HC8 What's New

The latest version of HC CONTROL PANEL provides variety of new features and benefits that are bundled together under the banner of HC8. It ensures comprehensive automated services for all its end users and service providers. HC8 introduces a complete new look with more user friendly interface and numerous long-awaited features to assure real success for you in your hosting business.

 

HC8 offers absolute flexibility in terms of integrating CLICK & INSTALL APPS, now you can integrate hundreds of your own click and install applications with the control panel as per your business needs.

Following section of this document briefly states the most recent features of HC8 and the ongoing benefits of each.

 

BlackBerry Enterprise Server is robust software that acts as the centralized link between wireless devices, enterprise applications and wireless networks. It is specifically designed to meet the needs of enterprise and government organizations, it provides a proven, secure, open architecture for globally extending wireless communications and corporate data to mobile users. Therefore HC introduces BLACK BERRY SUPPORT in HC8.

Mobile emailing for service providers have never been as easy as it is now with the BlackBerry support in HC8. This powerful integration allows you to meet new challenges of the new era. It breaks communication barriers and ensures an excellent support for BlackBerry from its provisioning to management. This solution mainly empowers with the followings:

 

  1. Automatic Provisioning of BlackBerry on BES

  2. Automatic Email Sent to Users on BlackBerry Service Activation

  3. BlackBerry Usage Statistics

  4. BlackBerry Activation Removal

  5. Resetting BlackBerry PIN

 

 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers rich sales automation, service management and marketing automation functionality through your browser and within your everyday productivity applications.

 

Keeping in view the drastic need of an absolute management and monitoring of customer relationships, HC8 offers Dynamic CRM support. It is a complete and proficient customer relationship management tool that is fully integrated with the control panel. The solution assists you in keeping absolute track of your customers i.e. from first time contact to purchase and all this in an organized manner. With the support of dynamic CRM, it turns out to be the most flexible and cost effective solution for your hosting business.

 

 

HC8 is enriched with extended MS Exchange 2007 features to provide comprehensive support for the industry’s foremost messaging and collaboration tool. It ensures greater functionality, improved performance, better stability and additional product enhancements. These significant features are:

 

Mailbox Database Management

HC8 provides comprehensive mailbox database management by offering complete control over the addition/edition/deletion of mailboxes and databases.

 

Public Folders Management

HC8 assures complete management for the public folders. It allows you to create/edit/delete the folders as per your needs. Also, you can maintain a separate list of accepted and rejected senders to keep an absolute track of your senders.

 

 

HC8 gives a new and comprehensible look to auto sign up. Now, you can customize your interface as required. You can place your own header & footer in the Auto Signup area. Also, you can select the skin that goes with your choice.

 

 

The enhanced support of CLICK AND INSTALL APPS ++ in HC8 is intended to provide round the clock ease and comfort to its users. Now, you can integrate any third party tool as required within a click and thus facilitates your end users with all these third party applications.

 

With so many new features that exactly satisfy your demands, HC8 also brings multiple mail server support. Now, you can simultaneously assort various mail servers with the control panel as required.

 

You might be using “SmarterMail” as your web server and you want to offer MS Exchange 2007 services as well. With HC8, no big deal! It allows you to add multiple mail servers in the cluster without effecting functionalities of any of these. So, you can easily add “MS Exchange 2007 Server” in the cluster.

 

Supposedly, you are using “IMail” as a mail server in your cluster and on the same time you also want to add “MailEnable” as another mail server. Yes, HC8 allows you to do so without disabling any of these.

 

 

A brand new skin is launched for HC8 named as AMPLELITE. It is specifically designed to assure easy and apparent use of the interface to enhance user experience with HC8. The new look offers new prospects, new designs and new junctures to all its users.

 

 

Now you don’t need to worry about the security issues for your existing database. HC8 resolves all your safety concerns and thus introduces an extensive support for MS-SQL 2008.

 

HC8 brings your way an absolute support for Serv-U7 that assures faster, secure and more reliable file transfer than ever.

 

With so many long-awaited features, HC8 provides another great option to make the interface more robust and versatile. It allows you to add your favorite links on the top so that you don’t need to search for them repeatedly. It gives a tidier look to the control panel as well as saves your searching time.

 

 

HC8 ensures improve capabilities of Awstats in this new version. It shows complete statistics against any website, calculates absolute disk and traffic usage and provides complete statistics to you as required.  

 

Like Windows users, HC8 now also facilitates Linux users to integrate as many web applications as required in the control panel. You are not restricted to limited number of click and install applications rather you can add any kind of your own web applications/scripts with the panel.

 

HC8 offers the longed-for feature as DISK & BANDWIDTH USAGE CALCULATION for Linux users. Now, the panel gives you better control to calculate your disk and HTTP/FTP/Mail traffic usage within few clicks.

 

From the efficiency and security point of view all Development of Hosting Controller 8 is done using the latest dot NET frame work. It has mature debugging tools and thus ensures lesser bugs for the resulting product. It uses most of the industry standard protocols such as XML, SOAP and HTTP and thus facilitates distributed application communications efficient, ensuring all the security measures.

