I would like to make a few miscellaneous suggestions.
1. I have always had difficulty navigating Drupal-based web sites. I hope you can make the site easier to use as problems are ironed out after the upgrade to Drupal 7.
2. Your prices were previously too high. They'e much more reasonable now, so I decided to buy a modest license and try out Virtualmin Pro, with the intention of buying more after I had tested Virtualmin for a while. But I don't think your shopping cart is working. I tried to make a purchase and ran into problems. I won't provide details of this as I'm sure you all will be testing this and fixing problems, due to the Drupal upgrade. But I suggest fixing the shopping cart first before you fix other things.
3. Please accept Paypal and/or Google Wallet. There have been entirely too many hacks of credit cards and associated information in the last year. With Paypal or Google Wallet, I choose whom to pay and when. I like that choice. With credit card numbers, the party wanting payment makes the choice, and my only option is to painfully keep track of my credit card purchases and resort to undoing unauthorized payments after-the-fact. Every new website where I enter credit card information is one more place for me to worry about for the next couple of years.
4. I am currently using DirectAdmin for web hosting, and I'm suggesting that you use the Directadmin website as a model for at least one of your web pages. If you go to http://www.directadmin.com/ you will note that on that one web page, you can immediately find links to all sorts of useful things: online demo, features, forums, version history, prices, order link, user documentation, admin documentation, and a few other things. The Virtualmin website was such a mess in the past, it was impossible to find most things. After the Drupal upgrade it looks nicer, but things are almost as hard to find.
5. Please implement an online demo feature. DirectAdmin lets anybody who is using it for web hosting enable to demo on their own website, so their potential customers can try it out online. Virtualmin should also have this demo feature. It's not just for people who might buy a license from you. It's also for people using Virtualmin for web hosting. We want our potential customers to see an online demo of our services. Right now we have no simple way of doing this.
6. Please add a search box to your website. I don't see any right now, at least not on most of the pages.
7. I tested Cloudmin GPL recently for KVM hosting on CentOS 7. I would have liked to test the pro version, but you don't provide any trial licenses. The only option is to purchase now and cancel later, which for very good reasons I do not do. I followed instructions to install on CentOS 7. The script failed because it could not find a bridge. I created a bridge (through guesswork), and ran the script, and the resulting installation did not seem to work because it could not find the bridge. This is an ironic situation. The instructions say to install CentOS 7 and do nothing else manually but simply run your scripts, and that's what I did. If a bridge is needed, the scripts should create one. If I need to manually create a bridge, the instructions should ask me to do so. But the instructions say to do nothing manually, let the scripts do it all. This is contradictory, isn't it? I can do things manually, or I can follow your instructions to let the script do all the work, but I can't do both. i would suggest modifying the instructions to include directions for creating a bridge first, and then running the script.
8. I hope the tone of this posting doesn't sound negative. Sometimes I write something neutral and the reader sees it as flaming. This is not intended to be any sort of flame. These are just suggestions. My apologies if anything I wrote above comes across as unnecessarily critical.
Joe
Howdy,
Thanks for all your comments, I'll respond in more detail later!
However, we hadn't heard reports of problems purchasing licenses, and I believe we're receiving other orders. I will go verify that though :-)
Can you offer more details on the exact problem you ran into?
Thanks!
-Eric
The problem that I ran into seems to be now fixed. When I went through the buying procedure, I saw a checked radio button saying "Credit card", but there was no place to enter any credit card information. Now, the same page has a place to enter card number, expiration date, etc.
So now I'll await a buying procedure that does not require me to disclose bank or credit card information (e.g., Paypal, Google Wallet).
Search box is on the Suport page --- or just go to virtualmin.com/search
Thank-you for the pointer to how to search. I may forget, and if I do, I'll be sure to come back to this forum and ask again. :-)
Let me respectfully suggest to the Virtualmin developers that they use their own software as a guide. When using Webmin or Virtualmin GPL, we see on the left a fairly complete menu of choices, along with a search box. The menu will generally lead us to where we want to go, but if we are lost, the search box is always there -- no need to post to a forum to ask where to find the search box.
We actually wanted to add the search box to each page. There was a fancy one that was available as a drop-down from the top-right of the site. Just before launch, we discovered that in some browsers it was causing some really crazy problems. So we had to disable that.
What I'm going to do in the meantime is enable that at the bottom of the site, which is universally supported by all the browsers, and a bit better than having to browse to another page to search. Our ultimate goal is to re-enable the cool search box at the top of the page though :-)
-Eric
Thanks for your response, our postings crossed. I still think you should base your website on the Virtualmin GPL or Webmin menu schemes, which are relatively efficient and complete.
Okay, there is now a search link at the bottom of the page.
There will be better search functionality in the future, but hopefully that's a start!
-Eric