Free web hosting panels

A web hosting control panel is a web-based interface, that is accessible online and provides tools for administrating your websites and sometimes your web server.

The most popular webhosting control panels are Plesk and cPanel with a market share around 98%. The pricing is based on the number of features included and/or number of accounts or domains.

For a small company that does not want to invest in a paid license or for home users that need to test websites, we will focus on some free alternatives that I had a good experience with.

1) Cyber Panel

Cyber Panel’s free version comes with Open Litespeed as a webserver, which is the 4th most popular webserver in 2021 and is known to be compatible with most Apache features. A great option that can be found in Cyber Panel is that you have a Docker Manager and a Docker local service to play with.

Hosting packages can also be created, with different level of users. WordPress install script comes with LSCache plugin already install, which is a nice option. Other great features are

  • Incremental backup
  • Redis Mass Hosting
  • Imunify360 Integration
  • Git Manager

2) aaPanel

aaPanel is a wide user administration panel in Asia. One of it’s great features is the modularity. It has an available app store where you can find and one clicke install services according to your needs starting from a full webserver (Apache, nginx, Open Litespeed, PHP, DB Service, Mail Service), to docker manager, DoS Protection or Google Drive/Amazon S3, automatic backup. The main disadvantage is that you can’t have multiple users with different level of access.

3) Virtualmin

This is my main to go, my production server where I host my clients websites. It has alot of features. Besides the standard webhosting option you can install server updates, features, modules and configure almost anything, like disk partitions or VPN server/client. You can even create cluster of servers. And the list can go on, maybe in future post I will present it in detail.

All the three options above, have good security options like changing default link or port and multi factor authentication. Besides that you can find in any of them the standard features that a normal web control panel needs: Web Server, DB, PHP, FTP, DNS Server and Mail Server. In my case, for development is user aaPanel for the ease of access on different web servers and Virtualmin for may main hosting service.

Hope this can help you!

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