Alternative to cPanel/WHM

[siciliancasanova]

I'm moving to a new town here over the next couple weeks and of course will need to change my ISP. I am also acquiring a couple pretty decent desktops and figured this would be a great opportunity to get rid of my reseller hostgator account and have my own server. For various reasons but mostly for my web projects. Anyhow the ISP told me they would give me a static IP at no additional charge and now my last question is about the back end of my sites. I do not want to pay for cPanel.

Unfortunately cPanel is all I've ever used in my experience so what are some great opensource managers that some of my clients will find relatively easy to use and manage their site?

[JeevesBond]

I'm interested in this too. Have a look at:


Webmin (http://www.webmin.com/)/Virtualmin (http://www.webmin.com/virtualmin.html) - looks most promising.
ispCP (http://www.isp-control.net/) - looks really slick, but seems to still be in development (maybe stalled?)
vhcs (http://www.vhcs.net/new/) - also looks slick, not sure about the licensing though.
Penguinator (http://penguinator.org/) - looks to be very actively developed, the guys that run the project do seem a little disorganised: judging by their Web site. :) You'll also need to get the source code from SVN as they don't appear to have an official release.
eBox (http://ebox-platform.com/) - more of a general configuration tool, looks pretty though. You might be able to use it somewhere else. :)


Do let us know how you get on, am interested to know what you choose and how well it goes. Good luck! :)

[siciliancasanova]

Awesome, thanks for the list. Yeah I will probably make a blog post after I'm done with it, I will reply to here with the link to that.

Anyone else have some solutions? I know one big thing is security and keeping it updated so keep in mind that there are times even weeks where I just don't have time to do much on the computer so keeping a super close eye on security is something I don't want to be thinking about if I go on vacation for a week.

EDIT: Also any that work in tandum with a billing company would be great. Right now my bill collecting comes down to me calling someone who is hosting with me and letting them know I'm broke and would appreciate it if they would pay their bill. So something that works with any automated system like modernbill or even as simple as paypal would be a load off my mind.

EDIT: Webmin and VHCS both look nice, VHCS has some demos... if you check out the domain level demo it looks to be more easy to use than the default cpanel-x layout
http://vhcs.net/new/modules/wfchannel/index.php?pagenum=7

[JeevesBond]

Don't know why this one didn't appear in my searches: ISPConfig (http://www.ispconfig.org). Looks really promising too.

:)