Why thank you hoopycat and Mr Nod - Now I understand.

I also wanted to know, what made you guys not choose cpanel (or any other similar program) if it makes hosting easier? I'm asking because cpanel hype is all over the forums everywhere - I never heard of people getting by without cpanel...

And how "hard" is it to get by without cpanel for one static website?

thanks!

R

cPanel is the 'standard' for shared hosting services, so its what many people are familiar with. Also, many people aren't comfortable with running their own server, but want to get off shared hosting.

Its pretty easy to get by without a control panel. Once the server is setup you really don't have to do much with it other than to keep the software updated.

If your not the tech savy type, there are some people on the irc and forums (myself included) who can help you to setup your server for probably less than what that cpanel license is going to cost you over a year.

Thanks for your great response, H3LR4ZR.

Yes, I'm very tech-savvy, but I don't want to bite more than I can chew :wink: However, judging from posts on this forum, I feel everyone is helping everyone out. I've been researching affordable VPS hosting for the past 3 months and linode really stands out - so I'll move my stuff on a linode during my vacation ~ end of this year.

Thanks again!

R

IMHO cPanel would be a waste of money for just 1 static site - you'll get by easily doing it yourself.

The other option is to check-out virtualmin GPL which will do mostly everything you'll require. I personally use virtualmin because it does all I want.

Mr Nod you are absolutely right - cpanel is ridiculously expensive and I just realized it after visiting their website. I also looked at virtualmin GPL - it might work for my website. Thanks for the info.

R

I'd like to disagree with you here. I don't think cPanel is ridiculously expensive, really, the VPS license is extremely cheap. You get a fantastic and complex piece of software for only $15 a month! That's really a low price to pay not to have to manage everything by command line.

Virtualmin has been mentioned several times, but I thought I would mention that webmin/virtualmin (free) is great for managing both sides of server hosting. You can do pretty much all server maintenance through webmin, and with virtualmin gpl, every client can have their own control panel for which to control their 'account'.

Virtualmin even offers a install script for people who are unskilled with linux (or prefer to have things automated), while I recommend coming to terms with the linux cli...
With the install script for virtualmin which installs everything needed to run an LAMP server. You'd only need to copy and paste the commands needed to run the script, everything else can be done from the web gui.

I realise virtualmin can do a lot, but I do think that cPanel Inc have a lot more experience with creating server management products and that cPanel/WHM offers a lot more functionality that virtualmin. Though I have to emphasise that the basics may very well be done with virtualmin. If you'd need a more advanced, grown up panel, you'd need to pick cPanel (or DirectAdmin, more lightweight, less advanced).

If you're looking for advanced and grown-up, why use a panel?

I feel quite defensive about webmin because it helped me so much when I first set up my server, but I am aware of how popular cpanel is, and I have used the user end of it before.
I am however completely unaware of what features cpanel gives you to the server management side of the game.
From what I've seen of directadmin, (i've played with the demo panel) the feature set seemed limited to the very basics.

Virtualmin is a commercial product as well as a free one, with many features only becoming available in the paid product, but virtualmin gpl stands strong on its own. The paid version for example adds an extra tier to virtual hosting, with reseller accounts. Compare.

The webmin component (can be installed without virtualmin) is a full control panel with quite an array of 3rd party plugins. My webmin is standing at having 120 modules installed. It has its own mysql manager, you can edit disk mapping, network interfaces... It has full modules to control things like bind, sendmail, apache, postfix, ldap... and at least 8 modules managing clustered solutions.

I have used all three and presently use Virtualmin Pro. I don't know about the GPL version of VM, but I can say that VM Pro offers vastly more functionality than either cPanel or DirectAdmin.

It does what it does very well too. Virtualmin 'Pro' is an extremely 'grown up' product, as is Webmin (which sits underneath VM on the server).

Does it offer more than cPanel/WHM from the sysadmin point of view or the end user/shared hosting client point of view? I've always found virtualmin (not pro) lacking in the latter, though that was about a year ago.