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I'm thinking of getting a Dedicated Server from Leaseweb and noticed they offer a nice range of Control Panels to make life easier on the sys admin.

I'm wondering, though, do these control panels affect performance? I've used a VPS in the past that had WebHost Manager and CPanel installed and it seemed rather cluttered.

You know how when you buy a prebuilt computer from the store and it comes with Windows Vista Home, a trial version of Office, Norton Anti Virus, etc, and you spend 30 minutes going through removing all that shit before finally thinking "F*** it. I'll just reinstall Windows and start from scratch" - This is how I saw WHM/CPanel.

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  • My gripe with control panels is they force their way of doing things. Their software versions (without distro tuning, support or security updates), their filesystem locations, their settings etc. Also, it comes with a certain idea of a stack, so you may have unneeded parts on your hands.
    – Joris
    Sep 26, 2010 at 7:52

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Most control panels do not actually do anything unless being actively used; they defer the actual actions to other programs, usually those that come bundled with the control panel. The bundled packages themselves may be of... less-than-ideal quality, but that is a separate issue.

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  • Point. I guess the cluttered system just gives me the feeling it would be slow... Doing a find / -name "*cpanel*" on my old VPS would make me cringe. I figured, for the new server, I would just write a few Python scripts to handle adding new 'domains' (the user, group, apache vhost, ftp settings, etc) but I may just be creating more overhead than necessary. Just wondering how you guys go about admining your servers
    – Frank
    Jul 9, 2010 at 7:21
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Do you have experience in administrating a server over the command-line?

IMO, a control panel is only useful in a few situations:

  • When you're a hosting reseller with lots of clients who often needs to make changes to websites/email addresses every day.
  • When you've not got the skills/experience to be able to manage your server solely via the command-line.

I've tended to find that Plesk breaks a system a lot-less than WHM/cPanel, and as long as you're prepared to do things the "Plesk Way" then it's pretty good.

Background: I work for a small-medium hosting company supporting hundreds of servers for our clients, running straight Linux, Plesk, Webmin (CP+), WHM/cPanel and an older in-house control panel.

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