Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Enkompass 11.30 unfit for ASP.NET hosting

After facing various issues with Enkompass, I’m giving up on it and moving to Plesk. I shall document the issues to remind myself not to go back to Enkompass until the issues are resolved. Hopefully, this also serves as a guide to those evaluating whether Enkompass caters to their needs.

  1. Enkompass supports only one ASP.NET application. There is no way to configure virtual directories or new ASP.NET application in subdirectories. This is a blocker if you wish to have a different application, say landing page on www.example.com, and a separate blog application on www.example.com/blog.
  2. The workaround for the one ASP.NET application limitation is to use subdomains. Each subdomain supports one ASP.NET application. So you can have a landing page on www.example.com and your blog on blog.example.com.
  3. However, I need to secure all communications, so I had to install an SSL certificate to enable HTTPS. SSL works on a per IP basis. There are two types of SSL – one which secures one domain only, and another called a wildcard certificate that secures multiple domains. Enkompass supports only one dedicated IP per account, so getting many one domain certificates is not an option.
  4. As for getting a wildcard certificate, Enkompass does not allow me to change the host field of the CSR to *.example.com, so wildcard certificate can’t be used as well. Moreover, there are reports that even if you are successful in generating a wildcard CSR using WHM, when accessing the HTTPS subdomain, web pages from the main domain get served out instead.

Enough of Enkompass. Simple interface, crippled internals.