A screenshot of Enkompass
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – Web hosting control panel cPanel (www.cpanel.com) announced on Wednesday that it will begin offering Enkompass free of charge.
Enkompass is a Windows web hosting control panel that is designed to be used in a distributed server environment. It supports MailEnable or SmarterMail and creates databases and user accounts for MySQL and Microsoft SQL server. Prior to this announcement, Enkompass was offered as a subscription based software model.
cPanel vice president of product development Ben Thomas told the audience at cPanel Conference that the product is capable of enterprise-level hosting but sales and distribution have not met expectations.
“All options for moving this product mainstream were considered, but ultimately the decision was made to move Enkompass to a no-cost control panel,” Thomas said.
Last year cPanel’s John Lyle Koston talked about how to make money with Enkompass at the cPanel Conference.
Enkompass features unlimited reselling, robust APIs, familiar interfaces and multi-server technology. According to the press release, after a final release in Q4 2011, major feature development will slow but its teams will fix bugs and hot patches.
cPanel says that as part of the efforts in making Enkompass free of charge, it will free internal resources, teams and increase development hours on other projects.
According to the press release, when Enkompass development began in 2005, there was a high demand for multi-server product, however, over the past two years the industry has moved to consolidate cloud and virtualization.
The first beta release happened in May 2009 with 66 companies. Enkompass 1.0 was released at the beginning of July 2010.
cPanel says Linux dominates the shared hosting market and shared hosting with Windows has not approached expectations.
The company says it may reintroduce Enkompass as a commercially-supported product. In the next few months, cPanel says it will release two final commercially-supported releases of Enkompass.
cPanel says that current customers who have purchased Enkompass licenses will move to the free version and will receive free technical support for a given period of 12-18 months, or until their licenses expire.
Enkompass will be moved to its own website, www.enkompass.com, and maintain its own branding.
About Nicole Henderson
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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