Bye Bye Fantastico – Hello Softaculous!
Posted on June 21st, 2010 in Uncategorized | No Comments »
For more than 6 years, Fantastico has been a big part of our shared web hosting business. While the software has been a great help to our users in installing scripts with a click of the mouse, the software has also been lacking (for a ver
y long time) regular updates to the packages that it installs. Wordpress, one of the most popular installs for many of our clients, has been one of the biggest let downs of Fantastico along with other scripts in that the makers of the softwares make critical updates but Fantastico fails to compile the exploits ina timely manner. For the few month ValueVPS has been installing Softaculous to aid our clients with installations on VPS and Dedicated Servers but we’ve held off on our Shared Hosting servers in the hopes that Fantastico would get their act together. It’s now clear they will not. Bye Bye Fantastico!
So what’s the big deal between the two automated script installation tools? The biggest difference is the constant updates provided by Softaculous for the scripts that they install. The most noticeable difference for any of our clients however will be that instead of choosing 48 different scripts, they now have access to 144 different scripts and that list just keeps growing!
What does it mean to our users who already have scripts installed using Fantastico? Basically those already installed scripts will continue to operate without a problem. There’s no need to remove them when we launch the new software either. Softaculous will import the settings from Fantastico and will help update without any issues. The only thing that will change is that now instead of clicking on the “smiling blue face” for Fantastico, they’ll have a different icon to click.
We’ve been waiting for almost 5 years for Fantastico to release their “coming soon” Version 3.0 software, and as you know, when you say that something is coming soon, then it means SOON, not 5 years! With that in mind, the additional scripts, the ability to install some of our own scripts, the 1 step install, gzip compression, the ability for users to RATE and REVIEW scripts, DEMO scripts and the lower price that we’ll end up paying for better software, the choice really makes itself for us! It’s time to cut our 6 year relationship with Fantastico and work with Softaculous.
A couple of the most popular scripts that are included in Softaculous are; Wordpress, Magento eCommerce, Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, Website Baker, Open Blog, Wordpress MU, Typeo3, phpBB, SMF, Coppermine, Gallery, 4images, MediaWiki, PhpWiki, Noahs Classifies, PHPads, phpScheduleIt, phpList, poMMo, ccMail, LimeSurvey, LittlePoll, dotProject, PHProjekt, SugarCRM, PrestaShop, OpenCart, osCommerce, WHMCS, CubeCart, phpBook, Advanced Guestbook, Crafty Syntax Live Chat, phpSuport, Open Web Manager, iQDesk, Podcast Generator, ClipBucket, Open-Realty, Elgg, CodeIgniter and many many more.
ValueVPS has become a NOC partner with Softaculous which means that we are able to provide the script to our VPS and dedicated server customers too.
We hope everyone enjoys Softaculous and it’s abundance of scripts available.




