Ask HN: Is there still an opportunity for an affordable CPanel alternative?

I have domains registered back to 2008 (and older ones I've let expire) and newer ones that are in their first year, and as far as I can tell *NONE* of them generate any kind of spam (or it's so infrequent that I literally miss it completely).

This only ever happened with Hostinger. And for the first couple of years, every email and phone call would explicitly reference one of the two domains I registered.

So I can recommend their hosting I guess, never had any problems with it, but I would never, ever register a domain with them again.

Also, the problem with this is that it's going to be a massive hassle when you want to move to another hosting provider.

Could you share what it was in the four you looked at that didn't meet your expectations? What were you looking for specifically?

7 to 10 months seems doable for an MVP, but we'll see. I'm looking to have something that a CPanel/Plesk client would be comfortable using.

It appears it would be unwise to just build a direct competitor to CPanel, Plesk, etc. Not only would that be short-sighted (given the competitiveness you've highlighted), it would be unnecessary (because control panels don't appear to be required tooling for the people buying cloud infrastructure).

According to Gartner, Cloud IaaS revenue was $90B in 2021, but the combined revenues of CPanel and Plesk in the same year couldn't break $100M (according to data from Datanyze and ZoomInfo). This is a clear signal that those who are buying cloud infrastructure from Amazon, Microsoft, et al. don't have an essential need for these tools. And even at the smaller providers like DigitalOcean, Linode, etc. you'd have to be unreasonable to pay $20 per month for a license to manage a $5 per month droplet; the panel won't even install on a $10 droplet.

It's kind of funny, because the things that can be done on that single droplet/server are incredible. What can't you build? Unfortunately, control panels as they are setup (and have been setup for ages) can't cater to aspirations. People need user-friendly tools they can use to build things on servers; by themselves and/or with others.

You're right about the innovator's dilemma though. Your customers aren't going to tell you what could be, only how 'what currently is' could be a little different. It's going to take some kind of leap, but the companies seemingly thriving in this space may have become too comfortable collecting license fees to make it. Maybe they've seen it (or something like it), but the refactoring cost and mental paradigm shift constitutes too much inertia to overcome their comfort zone without a looming existential calamity staring at them in the face.

'Going to take a crack at it. I have a few ideas I think could work, but I'll never know unless I test them out. There'll be a server management aspect to it, but that's not going to be the main. And I don't think 10 months is too optimistic for an MVP. Again, it's not going to be a CPanel clone; not that many folks really need that.

Is it ok to check in with you later in the process and perhaps bounce a few ideas off?