I just upgraded a test box from 9.5.3 to 10.2.0 and I got to say I am quite horrified by what I have found, and the absolute lack of all the configuration parameters and pages, as well as the changes to the account creation process.
With the subject of templates, branding, customization, hiding buttons/sections, advertisements all over the place (even though they are all turned off) and the constant warnings that making a change to the default service plan is against a server policy - and gives you no where to view or change this policy, and the many more confusing changes and port changes (updater now runs on a different port), the biggest problem is that the API doesn't work the same anymore.
Previously we used to create an account, and all that was required was the basics:
username, password, phone, email, country and a user template ("template-name" xml node) to create the account, and set the account defaults. This template is what sets the basic and global settings for each, and sets a base disk and bw limit of Xgb - knowing that we will change it immediately.
So know when we use the same exact API call that our system was already using, it seems to work just fine, however the customer can not login.
"Error: Access denied. There are no subscriptions available for this account."
Not having your API be backwards compatible or at least throw an error is horrible.
On top of that, in order to create a subscription they have to have provided you with a domain name.
WTF?
Why would you give such a hurdle to a sign up process?
yes I know in order to have web hosting work you need a domain name, but in our point of view we just want to take their money and set them up with an account - we don't care if they never setup a domain name or not.
Now we are forcing them to have this domain name already before they can buy web hosting - instead of potentially buying hosting and then getting a domain name later. This is a poor user experience.
Now we try and "set account limits" for that customer based on the plan they purchased - using the client set methods to set disk space and bandwidth, etc - it gives back an "OK" - but never changes in the control panel - even after half hour and logging out and back in several times.
Not to mention one thing that is very annoying aside from the loads of spam advertising in the application vault and not being able to find anythign anymore is that when a new domain gets created, it is created like a full blown domain in /var/www/vhosts - however when you go to that disk path there is never an httpdocs folder and there is no indication where the web files actually are.
This means that our support staff actually has to login into the control panel in order to find out where the files are, and then relay that to the admin staff who do the support escalations.
Plesk could have made this so much easier on everyone...
As it stands there is no way we could use this product in our production environment and so we have to start looking at Cpanel instead as we cant sit still in our control panel offering too long or we become obsolete.
Its just going to be a pain migrating dozens (almost 100) of servers to another provider, which makes me even more mad lol !
Now I am trying to figure out how to downgrade a test machine back to 9.5
