New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Comments
How about showing a screenshot of the editor containing the specific code snippet you designated?
Memory usage is from the dashboard. It is clean setup with only one wordpress site running right now. I don't have ssh access now, so can't confirm with command line, but thats what I see.
Thanks @dustinc, RackNerd and the AdminBolt team for the giveaway. I've been trying AdminBolt v1.9.2 on the giveaway VPS, focusing on a few everyday website maintenance tasks.
Using the client File Manager, I created a PHP test page with a simple form, opened it over HTTPS and checked that the server processed the submitted values correctly. I then edited the page in the browser and confirmed the updated version was live. For small website changes, being able to edit and check the result without opening an SSH session is convenient.
I also tested what happens when a file needs to be recovered. I created a ZIP archive of the page, extracted it into a separate folder and checked that the extracted copy worked. Then I moved that test file to the recycle bin and restored it to its original location. The page returned 404 while the file was removed and worked again after restoring it.
The Access Logs were particularly useful here. Searching for the test URL showed the corresponding 200, 404 and 200 responses, so I could check the outcome of each step from inside the panel. Having file management and searchable request logs together makes this a practical workflow for small maintenance jobs.
One point about first-time access: the initial link in RackNerd ctrl used the IP address and triggered a certificate warning. Using the matching myboltip.com hostname resolved it, as discussed earlier in this thread. Having ctrl provide that hostname as the main panel link would make the first visit clearer.
These are still early impressions, but the editing and recovery tasks I tried worked as expected. Thanks again for the opportunity to try the panel on a real VPS!
I think we can make this happen.
Let's GO!!! racknerd party!!!
RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!
BACK TO BACK GIVEAWAYS, WE'RE IN! LET'S GO!
LET'S GO!
Data base + apache + php + batch of workers for monitoring, statistics, mail server (relay) and etc. Looks like 1.4Gb ram is ok for this setup. This is cost of the comfort and buttons in WebUI. I don't know why devs takes Apache instead of nginx, I believe nginx could save more ram. Any way, when I start my dev DB it takes about 10Gb ram, your setup is ok, it's my opinion.
Why are there so few people here today? Let's hype it up quickly to convince @dustinc to start the giveaway for us!
Let's GOOOOO! RackNerd Party!!!
#RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!
Maybe everyone is quietly waiting for @dustinc to warm up and show up, just like yesterday
RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!
Everyone in front of the screen, stop staying silent! We need to hype this up so that @dustinc will throw more giveaway parties for us!
#MORE GIVEAWAYS BY ADMINBOLT & RACKNERD - LETS GO!
#MORE GIVEAWAYS BY ADMINBOLT & RACKNERD - LETS GO!
RACKNERD-AND-ADMINBOLT-KEEP-THE-PARTY-GOING!
AdminBolt review - verification log
I set aside a few hours with the AdminBolt server and tried to use it for real work: choose a task, run it through to the end, and note exactly what happened. v1.9.2 on AlmaLinux 9.8, panel and the supplied temporary domain throughout. Every item below is something I clicked, ran or broke myself today. I tried to be exact enough that the team can reproduce anything I claim.
VERIFIED WORKING
1. WordPress installer The wizard used to reset to step 1 with no error when the placeholder index.php conflicted. Following the explanation from @Chris_AdminBolt, I ticked "Clean existing files before installation" and the install completed in under a minute. Better than the outcome: the wizard now shows a live step list while it works (cleaning directory, setting up database, downloading WordPress, creating tables, and so on), so you can see where it is instead of staring at a spinner. The site came up on HTTPS immediately and Manage WordPress listed it with Visit, Go to Admin, Manage and Uninstall actions.
2. One-click login to wp-admin works, with a caveat below. From Manage WordPress it opens a window and logs you straight into the WordPress dashboard, no password prompt.
3. Mail, full roundtrip. Created a mailbox (instant, with a per-mailbox quota note - see issues), opened Roundcube from the account list with one click, sent a message to the same address, and it was in the inbox within seconds. The part I liked most is the Mail Delivery page: it logs the exact SMTP response for the delivery (a 250 "Saved" in my case) with Sent / Deferred / Bounced filters. For anyone who has ever debugged "the form says it sent but nothing arrived" on a shared host, a per-account delivery log like this is the feature you actually want. I only tested local delivery to the same server, not outbound to Gmail or similar, so deliverability to the outside world is still an open question for me.
4. Backup AND restore. Earlier reviews in this thread tested backups but explicitly not restores, so I made that the point of this session. Created a filesystem backup of the domain (33 MB of WordPress files, finished in about 10 seconds), then went into the file manager and deleted license.txt from the docroot. Backups page, Restore, confirm, done. The file was back. That is the whole test and it passed. Two nits about the flow in the issues section.
5. AI Bot Blocking, tested from the outside. The client panel has a per-domain AI bot blocker with three categories (training crawlers, AI search crawlers, live assistant fetchers), each expandable into a named list - GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and about twenty others. I enabled training-crawler blocking with the defaults and then requested the site from outside with different User-Agent headers: GPTBot and ClaudeBot got a 403, a normal browser UA and Googlebot got a 200. It does exactly what it says, and the page is honest that UA filtering only stops well-behaved bots.
