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What is needed from a web server control panel
Hello guys!
I've read this post https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/158603/in-progress-we-are-building-a-new-webserver-control-panel and seen what great advice the community offers. We also need help in understanding what features are needed and I would be very grateful for real opinions about what we are trying to accomplish.
We've been working on our control panel for maybe more than 10 years, initially as an internal tool for our server management ops but for the past 3-4 years we've developed a nice interface to be usable by everyone. We are a team from Romania and the control panel is located at https://clustercs.com . Some more details and screenshots can be seen here: https://clustercs.com/product and features here https://clustercs.com/features
We've designed this initially as a server owner panel, meaning that the account owner has all his servers and domains in one single interface. We did not give too much attention to sub-accounts (or per domain access) but we are now working hard to bring forward all the necessary isolation.
Another important criteria in our work was to be able to handle high traffic websites, so we've designed the system right from the start with multi-server architectures in mind. This is also the concept that we consider gives us an edge as no other systems as far as we know have similar capabilities.
We have all common domain management operations - databases, emails, dns, ssl/let's encrypt, backups, crons, logs. Then there are two important new concepts:
a haproxy traffic router which we called "Speed" in the interface. Our default setup uses haproxy as traffic entry point. A user is able to customize the setup but as long as haproxy is being used as entry point, the set of features is available. This allows to create rules to handle incoming requests, a few examples: choose between apache/nginx/lighttpd/varnish to handle URLs, password protect website areas, cache with varnish or nginx, rate limitting, ip restricted access to certain portions of the website, redirects to ssl or www/non-www url formats. All this actions can be setup by choosing matching criteria for paths, cookies, ips, user-agents etc. some concepts about this can be read more in-depth here https://clustercs.com/kb/article/speed-optimizations/concepts/speed-engine-concepts/
This is most likely a novelty for control panels and we are not sure how well understood these things are. It is one of the main points where we would like to know if you guys find this useful, whether the concept is easy to understand or any comments that would help us make this feature easy to use.
Here are some screenshots:
dev environments - this is essentially a lot of automation to migrate back and forth code from a live environment to a dev environment. Those environments can be opened under the same URL of the live website. We know this is useful especially for wordpress where switching to a dev url can have complications. It also supports git operations. We would be very eager to learn from you how we can improve this area. Especially on git operations, where we kind of have only basic branch moves functionality, we would like to know real workflows and what we need to change/add to make this better.
I mentioned initially that we are working on per domain access. ClusterCS is a SaaS management engine, it doesn't reside on the server. So the difficulty is in figuring out what management license a login is for. Our quick solution so far is to request a form of company_id along with a user/pass enabling us to identify the correct account. While this works neatly for the purpose, it doesn't allow for a sort of "Teams" approach where a developer could have access to several clients and have an easy way to switch between accounts/domains with just one single login. Would this switcher be something you find very useful or it's not too big of a hustle to login separately for each domain.
There's other things for modules that we are thinking to build but don't want to make the long post too long 
... any advice for cool features is very welcome.
I know you guys would spend valuable time on this, if anyone is willing to go this extra mile with us we would be very happy to offer free licenses both for testing and ongoing and obviously we will appreciate it tremendously.
Thanks!
Comments
The next cPanel needs to be good enough to capture the market, be Closed Source Non-Free and then hike the prices to generate perfect LET drama.
Yes, that was very unfortunate, I've seen it happen before
... we do have a free account and I consider this our way of giving back ... more in the future but it's the least we can do now
Very good for you and I wish you all the success (along with a thousand devs making the next panel right about now...) But I repeat, new panel will either fail or will do exactly what cPanel or any other proprietary monopoly did. It's either Open Source or no one will learn their lesson.
And people will still download nulled version either way even if it's open source.
I don't doubt it but I also think it's a good way to progress ... developing technologies is very expensive ... not helping progress further after making fortunes is bad.
I am indeed behind a proprietary control panel but i must confess, it's a true passion for me to work on it. If it was just about balance sheet, we wouldn't be here ... we really believe we can make a change. We have many ideas that I think can shape a bit in the better the domain, and not for the crazy prices ... enough to keep us going
Been using your product, and I confess, its a breath of fresh air moving away from these control panels and into a cloud based one so I have the freedom to host anywhere and scale when needed.