H-Sphere Roadmap

H-Sphere 3.1 Beta 2

New Features and Improvements

• Provided possibility to create PayPal payment subscriptions from user control panel
• Improvements in updating boxes from admin CP:
  • added possibility to update physical Windows boxes
  • improved getting the initialization script from CP during the Unix box update
• Added possibility to update VPS Core Templates and get their info from user CP.
• Added skipcachk and skipsachk Qmail parametres
• Added Load Balanced server support (missing in H-Sphere 3.1 Beta 1)

Windows Features and Improvements

• Implemented new model of H-Sphere Winbox installation/update: H-Sphere Windows services are installed/updated from MSI packages.
• Introduced H-Sphere Winbox installation and update from admin CP by Update Boxes Wizard.
• All communication between CP and H-Sphere Windows services is now performed only by SOAP protocol (port 10125). Removed all older ASP scripts for the following resources:
  • MSSQL
  • MSSQL usage loader
  • Urchin 4
  • Miva Empresa 5
  • SSL
• Modified the AWStats resource to work with regular transfer logs for each domain, instead of creating one accumulative log file in a special awstats subdirectory
• Changed the upload feature of the Anonymous FTP resource: when the resource is disabled, the upload subdirectory becomes inaccessible for reading and writing
• Modified ASP.NET to avoid dynamic recompilation caused by machine.config changes
• Removed outdated ASPSecured resource
• Added support for Urchin 5.7
• Implemented new Urchin CGI scheme: now the tool responsible for collecting logs for Urchin server is linked to every virtual host via virtual directory launched in terms of particular anonymous account.

H-Sphere 3.1 Beta 1

Unix Features and Improvements

• Support of Apache 2.2.x, with a possibility to switch between Apache 1.3.x and 2.2.x
• Advanced PHP configuration:
  • Multi-version PHP modes on Unix box with mixed 4 and 5 versions
  • Added possibility to switch between PHP 4 and PHP 5 and choose among libphp, cgi, and fastcgi modes for PHP 4/5 for Unix-hosted domains.
• Added customizable config file templates for Apache 2.2.x and PHP 4/5 for Apache 2.2.x. Apache, PHP and FTP custom config file templates need to be recustomized after the update to H-Sphere 3.1.
• ExtraPacks: packs of preset bundled resources to be offered to end users.
• Simplified plan wizards
• Setting max values for resources directly in Plan Wizard.
• Enhanced domain management: Introduced new Hosting Alias and Mail Service Alias resources as a replacement to the deprecated Domain Alias resource. It makes possible to assign a domain to be either a hosting domain alias to another domain with the "Hosting" resource turned on, or a mail domain alias to a domain with "Mail Service" enabled, or both. Besides, it's possible now to register via domain registrars those domains which are to be used as domain aliases.
• New H-Sphere VPS 2.x branch:
  • VPS Templates made a billable resource managed from CP
• Ruby On Rails support (requires manual installation)
• Implemented possibility to configure FTP over SSL/TLS for shared IPs with shared SSL enabled
• H-Sphere Jail: users are granted SSH access within their home directories, a chrooted shell environment with a set of widely used utilities and file managers:
  • Utilities: a range of commands such as cat, echo, ln, mkdir, ps, vi, grep, awk with dependent libraries.
  • File managers: mc, ytree, vifm
• Updating physical Unix boxes from CP Web interface
• Physical Server Profiles: sets of update rules to be assigned to an individul *nix/Windows physical server or to a group of physical servers.
• Resource Prerequisites:
  • Some resources (like SSL, FrontPage, Throttle, Ruby On Rails, etc.) can be enabled or disabled for selected logical server groups despite their availability on physical boxes. These resources are called resources with prerequisites
  • H-Sphere periodically checks resource prerequisites availablity, showing results in admin CP
  • Enabling/disabling of resources with prerequisites automatically affects end users, without a need of editing respective plans
• Added possibility to stop, start or restart services on a physical server via admin CP
• Sign-up validation
• Extended functionality of suspending and resuming accounts.
• Web access control to particular directories of a domain's DocumentRoot.
• Mail SMS resource: forwarding email to SMS to any number of recipients, without excessive content, with filtering sender addresses and setting the size and number of messages.
• Autoresponder mail resource improvements:
  • On the Admin CP level:
    - autoreply is provided if SENDER originating IP corresponds to a target recipient IP or Subnet only
    - autoresponder is blocked globally if wildcard pattern engine is not enabled for specific mail resource
  • On the User CP level: identifying the list of recipients allowed to get replies on the mail resource level
• Added cron for removing all mail relays on a chosen mail server
• Added validation for virtual mail resoures on mail relay servers. For this, provided the procedure of synchronous creation/removal of pseudo users on a mail relay server for respective mail resources of the main mail server.
• No install/update any longer available for RedHat 7.3, RedHat AS/ES/WS, FreeBSD 4.11 since 3.1 Beta 1. All H-Sphere servers under these operating systems need to be migrated to other supported OS's before the update.
• Possibility to bind custom skill icon sets to a particular plan
• WebShell 4.4.3 with Web 2.0 driven WebShell Protect Wizard.
• New mechanism of SiteStudio user authentication: now SiteStudio is isolated from H-Sphere database, runs from a separate studio user and on a separate Tomcat server.