I figured since my advertising revenue is dropping it'd be good to cut costs whereever I can so when it was pointed out that 1/3rd of my hosting costs went on cpanel I figuered there was something to save there, and considered the possiblity of moving to a virtualmin setup.

Firstly, has anyone here used both pieces of software? How do they compare in terms of features and usability? I've used direct admin in the past and it was nowhere near as good as cpanel, but i feel its only worth paying for something if there is a noticeable difference between it and the open source alternatives (eg vbulletin is >>>> phpbb)

Secondly, has anyone tried to migrate between the two? Cpanel is known for its iron tight grip on servers and its own personal way of doing things, is it going to be hard to remove it without formatting the drive?

Thirdly, if anyone has any other suggestions for a control panel that might be a cheaper or free replacement i'd be happy to hear them.

Unfortunately, it would be better to nuke the drive and then reinstall the OS, then install virtualmin, it will grab webmin for you.

Your getting a better all around system, unfortunately, webmin doesn't have all the "easy" tools for you to use, ie, such as easyapache etc, you will have to learn to compile from source using webmin.

Feature wise, the "free GPL" version of virtualmin don't compare to "everything" that cpanel has, but holds its own just fine for anything you'll need to do to run a website.