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Open Source web hosting control panel that offer close to if not equal to Cpanel/Plesk?
TheZealous
Member
Hi all,
Just want to get some feedback here. Which control panel do you guys use for your "shared web hosting" (not VPS control panel). Day to day basic stuffs I see Cpanel and Plesk offer a lot of quick and easy click click next next to add a new domain, edit DNS, create new databases etc... I wonder which control panel you are using that is Open Source ? I did a quick research and found out Webmin, Zpanel , EHCP, ispCP, VHCS, Virtualmin, DirectAdmin, InterWorx, Vesta CP, and many more.
Let me know which open source control panel works best for you 
. I am currently hosting around 50 sites for friends and family for free and I use Cpanel. Tired of paying $14/mo for the license so therefore I am looking for a different solution that is free here. I understand with a Centos VPS I can setup Apache Virtual Hosts... but the list of websites just keep growing and it is out of control, take too much time to maintenance. 
Thanks,
TZ
Comments
VestaCP works very well, but I've never used it for clients or anyone other than some small sites of mine so I couldn't say anything about client functionality.
+1 for vestacp and also cwp.
CentOSWebPanel
VirtualMin. Mature and proven.
https://virtualmin.com/
Went with it after years and years with cPanel and (after a short orientation period) never looked back.
VestaCP
I went from Plesk to Virtualmin several years ago, and have never looked back. It's not as "nice" looking as Plesk, but it do the job.
vim. You can fuck things up with it just as well as you can with CPanel's defaults.
Webmin, with a few Virtualmin modules. Even better than ANY commercial panel that I've ever seen
Virtualmin cost $6/mo/server for professional version? I don't see they have free basic version?
https://virtualmin.com/catalog
There's also a GPL version.
I'd also agree that VestaCP is the way to go, but it's nothing compared to CPanel or Plesk. You should explain to the people you're hosting that the service costs money, out of your own pocket. I'm pretty sure they'd be happy to pay then.
Tip: Forget EHCP and zPanel
They're both security nightmares. Both have exploits against their name, both are terrible.
Want a "control panel"? Use nano.
+1 for VestaCP. It even has native integration with Lets Encrypt. or you could also go with sentora (if I remember the name correctly)
VestaCP is fantastic.
That being said, as you're doing all this for free, remember that your time is valuable as well. If things are working out fine for the time being, I'd hesitate to change much on the basis of having to both migrate things over (it'll take a while) and dealing with your family and friends comments/problems with the new system (inevitable).
If you're looking to cut costs down a bit, have you considered moving the sites over to a reseller account? BuyShared is cheap (starts at $2/month for their reseller plans), uses cPanel and their servers are fast. You also won't have to deal with the maintenance, and you'll have someone to 'blame' if something goes wrong.
webmin/virtualmin ftw
Thanks everyone for the input !
@rajprakash: not a bad idea. Do you know Buyshared is a stable host? How many years have they been around? $2/mo is too cheap to be true. I would rather pay a little more to earn the peace of mind.
They have been around a long time now. Since I have been coming here in and I signed up in 2011. You have nothing to worry about with @Francisco and buyshared. They are one of the most stable hosts around here.
@TheZealous, I think closest thing is : KloxoMR
+1 for vestacp, another great alternatives are froxlor and ispconfig.
If you don't care about frienly ui, ajenti is(was? not using for over a year) the most feature rich of them all.
If you want just basic stuff then VestaCP should be fine. However if you want to have more functionalities then do with Webmin+Virtualmin.
vote for kloxomr too, and webuzo
but how if comparing to whm?
More stable than the rest, as for kloxo family control panel, I don't even recommend to waste your breath on it as security issues.
ispConfig for clients. They are happy with it
vestacp will get you : php selection tools/php-fpm, mariadb, nginx-apache, etc
just set your goal first, then control panel will follow.
@rajprakash: Are you still sure about their stability?
Buyshared just had a huge outage that probably lost ton of data for their customers.
A single node, not a global issue. Every shared host out there is going to have a melt down at one point or another on a node.
With that being said, backups are about a week old and for the vast majority of our users that's more than OK since they just have a static site.
Backups are packing and users are importing.
The point of "we aren't going anywhere" is also still valid.
Francisco
Please explain more?
We had what we assume is a failing PSU surge and fry out 3 pieces of equipment, 2 drives from a RAID (both on the same side) and an OS drive. The OS drive wasn't a big deal, but obviously the RAID was.
We have backups but they're about a week old due to the length of time jetbackup takes to run.
We replaced the node in full and are actively restoring users as quickly as the node holding the backups will let us.
Francisco
lv-shared02 Also ?
No, just lv-shared03. Nothing else was affected as it was a single PSU (we're assuming). The PSU seems far fetched even to us but it's the only thing we can think of that would make 2 brand new SSD's die at the same time, as well as an OS drive.
I'll give r1soft another go and see if it's better on CentOS 7, but we had to move away from it because of how unreliable it was on there.
Francisco