25 Mar 09 An idea – cPanel like host management

Recently for various reasons, specifically our acquisition of nxserve.net I have loathedly had to start working with cPanel which is what the users manage their accounts with. It’s a bit like installing some Windows based GUI on top of a Linux system. You can point and click your way around and actually get a surprising amount done, however as soon as something doesn’t workas expected, you’re absolutely stuck. Further to that, should you decide to log in to the console and make modifications as you would usually, you will either find that the entire system catastrophically fails, or that your configuration is simply overwritten by cPanel again. That said, whether or not I like it, cPanel is actually a fantastic system. How else would you successfully manage 1000+ user hosting accounts on a single server whereby you can just set up a logon and give it to the user, and he can do anything he should need? Installation is also incredibly easy. Install base CentOS and just ’sh ./latest’ which you download from cPanel. The rest is done for you.

As much as everything within me opposes something like this, I actually love it. It’s a fantastic idea and it works so well. So much so, that I’m interested to know if there is any demand or even desire for anything like this.

What I’m thinking here, is a single shell script which you pull over and run on a clean Debian install. It will pull over everything else it needs as well as all packages required. On complete installation which will be substantially faster than the cPanel one, it will present you with an admin web interface. From here your preliminary key features are:

- Backup/Restore
- Email Configuration (exim/courier (imap/pop3)/mysql setup) in a vhost environment
- Apache setup (vhosts, SSL, CSR generation)
- MySQL simple/advanced setup (caching/innodb key buffer type thing)
- FTP (vsftpd/mysql) setup
- PHP4/PHP5 installation and configuration (also caching/accelerators)
- Installation of popular PHP libs (GD/mcrypt/curl/soap/etc)
- Firewall management
- DNS zones, management
- Webmail (squirrel)
- Reporting (bandwidth usage, etc)
- Traffic Shaping Setup

I don’t currently intend to allow the admin to delegate his customers to log in and modify DNS zones and the like under a ‘reseller’ account or anything similar, but I guess we’ll see where things go.

What is the purpose of this when cPanel already exists?

- This won’t hijack your entire system, leaving you unable to ever use the console again.
- This system will be more transparent and easily separable from the underlying  OS should you wish to make further changes or customizations to your OS.
- This system will be VERY lightweight
- This system will run on Debian Etch or Lenny
- The system will be very easy to navigate around and manage
- The system will have the option of auto updating, or if you are concerned about your privacy you can turn updates off.
- The system is geared towards a single user setup, not an admin/reseller/user type setup.
- The system will be cheap

Tags: cpanel, debian, host management

Reader's Comments

1. eugene_krop | 26 Mar 2009 1:37 am

   And did you try the DirectAdmin? That is more cheaper (I know that the lifetime license for users is 299 bucks for resellers about 150, Cpanel is 55 every month), economical in resources and working with clean Debian Sarge / Woody 3.1.
   With regard to system requirements, I have heard the views of people who changed their Cpanel to DA, what they claimed a 50% space savings and 50% saving processors res-s. At least for FREE hosting what should be, i think.

2. MJ Ray | 26 Mar 2009 12:10 pm

   At first (quick) glance, the above sounds a bit like dtc-toaster, although that has the resellery bits visible by default. They’d probably welcome some contributions of any features you find missing.

3. Admin Management System | Adam's Tech Talk, Linux HOWTOs & Discussion, PHP, MySQL | 29 Mar 2009 2:29 am

   [...] my last post An idea – cPanel like host management – I’ve had some interesting comments emailed to me. I am aware of the various options out [...]

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