Compare RVSkin Hosting

Stand out from the large crowd of hosts that offer cPanel by customizing your control panel interface with RVSkin. RVskin is a theming and templating utility that allows hosting companies and resellers to customize the look and feel of their cPanel Control Panel.

Cpanel is an extremely popular web hosting control panel solution. In fact, it’s the most popular. More web hosting customers use cPanel to interact with their server than any other control panel.

CPanel is especially popular in the low-cost shared hosting market, where it absolutely dominates the competition.

Unfortunately, this makes it difficult for a hosting reseller or hosting company to stand out in the market.

cPanel is so popular because it is very good and fairly inexpensive. It is easy for the hosting company to install and run, and it makes it easy for web hosting customers to do what they need to get done.

The problem, though, is that virtually every cPanel control panel looks exactly the same.

The Control Panel is the Face of your web hosting

You sell speed, or customer service, or one-click-installation. You optimize your servers and hardware, you train your phone support staff, you do everything you can do to technically set yourself apart from the competition.

But your customer doesn’t really notice any of that.

For most customers, the only performance-related issue they notice is if their site goes down too much. As long as you meet some minimum level of uptime and are decently priced, the vast majority of website owners and web hosting customer don’t know or care about any of the fancy performance enhancements that you play up in your advertising. (This is because the vast majority of them are non-tech people. They are running personal blogs or small business websites.)

What _do_these people notice? They notice the UI (user interface).

For the average non-technical user, the UI of the control panel IS their web hosting company. They can’t see your (virtual) machines. They can see their control panel.

Why that’s a problem

If you have cPanel and that other hosting company has cPanel, what’s the difference? If you charge $4 more per month, why should I pay it?

The cPanel control panel (in its default state) isn’t branded to fit into your hosting company’s brand. At all. This is part of the reason that shared web hosting has become such a commodity: there’s no hosting-specific brand experience in the day-to-day interaction with the UI.

This makes it very easy for your customers to assume that your web hosting service is just exactly like everyone else’s web hosting service. This does not benefit you at all.

How to solve this problem

One way to differentiate your shared hosting service might be to use a different control panel solution, like Plesk or Webmin.

This would make it different than your competitors who use cPanel, but then you are just playing the same game at a different table. And besides that, it might not even be a option. If you’re a reseller, you might have to use cPanel. Also, cPanel is really good, that’s why it’s so popular in the first place.

So, what to do?

RVSkin

RVskin is a theming engine for cPanel. It lets you create custom themes and style for cPanel, extending your brand into the UI itself and marking your hosting experience as distinct.

RVSkin Key Features

Internationalization and Localization

RVSkin supports string replacement and custom messaging through the entire cPanel environment, and is already translated into 24 languages.

Admin Login in Account Interface : Login to a user’s account, but with all the features enabled as if logging in as an admin.

Account Feature Manager

Enable and Disable individual cPanel features, and create Feature Packages (which can be sold as specific hosting plans).

Webmail Feature Manager

Features associated with Webmail can be configured for each email address, and sets of enabled features can be packaged into webmail user types.

Upsale manager

Display disabled features to the user, so they can see what they are missing out on by not upgrading their hosting package.

Branding

Custom colors, fonts, and other style elements can be implemented in the entire UI. Branding elements such as logos can be added to headers, footers, and sidebars.

Disable Full Backup Link

This feature is a little evil, but it deserves a mention. You can disable cPanel’s built-in full backup feature. Web hosting customers can still take backups of their websites and databases, but this has to be done manually or through another application. This can make it a little harder for your customers to leave you for another hosting company.

RVSkin Web Hosting

If you are a hosting company or web hosting reseller that uses the cPanel Control Panel, you can install RVSkin and start using it.