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= What are people using instead of Plesk or CPanel for managing their websites? =

I often hear complaints from the boss that Plesk is just getting to expensive and we found the same problem with CPanel some years ago. Plesk has gone up by 10% a year every year for the last couple of years and we are probably on one of the more expensive plans hosting hundreds of websites

I just wondered what other price conscious people were using that offered some level of support but perhaps more stripped down so we are not paying for a lot of features that we don't use. I prefer something that offers some kind of reseller option that allows setting up of sub accounts for customer websites that offers them some kind of web panel, file manager, database manager. Really the basics

Thanks

Webmin/Virtualmin is free and super powerful for managing an entire server including virtual hosts. Functionality is a bit different if you’re used to cPanel but it works and honestly I think it is actually more powerful and has more features than cPanel, if you know what you’re doing. Decent online support community as well and there’s some YouTube channels that demonstrate installation and use cases. For databases, phpMyAdmin is also free and easy to install and customize

I prefer zsh, vim, and git. I expect to replace it with Ansible eventually

For those who prefer a web interface, I have found Hestia CP to be a solid panel

ISPConfig, as mentioned by u/DadJokesAndMore, has a long and reliable track record

OTOH I played with DirectAdmin a little bit, it's a serious contender. And it even has a Cpanel-inspired skin which should make it easy on your clients to transition into. DirectAdmin seems like the best choice so far, and I just discovered a nice feature: DirectAdmin backups *include* Roundcube settings. That was always a pain in theto deal with: when I migrated a customer I had to manually open Roundcube and backup the address book and make a note of the settings to transfer to the new server. I was surprised when I saw DirectAdmin doing this automatically

Another option to consider is one called ApisCP. Seems good but I haven't tested it

By the way, I own a website maintenance business, I don't resell hosting per se, so take that into account when reading my replies


ISPConfig for many years now, never had a problem. I have used it as single and multi host setups, I have sold systems with ISPConfig and people have paid me to setup systems with this. It just works, mostly because, I think, it is at the surface, quite simple

It is a straight forward experience with no complexity and anybody with minimal tech experience can look at it and know what is going on and what to do

I bought a 50% off lifetime license during Cyber weekend and I’m very happy with this control panel. Prior to this, I tried DirectAdmin, ISPConfig, WebMin, CentOS Web Panel, Moss.Froxlor and Vesta

Regarding ApisCP, I like…
How long they’ve been in the game (since 2002)
Their security is quite good per Rack911
File manager (most don’t have this)
phpMyAdmin
Fail2ban
Commercially supported
Automatic updates
If you haven’t tried it, give it a shot

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