there!

Seeeeeeee, there’s always somebody not satisfied :wink:

[color=#0000CC]jason[/color]

#17

Personally, I’d positively hate it if my DH account login were the same as my login here at the forums.

#18

(gonewthewind)

[quote]I will have to admit that it took a bit of fuss to find which web browsers works
best with dreamhost’s webadmin panel. found that in ie, os9 mac I needed
to use mozilla cause ie just doesn’t work.

[/quote]

IE 5.1.7 under Mac OS 9.2.2 works fine for me.

–garyblitz

.

#19

I’m positively curious why? Friendly forum-goer. :slight_smile: why.

Earlier I really wasn’t trying to discredit the open sourcing thing I truely believe this is a good idea. Not so much I have a problem with the security of the thing when this is finished, but while the project is under development it might be easier for accounts to come under attack from the old code.

Someone or a couple of people should take it under their wing to write the whole thing again, if it’s not really liked by more people than just me. We could eliminate all tables if we wanted to and what not I suppose, though there’d be no reason not to use wonderful wonderful table structures.

There’s enough geeks on this hosting service to pull it off. Now get to it everyone!

You know… If you guys want to.

#20

I’ve grown rather attached to the way this web panel operates actually since the time of my first post. I hope you all might forgive the original designer of the panel like it was said this was put together a long time ago.