6. Redis as a one-click service. Enable Redis gives the account its own private instance: 64 MB, listening on a unix socket in the account's home directory so only that account's processes can reach it, with live state, memory usage and key count on the page, plus copy-paste connection snippets for WordPress (both major object cache plugins), Laravel and plain PHP. Mine showed Running within seconds. One wrinkle in the issues list.
7. Databases. The wizard creates database and user in one flow with per-privilege checkboxes instead of a single "all privileges" shortcut (that option exists too). Engine is MariaDB. phpMyAdmin opens from the panel with one click and shows the account's databases without a second login - though see the issues for what happened when I ran queries.
ISSUES AND ROUGH EDGES (all reproduced today)
A. WordPress "Go to Admin" is flaky on first use. Manage WordPress > Go to Admin: the first time I clicked it, it opened blank browser windows that sat on about:blank and never loaded anything. I closed them, clicked again, and this time the window sat blank for roughly ten seconds and then landed me logged into wp-admin. So the function works, but the first attempt failed outright and even the success takes long enough that I assumed it had failed. Repro: fresh browser session, client panel > Manage WordPress > Go to Admin.
B. phpMyAdmin would not complete a query for me. Browsing databases and tables through the panel's phpMyAdmin (5.2.3) worked, but every time I submitted a SQL statement (a simple CREATE TABLE plus INSERT against an empty database) the request never came back - I waited over 30 seconds on each of three attempts. The same CREATE/INSERT is trivial, and WordPress itself had no trouble creating its own tables through the panel's installer, so this looks specific to the phpMyAdmin route rather than the database. Worth a look; happy to retest.
C. Redis is offered with one-click WordPress object-cache wiring, but the page itself flags "PHP redis extension not enabled" for the account's PHP 8.4. So the headline integration (point LiteSpeed Cache at this Redis) cannot fully work out of the box on a stock account. Either enable the extension by default when Redis is on, or make the warning a button.
D. Mailbox quota defaults to a 200 MiB maximum on a plan where everything else shows "Unlimited". That is what the creation form states ("Your hosting plan allows at most 200 MiB per mailbox"). Maybe intentional, but on a giveaway VPS with 60+ GB of disk it surprised me, and it is the kind of limit a user only discovers when mail starts bouncing.
E. Two backup-flow nits. The Filesystem Backups page describes itself as "create, download and delete" - the Restore button that actually exists (and works, see above) is not mentioned. And the restore confirmation is a bare "Are you sure you would like to do this?" with no word about what will be overwritten. For the most destructive button in the flow, one sentence about scope would help.
F. Two data-consistency questions I could not resolve: the admin Email dashboard shows "No recent email activity" even though the client Mail Delivery page logged my test delivery minutes earlier, and the Visitors page already counted around 100 unique visitors and 588 hits on a domain that had existed for about an hour. The second is probably internet background noise hitting a fresh IP, but if those counters include traffic that is not the domain's own, they will mislead. Worth checking what feeds both.
NOT TESTED YET
Outbound mail to external providers, scheduled backups and remote backup destinations, full account-level backup restore (as opposed to the per-domain filesystem restore above), mailing lists, forwarders and autoresponders, FTP accounts, the Git integration, the Cloudflare integration, the migration wizard, and the WHMCS/Blesta/Upmind modules. The passkey and TOTP enrollment screens exist but I did not enroll. Long-term uptime and performance are obviously unknown after one morning.
Bottom line
the reason this review is long is that most of what I tried simply worked, including the two things I most expected to fail (backup restore and the WordPress reinstall path an earlier report in this thread flagged). The issues above are reproducible. . Thanks again to @dustinc, RackNerd and the AdminBolt team for the VPS and for actually engaging with feedback in this thread.
I suggest adding a system restart button to the control panel. It would also be even better if there were Docker modules to manage Docker.
Good suggestion.
Let's hype it up quickly!
#MORE GIVEAWAYS BY ADMINBOLT & RACKNERD - LETS GO!
Let's hype it up quickly!
#MORE GIVEAWAYS BY ADMINBOLT & RACKNERD - LETS GO!*
I would prefer to be able to choose to install only OpenLiteSpeed and PostgreSQL during installation, instead of Apache and MariaDB. A minimal installation would be even better, so I don't need to install email and FTP services.
always waiting for the new round ,exciting !
I'm always waiting for the new round, exciting!
Today is the weekend; perhaps he isn't working.
Dustin?
I am here
But historically speaking, on a typical Friday night - we may not have enough demand to justify another giveaway round!
Can you convince me otherwise?
#MORE RACKNERD, MORE ADMINBOLT GIVEAWAYS! WE'RE HERE!
Maybe, after all, it's already 10:25 on a Friday night.
MORE RACKNERD, MORE ADMINBOLT GIVEAWAYS! WE'RE HERE!
MORE RACKNERD, MORE ADMINBOLT GIVEAWAYS! WE'RE HERE!