Important license changes
Unifying DirectAdmin - Pro Pack features in all licenses
The popularity of retail Pro Pack licensing has surged over the past few years while volume growth of legacy licensing (licenses without Pro Pack) has dropped to record lows.
DirectAdmin will adapt to this marketplace change by unifying our codebase and cleaning up the confusing array of licenses that currently exist.
Sales of all legacy licenses (those without Pro Pack) will cease on August 1, 2023.
Our Personal PLUS, Lite, and Standard licenses will remain for sale.
These changes will allow us to improve our most popular product even further:
- More efficient development through a unified codebase with all licenses sharing the same features.
- More efficient documentation that becomes cleaner by assuming all licenses share the same features.
- More efficient 3rd-party development. Plugins, tutorials, modules, etc., can assume the same feature-set for all licenses.
If your account holds exclusively Personal PLUS, and/or Lite, and/or Standard licenses, then this announcement does not affect you.
If your account holds or routinely orders our retail Personal license, and/or internal (datacenter) products, and/or our support extension product, then please see the appropriate sections below.
Retail Personal Licensing
New orders of the retail Personal license will no longer be accepted as of August 1, 2023.
Existing licenses will continue to function after the deadline as long as an active payment subscription is maintained. If a license expires due to cancelled/failed billing, it will be considered permanently forfeited and cannot be reactivated at a later date.
Aside from the announcement in this document, there will be 1-year of notice given on our pricing page, and 1-year notice given in the client portal area. A final 60-day notice will be e-mailed to all accounts holding any active Personal licenses, to provide one final notice to order more, if needed.
Furthermore, Personal licenses will begin showing a legacy codebase flag in the licensing section of the control panel. This will provide additional clarity to the license-holder about why their license doesn't match the features displayed on our website, changelog, documentation, etc.
Datacenter (Internal) Licensing
New orders for datacenter products will no longer be accepted as of August 1, 2023.
This announcement only pertains to the sale of new licenses. Existing licenses will continue to function, at the same price, after the deadline (as long as an active payment subscription is maintained).
Therefore, no action needs to be taken with your existing customers; they may continue to use their bundled DirectAdmin licenses without interruption, until they naturally request cancellation.
After the deadline, any license that expires due to cancelled/failed billing will be considered permanently forfeited.
Aside from the announcement in this document, datacenter accounts will receive a minimum 1-year notice by e-mail; also 1 year of notification in the client portal area.
Furthermore, all datacenter licenses will begin showing a legacy codebase flag in the licensing section of the control panel. This will provide additional clarity to the license-holder about why their license doesn't match the features displayed on our website, changelog, documentation, etc.
We would like to thank our datacenter partners for being an important part of our growth. The year 2023 marks the 20th-anniversary of DirectAdmin and internal (datacenter) pricing, which has held consistent pricing since the year 2003!
Support Extensions
New orders for support extensions will no longer be accepted as of August 1, 2023.
Aside from the announcement in this document, the support extension option in the client portal will also display an announcement.
Existing holders of support extensions may continue to renew their support extension after the deadline, or have their license (legacy license + support extension) converted to a modern license type, at our discretion and without price increase.
Cancelled/failed billing will result in a forfeiture of the ability to further renew the support extension.
Pro Pack features
UPDATE: As of 2023 August, DirectAdmin has switched to a unified codebase where all licenses for sale automatically contain all features. The "Pro Pack" concept is now retired. More information here.
Some of DirectAdmin's more advanced features include:
- Python/Java/Ruby/Perl/NodeJS support with the use of Nginx Unit
- Per-User Redis manager
- Additional features for Nginx (automatic CMS templates, WordPress+FastCGI cache support)
- Ability to throttle resources per-user (CPU/RAM/IO etc.)
- Admin SSL (SSL administration, ability to use cross-user wildcard certs, replace expired certs with Let's Encrypt)
- More advanced Email Track&Trace, Email Summary
- Web Terminal
- GIT manager
- ClamAV scanner for filesystem scans
- WordPress manager
- IMAP sync for Email synchronization
- Automatic email account settings detection for Thunderbird (and other compatible) mail clients
- MariaDB 10.11, 11.4 and 11.8, MySQL 8.4
- DB Monitor
- "File System Information" feature which includes information about disks/partitions of your server
- Automatic "security.txt" (RFC 9116) support
- Support of Ubuntu 24, Debian 13 and RHEL 10 OSs
- "System Packages" feature
- Isolated PHP-FPM mode
And we plan to introduce these, among much more, in the future:
- Advanced backup manager, allowing user-level per-file (and per-database) restores from the backups
- DNS synchronization with external providers such as CloudFlare
How to enable the features
After license upgrade, you just need to restart DirectAdmin to have the Pro Pack features displayed:
systemctl restart directadmin
Then you could go to the admin panel and see if you notice the e-mail tracking feature, which would verify the Pro Pack features are there.
To install nginx unit:
da build set unit yes
da build unit
To install redis:
da build set redis yes
da build redis
To install WordPress manager:
da build wp
To install imapsync tool:
da build imapsync
To install GIT: On Debian/Ubuntu:
apt-get -y install git
On other systems:
yum -y install git
If you run CloudLinux, please execute this additionally:
cagefsctl --addrpm git
cagefsctl --force-update
To install per-user throttling (Not required on a new DA installation -- only on an existing live server), follow this guide.
Feature does not appear in the panel
If any of these features don't appear, make sure that they're enabled in the access level they should be present in. For example, if git doesn't appear in user level, make sure that git is enabled for:
- the user itself. Go to admin level -> Account Manager -> Show All Users -> Click the name of that user -> Modify -> Tick the checkbox for Git -> Save
- the reseller who owns this user. Go to admin level -> Account Manager -> List Resellers -> Click the name of that reseller -> Reseller -> Modify -> Tick the checkbox for Git -> Save
- in rare cases the admin user might not have the feature enabled in its reseller level. Follow the previous bullet point to enable it.