hi there folks, I am in Melbourne Australia and found this very fast loading site. Yet to do some more speed checks from around the country but nearly smoke came out of my keyboard, yes that fast.
No need to say I run a hosting business and was wondering if a good free control panel could be installed.

You could install Webmin / Virtualmin, ISPConfig or VHCS, or a few others I never heard of but webmin/virtualmin is commonly used

is that something support can install for me on request?

linode do not provide that sort of support for your server. You run it yourself.

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

what sort of support do they offer? besides sales support

Everything within your Linode is your responsibility, although we try to help where we can. You also have access to our excellent community via these forums and our irc channel: http://www.linode.com/irc/

Regards,
-Tom

Virtualmin is very simple to install. Pick an OS for your Linode (I chose CentOS), download the install script, and away you go. Its probably the most popular. Though I think ISPConfig is "prettier" (less features).

More info about Virtualmin --> http://www.virtualmin.com/download.html

You ought to try a Linode for a month. It will be a bit of learning to get started (if you've not messed with Linux). The community for Linode is great. Lots of experts around to help out with questions.

Worst case you're out $20.

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Digital Deviation - http://digitaldeviation.com

An excellent VPS you have complete control over which no other Hosting Company can match.

With complete control comes responsibility

And I wouldn't want it any other way

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Where "Thought Crime" is commited
http://www.rejecttheherd.net

Plus the best interface for controlling your VPS. Ever.

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/ Peter

Yep. Very solid interface.

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Digital Deviation - http://digitaldeviation.com

I have used webmin myself, it is nice but it does have some overhead and will affect performance unless you are letting your client manage their stuff I would just do some reading on how to manage vhosts and stuff on you own.

Just a thought..

oh, and make sure your server is here!

Webmin itself is not very resource intensive. It takes about 10MB of memory (though some of that will likely be shared with other processes). Virtualmin, on the other hand, in its default configuration can take up to about 100MB, due to caching of libraries and other data for performance reasons. But, if caching is turned off, it drops to exactly the same size as Webmin (Virtualmin is merely a set of modules and specialized theme for Webmin).

CPU will not be used for Webmin except when you're actually doing stuff with it, and it can even be mostly swapped out of memory by your system when you aren't using it. In short, Webmin is not going to effect performance in any way. It is merely another service.

Virtualmin does have several cronjobs and a couple of long-running daemons for processing mail, and keeping up with status information, and such, but those can also be turned off, making it identical in resource usage to Webmin (which, again, is practically nil). Virtualmin is, by default, optimized for large scale hosting, but it is quite easy to reconfigure it for small memory, low usage, and we have documentation for that in our wiki.

That's not to say you shouldn't learn about how your system works...one of the Webmin projects goals is education (and we have over a thousand printed pages worth of documentation about system administration devoted to that goal). But, Webmin can make many system administration tasks easier (and Virtualmin can make dramatically easier, when it comes to virtual hosting).

Note also that both Webmin and Virtualmin (GPL and Professional) are well-supported. We have mailing lists, forums, wikis and a bug tracker, and millions of users world-wide. The projects are very active and getting better every day.

I used webmin on a base ubuntu server, with required packages; Apache, php, etc..

My resource usage on apache alone is 30%-40% more than without webmin.....maybe I am alone but I didn't like it....doesn't seem like a lot but when you have a lot of users it adds up.


Just my opinion.

My percentages are figured as follows:

(apache alone= 18M, apache with webmin=23M)

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Ahh the Virtualmin guru has arrived.

I'll vouch for that. Any time I've needed an answer, I've found it or when I asked it was answered on the forums. I know Joe hangs out there a lot.

You can still tune Apache with Webmin. You aren't locked into any settings.

But I guess this isn't the topic to talk performance tuning.

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Digital Deviation - http://digitaldeviation.com

well, it is a great open source alternative to plesk/cpanel.

Sorry, I was cranky!

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