posted by on Jun 5
Which is the worst software company you’ve ever had to deal with? My vote goes to Parallels, a company behind server management software, virtualization, and a bunch of other overpriced rubbish that they somehow manage to push out successfully to individuals and corporations with too much money to spend on software.
Parallels is the company that now owns the Plesk server management brand. Through a series of complex acquisitions, they’ve managed to buy up a big slice of the control panels market for server management software. They acquired the rights to Helm, Ensim and Sphera, as well as of course Plesk in relatively recent times - all control panel products for servers.
Plesk used to be the most dependable control panel software money could buy for those looking to put web-based software on their servers to manage hosting infrastructure. Unlike cPanel, the most popular alternative, it played nice with the server packages included with popular Linux distributions, deploying updates did not put the fear of god into server administrators, and support for the product was really outstanding.
Roll on a couple of years later and now the opposite is true for most of what I wrote in the last paragraph. Installing Plesk updates is now an extremely risky business. Upgrading servers to the latest Plesk 8.4.0 resulted in breaking email for any users who were unfortunate enough to be hosted on those machines. Support was non-existant for this issue for more than a week after they pushed out the broken upgrade. They finally posted a patch on their forums that didn’t work for a lot of people, and then a hot fix arrived about two weeks ago that does work. But unfortunately, users running the popular CentOS 5 and Parallels Plesk are still reporting they don’t have a working patch that addresses these issues. Anyone providing a hosting service on this platform will be lucky to have any customers left by the time Parallels has finished.
They also introduced a feature called DomainKeys that provides a digital signature for all emails sent out from a server, helping receivers validate the authenticity of messages. This is a feature that has been requested for about two years now, so you would think when it was finally introduced they could have got it right. Of course not! Enabling the DomainKeys feature on a Plesk server results in email redirects/forwarding functionality breaking for anyone who had set it up. This bug has still not been fixed. And my contact at Parallels has stopped responding to messages on the subject.
Plesk is not cheap to run either. It costs $1399 to buy an unlimited domain license for one server, and then you have to subscribe to receive updates every year beyond that. The software is also available to customers as a leased software service. The prices vary between $39 and $69 for the basic service. Then if you want spam protection, anti virus, language packs, or a number of other features, those can all be had for an additional ongoing monthly fees.
Despite the pricing premium Parallels puts on its product, the company still feels it has the right to advertise freely to your paying customers about their other software products. By default, when a user logs into Plesk they are bomboarded with messages about Parallels Virtualization Software, Plesk Software Updates, and invited to click for more information about Parallels software on their website.
In the very latest version of Plesk for Linux, the company has just added in a feature they describe as “branding” by embedding their logo into the top frame of the control panel. This is also complimented by a commercial for virtualization software that links back to Parallels.com.
Parallels, it seems, has no shame when it comes to plugging its products in the software they sell/lease you.
The Parallels forums are flooded with bugs reports and unanswered pleas for help from customers who run into an ever-increasing number of problems whenever they upgrade their servers.
Some of these experiences are also shared among users who have bought into Parallels desktop virtualization software for the Mac and Windows.
I’ve finally given up on Plesk after several years of using the product on my servers. I will never buy or lease another Parallels product for as long as I live. I’ve started looking at cPanel again, but more likely I will pay someone else to manage the hosting for me - on a more dependable and better supported Windows Server platform.
Congratulations Parallels!
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Read more from the original source:
Parallels: The worst software company I’ve ever known
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