Most website owners use control panels for website management.
A control panel facilitates the server administration and allows the users to manage multiple websites.
To host a simple website, all you need is a server and a web hosting control panel.
There are premium control panels like WHM/cPanel and DirectAdmin which are very powerful but if you don’t wish to pay for a control panel you can simply choose an open source alternative .
In this guide we discuss some of the most popular open source web hosting control panels.
Web Hosting Control Panel
A web hosting control panel is a web-based interface that allows users to manage their hosted services in a single place.
Most hosting control panels have the following features:
- Database administration
- DNS management
- Email management
- FTP management
- Access to server logs
- Web space and bandwidth usage
- Web server administration
There are some features that are specific to a control panel. When choosing a control panel, you may need to knoe the programming language used for the front end and the abck end and the services that are supported.
Control Panel Front End Back End
Ajenti Python Python
Webmin Perl Perl
Sentora PHP PHP/MySQL
VestaCP PHP PHP/C/Bash
Centos Web Panel PHP PHP/MySQL
Kloxo – MR PHP PHP/MySQL
ISPConfig PHP PHP/MySQL
Froxlor PHP PHP/MySQL
All of the control panels are free of charge and support the basic services that you may need for running a website.
Therefore, if you are running a website that doesn’t have any specific requirements, then all of them should work.
However, if you are looking for a specific feature you will need to carefully read the review of each control panel .
If you have identified a suitable control panel, our sysadmins will help you with the installation and basic configuration of the control panel on your VPS if you are using our Linux VPS hosting services.