cPanel vs. F5 Distributed Cloud WAF (Web Application Firewall) vs. Plesk

I personally use it for any website hosting I do for me and others. There are a few others but I have stuck with the old tried and true and it always works for me and I know how to get around it so it has become a breeze for me. For those who are extremely new to websites and hosting or to those with very little technical know how cPanel could be very overwhelming and they might want to do like a managed WordPress hosting where they don't really have to see or deal with cPanel. I also probably wouldn't use it for straight email hosting. If you have thousands of cPanel accounts it may get very expensive and that could be a factor.

Incentivized

It is doing its job effectively, and its scalability is superb. So, if you have a mixed environment with cloud and on-premise systems to protect this product, provide a solution to the challenge. However, its management is more suited to DevOps teams rather than to the ones responsible for on-premise systems, making the management a bit more complex.

Incentivized

Plesk is well-suited for website creators who have been developing websites on a regular basis. If one is new to website development, Plesk could be a bit confusing and difficult to navigate. However, if one has experience on another type of platform, like CP (Control Panel) which is used by other web hosts out there, then it will be much easier to navigate the Plesk panel. Keep in mind there is definitely a learning curve, as Plesk really is quite different. Overall, new users will learn to love the ability to have more control over their websites.

Incentivized

• The dashboard is very intuitive. Even beginners can figure out how to do things without very much help.
• The online community is very helpful and the online documentation makes administering any tasks a lot easier.
• User creation and administration for FTP access is also very simple.

• Layer seven attacks are becoming far more common. Traditionally it was always layered three, layer four, where you get an additional firewall, but with the application layer attacks become more frequent, more popular, et cetera. So having the web application firewall protecting us, and then with the recent Log4j, that's the most recent use case when it gave us that instant level of protection whilst we remediated the Log4j that we had that and the F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was protecting us.
• I have a great relationship with the account manager, my account manager, and I think he drives the best price possible, um, for me, and I'm happy with that price.
• F5 Distributed Cloud WAF is always innovating and evolving.
• We run a very competitive proof value where we run numerous competitors against each other, and then we evaluate from that and then make the selection, and F5 Distributed Cloud WAF was the winner.

Incentivized

• Automatically update the CMS, plugins, and templates of all your websites, depending on your CMS, all at the same time, with just a few strokes of your keyboard.
• Enables one to set up a schedule to back up your websites, automatically, and easily download/save the backup files off-site, for safety.
• Makes it easy for users to use a backup file to reinstall a website, with just a few strokes of the keyboard. Excellent service!

Incentivized

• The costs can be a limiting factor for some businesses if you are not using a web hosting company that uses it. I have been experimenting with Cloud hosting, which can be very daunting for the novice. There is an option to install it on the cloud but it is expensive.

Incentivized

• Lack of warnings, currently the console does not provide a warning when deleting key-value entry.
• The web GUI could use some tweaking, currently no undo option when removing exclusion rules.
• Configuration complexity, currently menus and options are hidden, making it hard to configure vs on prem.

• Interface Improvement: It is a bit hard to find specific functions
• Additional integration with third party services would be great
• categorization of services to make management easier

Incentivized

We gave it an 8 because it protects our web apps well and is reliable. The WAF is flexible and meets most of our needs. It could improve in user interface and make integrations easier, but overall, it’s a solid and effective security tool for us.

Incentivized

Although it can be a little bit bloated with a lot of options and configurations, it's very straightforward to use and maintain. So it's a great option even if you don't have large experience in hosting configuration. The WHM tool is more suited to heavy users since it requires more expertise, so it has a steep learning curve to better understand how to use it.

Incentivized

I believe is a solution that was designed from the start to be simple and easy to use. Coming from Imperva, it simply eased the burden and complexity of managing and securing our apps on different environments (cloud and on-prem). It easy to scale and very quick to deploy (as a cloud waf should be), provide us with DevOps integrations, visibility and automatic insights from multiple events that guarantee peace of mind for us analysts and opp managers.

Incentivized

Seems no issue

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Unnoticed slowness

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The support comes in the form of an extensive library of how to articles and community input. For most situations this will give you plenty of information and resources to trouble shoot. Live support really then would need to default to the hosting provider who provides the cPanel for your use.

Incentivized

I never contacted support for this product.

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Online training saves me lots of time

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Just make sure you origin servers have F5 IPs allowed.

Incentivized

The direct server management tool access provided by cPanel hosting accounts is far superior to any shared or "standard" web site hosting packaged offered by any of the numerous web host providers I have used and or evaluated over the 20+ years of my experience working in the internet industry.

Incentivized

The other one that I've used in the past, they're very similar and I haven't used it recently, so I can't do a side-by-side comparison today. But I can say that F5 does everything we want it to do consistent with what this other product did do and it's got enhanced features and of course we have a long history with F5 as a product set in general.

Incentivized

Plesk has a much more intuitive platform that allows for customization and scalability within an organization. It has the advantage when it comes to the ability to adapt to the current state of the company and grow with it organically. There are a few limitations that would make me choose a competitor, and there is good value for the price.

Incentivized

Dont see any issue so far

Incentivized

• cPanel makes back end server administration easy. This saves time and overall effort.
• cPanel is readily available with most hosting packages. It integrates with both Apache and Nginx.
• cPanel allows you to perform some of the same functions as WHM, but with an easier interface.

Incentivized

• The biggest gain for us was speed. Before F5 Distributed Cloud WAF, onboarding a new app to our WAF stack meant manual rule tuning, traffic sampling and regression testing. Right now, we spin up a service, tag it with the right policy and its ready (production ready) within hours

Incentivized

• We're spending less on server costs by having Plesk manage multiple clients on one server.
• We're spending less on support costs as Plesk is doing all the heavy lifting for us.

Incentivized