Control panels are used to configure and maintain servers by both system administrators and users. Years ago all the server settings for web, e-mail, name service, and other packages were done manually by system administrators. Nowadays there are powerful control panel packages that configure the settings based on relatively simple interfaces.
We have experimented with several Control Panels for our Gorges servers. This blog post is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all control panel software, but rather a summary of our own experiences.
PLESK and CPANEL
These two solutions are terrific, and they present the obscure settings needed to control web/e-mail/etc. packages in a meaningful way. The biggest drawback is the price. At Gorges we run our servers “lean” with relatively few customers per server; this maximizes the web page performance. Adding a commercial control panel to our servers would be costly and our hosting fees would have to rise perhaps unacceptably.
We do not host all the web applications we develop, and we often work with Plesk and CPanel on customer-supplied servers as well as one of our own. These packages work, but for hosting companies to justify their cost they either overload the servers with domains or use virtual machines to squeeze more clients onto each server box. You get what you pay for – and it can be truly frustrating when your domain is hosted on a server that has other customer domains saturating the bandwidth and processors.
WEBMIN
Webmin is perhaps the simplest of control panels, and basically just adds web page interfaces for packages. We used this for a while, but the settings were so low-level that one had to be a system administrator to understand the screens, so the improvement was only marginal since most savvy sys-admins know the text interface already. The companion package Usermin was perhaps more useful to the customer since it is for configuring e-mail accounts.
VHCS2
We have VHCS2 installed on most of our production servers. This decision was made almost five years ago, and it took months to both learn all the nuances of how it works and to develop some custom solutions for important-but-missing features such as name service records and backups. Although we liked VHCS2 at the time, work on this open-source package has apparently stopped, so it is stuck in time while better control panel software has surpassed the supported VHCS2 features.
ISPCONFIG
When we purchased several 64-bit quad-core servers in late 2007, we reviewed available control panel solutions. The package ISPConfig was selected since it appeared much better than other control packages and was under open source license (i.e. free for us to install and use).
ISPConfig is not without problems, but we have extended this control panel solution with custom patches for grey-listing and spam filtering, propagating domain name service (DNS) records to our production name servers, and integrating it into our system-wide backup.
SUMMARY
Perhaps the biggest drawback of all control panel solutions is that it is not easy bypassing the panels and doing custom configurations for special-needs clients. It’s pretty obvious that labor costs much more than hardware or bandwidth nowadays, so automating as much of the account setup and maintenance is the key to staying profitable.
As for us, we’ll keep using ISPConfig and passing the cost savings for hosting back to our customers.
Tags: Control Panels, CPanel, Plesk, VHCS2, WebMin
Nice article.
Ok. Quick question. I currently use Plesk (Linux). In your mind how would you rate ISPConfig compared to Plesk? (Say on a point system.)
Also have you ever used Open Panel? How would that compare to ISPCOnfig. I want something simple, yet robust enough to manage multiple sites, SSL, DNS. I’m looking for a solution for Rackspace’s Mosso Cloud Servers. I really don’t want to get into creating patches and customizations. Will I have to, with ISPConfig? In regards to DNS, can I just manage this through another system, so like GoDaddy?
Hi Paul,
Plesk is better and has more features, but find out if all these features are worth the (much) higher cost. To us, these features are critical in a control panel: web hosting, mail hosting, database management. And ISPConfig handles these core features very, very well.
For the “core” features and vanilla-type needs of customers, Plesk/CPanel are rated 10 and ISPConfig is 8 out of 10. However I’d rate Plesk and CPanel both as 8, and ISPConfig as 6 for overall value because sometimes customers just want something out of the ordinary, be it a special package, unique mail routings, or divided services. Then you have to fight with the system and hope your changes don’t affect other users.
Open Panel wasn’t yet released when we started our journey, and I see that it is still in beta. If you are on a budget, I’d recommend ISPConfig over a beta version of Open Panel, but I have not fully-reviewed the Open Panel features.
Running DNS through a registrar like GoDaddy makes a LOT of sense since it makes less work for you. We have started doing that ourselves, although we still have production DNS servers running since some of our clients are not registered through GoDaddy or another DNS-enabled registrar.
I see your reference to Mosso Cloud, and feel another blog article starting in my brain. We have developed some cloud applications, but have had mixed results with dedicated-VM servers. For our standalone hardware-based servers, we have all the tools necessary to track down poor performance issues should they arise. However sometimes our VM-hosted apps just feel “slow” but we don’t know why. We just have a small slice of the CPU and bandwidth of that computer, and sometimes is just is not enough.
Matt