GIVEAWAY by AdminBolt & RackNerd! 100x FREE VPS FOR A YEAR + 20x LIFETIME LICENSES. LET'S TALK!

lxs647

@dustinc @lxs647

lxs647

MORE RACKNERD, MORE ADMINBOLT!

lxs647

lxs647

regmail

RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!

perry1121

My AdminBolt trial is up and running, here's my honest first take.

Install: used the One-Click Apps in RackNerd's ctrl panel. Took roughly 15 minutes, landed on AlmaLinux 9, zero hiccups. Panel lives at port 8443.

Onboarding: 2-step wizard after first login — choose use case (self-hosting vs clients), then admin account setup. Then confirm email to activate the trial. Simple, no head-scratching.

The panel UI is clean and modern. Admin side covers Dashboard, Customers, Backups, Web Server, Email, SSL, Health, Cluster, Logs, Migration, Modules, Settings — sensibly grouped, easy to find things. The end-user panel has everything you'd expect: domains, file manager, MySQL, email accounts, WP installer, SSL, backups.

It auto-provisioned a temp website on the account (PHP 8.4.26 + Apache) that's already serving fine.

Early days, but the install-to-working-panel flow was one of the smoothest I've seen for a hosting panel. Thanks @dustinc, RackNerd and the AdminBolt team for making this giveaway happen!

Dulliri

ain't no party like a racknerd party!!!!!

daybreak

AdminBolt 是一个现代化的托管控制面板

greyhataj

@dustinc @greyhataj

greyhataj

#MORE RACKNERD, MORE ADMINBOLT!

Chris_AdminBolt

WOW! ~130 pages and still going, love it. Thanks to everyone who installed the panel and shared what they found. A few answers:

@MrEd

• Units: good catch. Disk space and bandwidth in the Hosting Packages list are in MB, but the list leaves the unit out. You only see it once you open the package form.
• RAM: @hunkx reported 350–400 MB idle on the same 4 GB giveaway VPS, so I'm curious where your 1.2 GB came from (free -m, htop, the dashboard?). Would help us compare.
• Docker and proxying subdomains to other machines (your Nginx Proxy Manager setup): neither is in the panel right now. Both are good asks.
• A cheaper home lab tier: fair ask, and thanks for spelling out the home lab use case.

@Greyhound

• IP:8443 without a valid cert: yep, the myboltip.com hostname you mentioned is the way to go there.
• CPU/RAM limits per client: the "Resource Limits" tab in a package only shows up on CloudLinux, or on Apache with the LSAPI Engine module installed, where the limits apply to PHP running through LSAPI. Without one of those you can cap disk and inodes, but there are no CPU/RAM controls.
• The disappearing logo: if you mean the "Login" button with the bolt icon in Accounts, it hides while an impersonation is still open, and closing the client tab doesn't end it. Click "Leave" in the impersonation banner, then refresh Accounts. The button also only shows for active accounts. If you meant a different logo, tell me where you saw it.

@x1arch
@nacy, @hunkx and @Dulliri all got there in about 10 minutes, so 30 is a lot longer than what they saw. Thanks for flagging it, and for the image idea.

@zc741 @leev you both asked for a first-run checklist, so that's two votes. And @leev, short explanations next to the advanced settings make sense too.

@gooliver

• Subdomain SSL: the panel kicks off a certificate request in the background right after you create a domain or subdomain, and retries every hour for domains that still don't have one. Your post doesn't show why it didn't come through on its own in your case, but glad the manual request worked. An "enable SSL" option right in the create form is a fair suggestion.
• Health "Unknown" on Mail IPv6: that check runs hourly, and "could not be collected" there means it hasn't saved a result yet. On a fresh install it may simply not have run. If it still says that after a couple of hours, the Execution Logs link is the place to look. And yes, it doesn't mean mail delivery is broken.
• Backups vs Filesystem Backups: good summary. "Backups" is the scheduled kind. It needs a backup destination plus an active policy that covers your account on the admin side, and then it runs on the policy's schedule. "Filesystem Backups" are manual copies of one domain's files, no databases. The two pages don't mention each other, and "contact your provider" is the wrong message when you are the provider.

@Dulliri glad the setup steps sorted out the SSL on your first login.

@rogan @AchylsWu @nacy @VGL @hunkx thanks for the write-ups, and enjoy the VPS! If something breaks or doesn't make sense, tag me here.

Every one of these lands in our backlog, so keep them coming.

greyhataj

#RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!

yangfalxz

RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!

TAEL

RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!

Belikov

Got the Los Angeles VPS activated and took AdminBolt for a spin on AlmaLinux 9. Big thanks to @dustinc and the RackNerd crew for setting this up!

