Over the years we’ve listened to customer feedback, and we have always strived to respond quickly and passionately, but we do appreciate we have not always responded as quickly as we could, especially in respect to one particular issue ….
One complaint we have heard time and time again has been how difficult the control panel is to use, and to be fair we have agreed … and we have tried to make changes and improvements over time.
Recently we rolled out Plesk 11 along with the latest Parallels Business Automation upgrades and received generally favourable feedback, however we still felt we could do better and that it was still too complicated to do even the most simple of things (register a domain, setup mail forwarding, etc).
Well we have listened, and we have decided to make a fundamental change in the way our control panel operates. This is going to have an element of pain as we try to migrate customers away from the old cumbersome Parallels interface and across onto the new, sleek and fast Fido control panel. We ask that you bear with us and where appropriate accept that you may need to continue to use the old panel to manage certain subscriptions in the interim. It is our goal however to move everyone onto the new platform just as soon as we can, but we want to get the new control panel out there now.
Work is nearly completed and we have some screen shots showing the simpler user interface. With the new solution we will be offering both Plesk and also cPanel. We’ve listened here too as the vast majority of customers when asked said they preferred cPanel and asked why we ever stopped offering it as an option. Well cPanel is back for good! (cPanel is not yet fully IPv6 aware so we will continue to offer Plesk until at least cPanel can support IPv6 completely too).
cPanel has been the leading control panel software for over 10 years. We made a business decision back in 2007 to switch to Plesk as it had more advanced features and a better road map. Plesk has served us well for years and we have been proud to say we were a 100% Parallels / Plesk house, however we appreciate that some customers found the interface confusing and cumbersome. The constant changes and “improvements” from 7.5 to 8, through to v11 have made things harder to understand too, whilst cPanel’s interface has remained largely untouched and is still well loved by millions. There are changes and improvements coming to cPanel too however these “skins” are user selectable so if you prefer to stay with the older design you can. 
We hope that the upcoming changes and “relaunch” of FidoNet will be to the liking of both our loyal existing customers, and to all those new customers who have been put off from using the Parallels interfaces in the past. We value your feedback and would ask that you let us know your preferences and as always if you have any ideas for improvements, any gripes or generally just fancy a chat!
We will be staging the rollout of the new control panel and billing system over the next 2-3 months, and will hopefully have everyone migrated by Q2 2013. Until then, if you want your subscriptions to be moved early just talk to our support department and they will do a manual migration of your services upon request. If you want to stay on PBA / Plesk then also please do let us know!
In the mean time, if you want to experience the new control panel today, hop on over to www.fidonet.com and request a password as your details have already been migrated and are awaiting a fresh / secure password to be created.
