What is the crowd's opinion of
Vesta Control Panel?
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14 reviews of this app found across the web:
It looks like it was planned, but as 0.9.8 version, not 1.0 https://vestacp.com/history/
Version 0.9.8-27 (Planned)
New front-end interface New front-end interface for File Manager Debian Buster support Debian Bullseye support Ubuntu Focal Fossa support Fix bugs from Github
Everyone says don't host your own, but I've been running my own email server for 15 years now. Yes, its going to take a few hours of time each month. And yes, if it goes down for longer than 8 hours you could lose emails. And yes unless you have backups you can lose everything. But I wouldn't give up my email server for anything. The amount of autonomy it gives me is well worth the time investment I've put into it. Great links posted in here and once its up and running its very easy to maintain. You can even do something like VestaCP that will take care of the DNS records and most things automatically.
For me, I've found Nextcloud to be the perfect solution to break things off with Google for-ever. And, if you run Ubuntu desktop, super easy to add in the calendar integration. Its not for everyone, but a pretty decent alternative.
I would recommend having a look at this, if you don't have much Linux experience. It will install all the things you need for running php websites as well as give you an easy control panel to manage multiple sites:
I set up a https://vestacp.com/ server for a client (a web design/dev company that doesn't have a sysadmin or Linux experience).
They host about 100 wordpress and a couple of magento sites on it.
It has way less features than cpanel, but seeing it's on Ubuntu I have better control over the server as a whole. I actually kind of talked the client out of cpanel to begin with for this reason, but to be honest we probably should have just stuck with cpanel seeing it has lots of features and they already knew how to use it. Had to teach them a lot with this, and even then, they can't do much with vesta beyond creating new sites and changing passwords.
I looked at a number of other systems, including the others mentioned in this thread already, but they were all too basic, and mostly seemed to be focused around a GUI for the server admins that don't understand the command line... rather than for limited access customers to manage their own sites (some have a bit, but it's very basic).
I'm a command line guy, all my own servers are basic Debian netinst + whatever I set up myself. So I fucking hate cpanel, and now vesta, and generally any crappy interface that fucks with your configs.
But if you need a lot of the cpanel features, especially stuff where the end client needs to login and change things on their own website, I reckon just stick with cpanel. If I were to do this project again, I would have just let them stick with cpanel.
Instead of getting web hosting it sounds like you will be best off with a VPS from a provider like DigitalOcean or Vultr, you will have full root SSH access allowing you to do anything you want on the system.
DigitalOcean have some really great tutorials about how to get your servers setup, so you can easily get a web server configured with Apache or Nginx. Best thing is you can follow those tutorials and have a server with a different provider, they are not specific to digitalocean.
If you do choose the VPS route I would recommend Nginx over Apache, it uses less resources and is a lot faster at serving static content.
You can also enable backups with most providers, once you have the VPS setup it is just a matter of making sure you do system updates regularly.
If your used to control panels, there are some great free solutions available.
There are also cheaper options for VPS's available, such as RamNode and OVH VPS if $5 is too much.
I would suggest vestacp.com I use them for all of my clients website and my personal websites. It's worked amazingly for me and the support is absolutely amazing. Once you get it setup, it has amazingly written docs on how to do anything that you need to do for your website.
I find it really hard to believe that a PHP based admin panel is using 8gb of ram. I find it even harder to believe an experienced for-hire developer would 'try' 1&1 hosting...and also that it took a week to find out it didn't work. Did the dev not get around to trying it for a week? Or did he have the admin panel running for a week, after which a series of crashes/etc made him realize it wouldn't work?
I think what's going on here is that the developer is not comfortable with setting up a webserver, and is relying on some server control software like WHM or cPanel...which likely does need a few gig's of ram. Maybe not 8, but more than a simple admin panel thing.
If i'm right about the why, learning how to set that up would be good, but their are control panels with less memory requirements. I haven't used this in quite some time, but the hardware requirements are pretty low and he'll be able to install this and get the project up without too much hassle. https://vestacp.com/install/
As others said potentially cheaper ,look at something like https://vestacp.com/. To help you manage multiple sites on one box.
Also because your now in charge expect differe sites to be constantly under attack by various bots (nothing personal about your site just works that way) , you need to stay on top of security, or you may find one day all your sites vandalized or worse.
I’ve used to use Cpanel but with their new pricing format the license became expensive. I have switch to VestaCP and so far its been great. Not sure what you required as far as stats so not sure if Vesta can support it.
In addition to setting up wordpress properly, you will need an HTTP server such as Apache / Nginx. This will determine how the domain name is routed.
You may wish to install a control panel on the server (such as VestaCP / cpanel / plesk etc) to automate some of the setup or insead install / configure php / apache / niginx manually.
So this really depends on what you're building, but I wouldn't be too worried about malware and viruses as such. DigitalOcean will let you spin up a server for as low as $5 a month, and then VestaCP would offer decent administration panel, free of charge. DigitalOcean also offers droplet backups, so you should be fine. As for vulnerability, for webservers, mostly it's bad config or an exposed entry point, such as someone inexperienced writing bad back-end letting malicious stuff through, so just keep that in mind. There are web application firewalls that can help, but most of the time, if there's garbage on your server, it is your fault, so just be careful when letting users talk to a database or upload files. Like really careful. It's the same as any other machine, you can have an antivirus, but every now and again, a user will install something they shouldn't.
This is a good starting point, but it's very barebones on the free tier. You can also look into VestaCP which has a bit more options and customization, but it's fully installed on your server and fullt free: https://vestacp.com/
If you need super control, it's very confusing but the #1 is VirtualMin.
You can throw on https://vestacp.com/ as your control panel if you want a simple setup.
edit: umm your asking for alot, Cheap + ESXI with a good amount of ram. Try to keep it simple this is just 2 websites.
Yes, you will get static IP too. You can host different domains by using apache virtualhosts
Yes. You will get full root access
I recommend using debian7 with free control panel https://vestacp.com/