Saw the discussion above about RAM usage. For what it is worth, on my clean install free -m shows around 380 MB used at idle with Apache and the panel running. That lines up with what @hunkx saw earlier, definitely nowhere near 1.2 GB on a fresh setup. Having over 3.6 GB free on a 4 GB box is great, leaves actual room to run things.

A few quick notes from testing it out today:

• Install via RackNerd ctrl was painless. Took about 12 minutes, zero errors, landed right on port 8443 with the initial setup wizard.
• The UI is genuinely fast. Moving between domains, databases, and the file manager is instant without page reloads. Much cleaner than digging through cPanel's maze of menus.
• Client impersonation works well and does not mess up your active admin session in the browser.

One big feature request for @Chris_AdminBolt:
Huge +1 to what was mentioned earlier about reverse proxying. A lot of my workloads are standalone Go or Node binaries listening on local ports (like :8080). Having a built-in option in the panel to point a domain/subdomain directly to a local port with automatic SSL would make this 10x more useful for developers, saving the hassle of dropping to the terminal to manually tweak web server configs.

Overall it is a very promising, clean panel. Really cool to see Chris actively in the thread taking notes and fixing things in real time. Looking forward to running a few projects on it!

TAEL

tuozhwei

Tompegen

ADMINBOLT — A MODERN WEB HOSTING CONTROL PANEL!

Tompegen

ADMINBOLT - THE MODERN WEB HOSTING CONTROL PANEL!

Tompegen

ADMINBOLT - THE MODERN WEB HOSTING CONTROL PANEL!

Dulliri

RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!

strraws

@dustinc @strraws

hyrj

AchylsWu

@Chris_AdminBolt thanks! One thing that broke for me:

After my server's IP was changed, I updated the hostname and the panel IP settings, and the certificate reissued fine. But logging in to the admin area with username and password no longer works. The log records the login as successful, then I'm immediately sent back to the client login page. The login page itself loads normally, and nothing related shows up in laravel.log. Logging in through an SSO link generated from the CLI works fine, so I'm using that for now.

Is there a session or IP setting I might have missed after an IP change? Happy to share logs by PM if that helps.

kevarti

ADMINBOLT - THE MODERN WEB HOSTING CONTROL PANEL!

leigh

ADMINBOLT - 現代化的網站託管控制面板！

Chris_AdminBolt

@AchylsWu that one most likely isn't the IP change or a setting you missed. It looks like a login redirect bug we already know about: if the client side gets opened first in the same browser session (and the bare https://:8443/ address leads there), a successful admin sign-in sends you back to that client page instead of the admin dashboard. With no client session that ends on the client login, which matches what you're seeing. The SSO link skips that redirect, which is why it works.

Two ways around it for now:

• after you sign in, go straight to /admin/dashboard
• or clear the cookies for the panel address (or use a private window) and open /admin/login directly, not the bare address

If neither gets you in, tag me again and we'll take the logs over PM.

@Belikov thanks for the numbers, and good to hear impersonation behaves for you. Domain → local port with automatic SSL: noted, you're not the only one asking. For Node.js (also Python and Ruby) there's Domains > Applications, which runs the app through Phusion Passenger, so the admin has to install that module first (on OpenLiteSpeed it isn't needed). A standalone Go binary on :8080 isn't covered by that, though.

abuat

Huge thanks to @dustinc for the GIVEAWAY by AdminBolt & RackNerd! I just deployed AdminBolt via the "One Click Apps" section in the RackNerd control panel, and the installation process was completely seamless.

After spending some time clicking around and testing the features, I have to say I'm genuinely impressed. Here are a few standout points from my initial experience:

1. Clean & Modern UI: Coming from traditional panels like cPanel or DirectAdmin, AdminBolt's interface feels like a breath of fresh air. It's super responsive, uncluttered, and everything (Databases, Emails, Metrics, Security) is logically categorized and easy to find.

2. Built-in AI Assistant: This is a game-changer. Having an AI assistant right on the dashboard that can directly help with managing domains, switching PHP versions, setting up MariaDB databases, checking Let's Encrypt SSL status, and even diagnosing error logs makes server management so much faster. It's not just a gimmick; it actually saves a lot of clicking around.

3. Practical Out-of-the-Box Features: I really appreciate that Redis is right there in the Databases section alongside phpMyAdmin and Remote MySQL. Also, seeing native AI Bot Blocking under the Security tab (along with IP Blockers and Hotlink Protection) shows that the devs really understand what modern webmasters need right now.

Overall, it's lightweight, fast, and packs all the essential tools without the bloat. Definitely looking forward to using this for a full year on my server!

VGL

Good morning, @dustinc

VGL

Will there be another round of the lottery today, haha