 

HC 7 uses a single centralized database, with reduced redundancy, improved security measures and easy management reducing the chances for bugs in the product.

 

One of the key features HC8 has is Load Balancing. In today’s world we face slow trafficking on our networks. Among other reasons one big reason is over loaded servers. HC8 introduces its load balancing component which is built in, it will automatically balance the traffic load in your cluster.

When there is more than one Shared Hosting server in the Cluster, resellers share the resources on these Shared Hosting servers. HC8 has a built-in mechanism to balance the user load among the servers.

In case of Reseller Hosting, load balancing operates likewise but only among the servers that are dedicated for Reseller Hosting. In other words, servers with Shared Hosting and servers with Reseller Hosting do not overlap but both groups implement load balancing among their respective group.

Currently load balancing in HC8 is based on the number of users (webadmin) i.e. HC8 maintains the number of webadmin nearly at the same level on each server e.g. if server A has 5 webadmins and B has 6, the next webadmin would be created on server B.

There are provisions in the load balancing mechanism to enhance it further i.e. later the load balancing can be based on the amount of bandwidth, memory or cpu usage or some other parameter for future enhancements.

It is important to mention here that a webadmin(end user) can have resources only on one server and the resources (domain resources and user account) for a webadmin cannot be shared on multiple servers (incase of separate servers for Mail, DNS and Database, webadmin can have mail and database on different server than web server).

Only resources of the resellers can be shared across multiple servers. Load balancing is transparent to the resellers and webadmins.

 

HC8 gives its users the freedom to use any operating system (Windows/Linux) on the servers, with just one limitation that the control or Master server must have Windows Servers installed on it. This provides flexibility to manage Windows (IIS) and Linux (Apache) Web Servers simultaneously through a centralized single interface.

 

HC8 introduces the golden principal of standardization for your cluster and reduces many management headaches. You only have to set standards for all the roles (Database server, web server, DNS server, Mail Server) of servers in your cluster once and HC8 will be functioning properly dealing with all issues involved. More interestingly you can also change this standardization for your cluster any time if required; you only have to update your respective server(s) accordingly.

 

Main control of HC8 is now integrated within the panel as Global Settings (Unlike the settings.exe in previous versions). You can easily perform any kind of setting for any of your server in the cluster with just simple clicks. For Host Administrator, HC8 has a new menu named Server Manager in the control panel.

 

The installation procedure is made lot easier. It should be made clear that servers in your cluster are of only two types:

You only have to configure your Database server at the time of installation. Rest of the configurations (setting paths, enabling third party software etc) and standardization can be done after software installation procedures.

 

HC8 comes with improved error handling techniques. It uses XML log generation at the back end which not only helps in error handling but also in error tracking. This way, errors will be tracked and fixed with lesser duration of time.

 

HC8 introduces mature quota checking procedures for not only System resources but also for Customer resources. You can freely add as many customer resources as required in your plans, without worrying about their quota management.

 

Now you can manage any of your servers with just one interface. HC8 relieves the pain of logging different servers separately and performing related management tasks. More over to ensure security, this cluster distribution is not visible to your users (resellers and webadmins).

In HC8, a cluster can be made independent of the NAT i.e. we can have a server of the cluster outside the NAT. Previously in HC6.1, DCOM remote call was limited to the machines within the NAT IP range because of DCOM limitations. In dot NET based remoting service; there is no limitation like this.

Moreover the services like IIS, Stats, and Mail etc now have got more detailed features and more attributes, which can be controlled within control panel.

 

In addition to Phpbb, WordPress and HC forums, two new click & install Apps are included in HC8 which are OS Commerce and bBlog. Three new applications will be added before complete version is released which are going to be: Snitz Forums, ZenCart and PHPMyAdmin

 

HC gives you the freedom of selecting installation option best suited for you in advance. This option is purely provided to save your valuable time and money. HC8 comes with two different options of installations, one with MSDE bundled with HC8 installer and one without the MSDE. In case you do not want to go for the MSDE option, you can select the installer without the MSDE version and save your time by downloading that extra chunk you do not even need.

 

HC8 is everything you need to start and setup your hosting business. With its effortless installation procedures it helps you get going just like that. You face no botheration in case you need to repair or uninstall the software even that is just a few clicks game.

  1. The installation setup provides you with the following options:

  1. To install HC8, you need to run the setup and select the Install option.

  2. You can remove HC8 by running the setup and selecting the Remove options or you can go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select the Remove/Change option for HC8.

Note: (Both procedures work the same).

  1. If HC8, installed with MSDE, is removed (uninstalled), MSDE will not be removed. The user will have to remove it manually.

  2. You can also Repair/Remove software without any mess, by simply running the setup and selecting the repair option.

 

Along with the competent features and efficient functionality, HC8 skys in with a cooler and friendlier UI. With its popular panel XP theme it now introduces perfectly structured Cool Tab skin and convenient Cool Tree skin, both in groovy and dandy colors.