blog posts

Direct Admin

What is Direct Admin? What are its features and benefits?

When it comes to control panels, there are many letters we are familiar with or may have worked with. Plesk, C Panel, Direct Admin, Net Panel, Website Panel and other tools that can be used for hosting.

Each of these panels offers features that many of them have in common, but there are differences.

If you are also looking for a good hosting control panel, we recommend that you do not miss this article. In this article, our goal is to introduce a practical and excellent tool for hosting management. This Control Panel is software that you will enjoy working with.

What is Direct Admin?

Direct Admin is a control panel software. This software helps you to easily manage your site and host using a graphical user interface.

This control panel and C Panel are both good choices for Linux sites; However, each has a number of advantages and disadvantages that you should be aware of before choosing.

What are the benefits of Direct Admin?

This Control Panel has 4 significant advantages that make it a serious competitor to C Panel and Plesk.

1- Cost-effectiveness

  • It costs less than other host control panels. Of course, this price has not affected its performance less. Despite the low price, It has high security and excellent default features.

2- Optimal speed

  • It is for to be fast and compact. Due to this small size, a large amount of hosts is not occupied and you will have more control over the available resources.

3- Attractive and simple user interface

  • The user panel is divided into 6 sections:

Account management, email management, settings, information display, additional settings and support.

With this simple menu, you can easily access the most used sections.

What are the disadvantages of Direct Admin?

In addition to all the benefits of it, it also has a few minor issues. Let’s have a look at these problems.

1- Incompatibility with Windows hosting

  • It is a great choice for managing Linux hosts; But it is not compatible with Windows hosting. If you are using Windows hosting, you can work with the Plesk control panel.

2- No third-party plugins

  • There are several plugins for C-panel and Plesk. By installing these plugins on the panel (as needed), its capabilities will be upgraded. However, Direct Admin Control Panel does not have a special plugin and you have to pay for its development to add the desired feature to the control panel.

3- User guidance

  • The good thing about C Panel is that it is used by a large number of active users around the world; That’s why there is a large community where anyone can provide training, ask questions, and get answers very quickly.

Unfortunately, Direct Admin users are not much of a C-Panel; This means that you may need to spend more time finding the answers to your questions.

Of course, this should not worry you too much; You can get support from a hosting company if you have a problem.

Now that you know the advantages and disadvantages of Direct Admin, let’s take a look at its features and see if it works for us.

Introduction of different sections of Direct Admin

A little higher, we mentioned the features of Direct Admin very briefly. Now we want to go into a little more detail and examine each section.

Direct Admin is divided into the following three general sections:

  • Account Manager: This part of the panel deals with domain settings, site statistics, DNS management, FTP management, backup, database management, and more.
  • E-mail Management: Using this section, you can monitor email accounts.

View and manage the list of emails and respond to them automatically through this section.

In addition, the emails you create in Direct Admin can be accessed and used both through the Direct Admin user interface and you can use other email software (such as OutLook) to manage them.

Direct Admin also provides protection against spam and other content filters.

  • Advanced Features: This section is for making advanced settings in Direct Admin. Users can view and manage server information from this section.

For example, users can install SSL certificates and Perl modules from this section.

PHPinfo management, Crinjob, MIME type permissions, apache handles Redirect site and Domain Pointer are also done from this section.

  • System Info & Files: Displaying system modules and information, managing files, displaying system error lists, changes to language and site views, and bandwidth can all be done through this menu.
  • Extra Features: Extra Features is accessible to webmail using Squirrelmail and roundcube software and access to direct admin databases.
  • Support & Help: The Help & Support section is responsible for Support & Help.

Important features of Direct Admin for you

To see if Direct Admin is right for you, let’s take a step forward and look at the important and useful features of Direct Admin.

Direct Admin features are into three levels: representatives, administrators and users.

Representatives level facilities

  • Account management (including creating, modifying and deleting accounts)
  • Create a package for users
  • View total space usage statistics for each user individually
  • Sort statistics based on each user account
  • Messaging system for users (including sending messages to all users through the ticket support system)
  • Customizable skins and templates for agents
  • Assign IP address and manage IPs
  • Personalization of NSs (Name Servers)

Manager level facilities

  • Create and control accounts for multiple administrators and users + determine the necessary permissions for them
  • Customize different packages such as mailing lists and sending them
  • DNS management includes creating, editing, and deleting records for each DNS record stored on the system
  • Manage IP addresses and assign IPs
  • Management and detailed statistics of system services

User level features

  • Manage various sections such as emails, TP FTP, DNS, subdomains, databases, error pages, ‌ Cronjobs
  • Backup section settings
  • View user statistics
  • Select PHP version
  • Certificate installation
  • Simple file manager environment

Conclusion

In this article, from the series of educational materials of Iran Server, we tried to tell you the necessary information about knowing and using Direct Admin. Now you can decide to use Direct Admin Control Panel or go to other control panels.