Control Panels

In todays growing market for website hosting, plans, software, and more; we often find ourselves looking at different options, needs, and pricing. Today we are going to focus on our website, and our website needs. Just focusing on website needs. As we review some of the panels and such many offer a “all in one” solution, some offer command line only features, others a full web based gui, some with email support, others without it. However again, our goal is our website and those needs.

*** Website ***
This test will be performed against a default WordPress install. No extra plugins, no ads, no remote calls, just the core/default WordPress install.

*** Hardware ***
Linode Nanode 1 GB
AMD Epyc 7713 64-Core
$5/Month VM

*** Software/OS ***
For each test, a format was completed, I did not spin up another vm as I wanted to make sure that the same hardware, the same node, the same neighbors, the same everything was used.

For each test unless noted by the control panels needs, a base system of Ubuntu 22 with nothing more then a password change, and a update/upgrade done. The rest of the configuration are done by the panel.

*** Control Panel ***
After each reinstall and update, the panels are installed via the howto documentation on each panels respected websites.

*** Testing ***
Each test will be setup and performed by the following.

1. DNS – Cloudflare, DNS only, no proxy.
2. Apache Benchmark will be used for each test.
3. AB will be run locally on the vm to make sure its run the same each time.
4. AB is installed from the repo via apt install apache2-utils.
5. The test will be a simple ab -n 5000 -c 20 http://controlpanelname.theserveradmin.com/
   This will generate 20 concurrent users requesting 5000 page loads.
6. Caching, each test will be setup with the default caching configuration.
7. The test will be ran 5 times, and the avg will be shown.

*** Notes ***
This is not going to be a technical write up on how to install each panel, but how they perform under a good load.

Wordops.
WordOps provide the ability to deploy a blazing fast and secured WordPress with Nginx by using simple and easy to remember commands. Forked from EasyEngine v3, it’s already much more than an up-to-date version of EEv3 with several new features including Let’s Encrypt wildcard SSL certificates with DNS API validation support, Linux kernel optimizations or a new custom Nginx package with TLS v1.3 and HTTP/3 QUIC support.

This test resulted in 1888/Requests/Second. Now keep in mind that this is under a optimal setup, no plugins, no real theme, nothing, so cut that down more then in half, but from a benchmarking, this is amazing.

Some numbers.
1888/r/s
113,280/r/m
6,796,800/r/h
163,123,200/r/d
Now again real word if you were pushing this kind of needs, you would have at least two dedicated servers, one for your website, and the other for your database. However you get this reference example.

This is pretty impressive for a command line tool. Yes who have to have a few minutes of skills in the terminal/SSH but its a very easy setup and configuration.

Next up with have Cyberpanel. This is a complete solution a top to bottom control panel.

This one had me surprised, 543/Requests/Second. I don’t know if the Wordops was that amazing or if for some reason after a handful of tests they all were wrong.

543/r/s
32,580/r/m
1,954,800/r/h
46,915,200/r/d

So with Cyberpanel you can have a complete hosting panel, that can pump out some serious hits. Still all for free.

Keyhelp by Keyweb.
So this looked very promising, its a full control panel while designed for the developer, its pretty darn cool. However sadly it installed, but I could not get files to upload for any reason best about 1MB of usable disk space, no matter how many reboots, disk space check, removal of the domain/readding. Nothing. So I can’t really test this, as I could not get WordPress to install.

Lets now look at our next panel. Cloudpanel.io

CloudPanel is a free software to configure and manage a server with an obsessive focus on simplicity.
Run Static Websites, PHP, Node.js, Reverse Proxies, and Python Applications.

As you can see, this is a not a full on control panel, there is no DNS, no email, no nothing but the web. Cloudpanel focuses on nGinx and Varnish as the webserver and caching system. Lets see how well it performs.

This is very interesting, as varnish is installed with this one. I honestly thought it would do better, but again, 128/reqs/second is nothing to sneeze at either.

128/r/s
7,680/r/m
460,800/r/h
11,056,200/r/d

aaPanel

This is a newer player to the field, I say newer loosly as it has been around for some time, but personally I have ever used it. aaPanel is a stand alone control panel like cPanel, completely independant, no need for any other services.

So once again, I could not get this work. After two hours of installing and configuring, I couldn’t get it to work. Now I am not saying I couldn’t do this, but as far as an out of box experience, I am not impressed. So with that, aaPanel is going on my list of “Not the best OOB” Experience.

Now again, any and all of these panels will kill it on a 1 GB / $5 VPS, I think you will need to figure out your needs and wants in a panel.

Hope this helps!