Server management such as CPANEL

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Server management such as CPANEL

tistaharahap

8:50 am on Dec 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hi guys,

Recently I just co-located a server. I am a web developer and I'm not linux shy at all. But this is my first experience to really be an admin for a web server. After doing some research, I found CPANEL to be very intuitive and easy. Because with all my shared hosting clients, I administer websites by using CPANEL so I figured why not use CPANEL also for this server.

The things is, it's so expensive. Compared to DirectAdmin, it's like heaven and earth. Does anyone have any suggestions regarding which admin software that is lower priced than CPANEL if not open source? I have Fedora Core 4 for the server.

Thank you in advance :)

Tista

wheel

4:44 pm on Dec 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

Try webmin. I doubt it's as comprehensive as CPANEL and is intended to manage at the server level (not really individual domains) but it's free.

However I would suggest you just do stuff from the command line. It's likely tired advice, but you'll be far better served to go through the pain of learning this stuff directly instead of through a control panel - because at some point you'll have to do something the control panel doesn't do. Plus, I believe it's actually faster not to use a control panel (after you learn the command line stuff and individual programs).

Plus you've now got to worry about security updates and stuff......command line knowledge helps there too.

What I do is do most of this stuff command line by myself. then I know one or two top notch linux consultants that I bring in once in a while for problems I can't deal with.

dandaman32

4:15 pm on Dec 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

I second that - using the command line is definitely the better way to go. cPanel can't build a custom server configuration for you, and neither can it update your /etc/fstab to put your swapspace on the second hard disk. Besides, control panels like cPanel require a lot of processing power and RAM that could better be used for running Apache and MySQL.

If you absolutely must use web-based control panel, your best choice is probably Webmin (free) or CP+ (monthly fee but much cheaper than cPanel). I'm pretty confident that the CP+ license system can be hacked since it's all written in Perl. (don't tell them I said that, and don't ask me for help doing it!)

And congrats on the OS choice - I use Fedora Core 4 too. You won't be disappointed with it.

-dandaman32