with or without a control panel on a dedicated server

[petertdavis]

One of my forums is getting too big for the VPS I have it on now. I've done dedicated servers in the past, and generally prefer cPanel. However, since the server would be for the sole use of a single website, I'm wondering if cPanel is an expense I could do without. Can anyone comment on the necessity of having a control panel, or the benefit of not having one, for a server that serves just one website, vBulletin being the most of it.

[Tree]

If you're comfortable manually editing httpd.conf, named.conf, and other configuration files, then no control panel would be a great thing. It knocks some $50 off your monthly budget.

If you're just serving up one site, as you are, and don't feel comfortable manually editing config files, I suggest VHCS (http://www.vhcs.net/). It's a free control panel, and has been great to me so far.

[Zachery]

One of my forums is getting too big for the VPS I have it on now. I've done dedicated servers in the past, and generally prefer cPanel. However, since the server would be for the sole use of a single website, I'm wondering if cPanel is an expense I could do without. Can anyone comment on the necessity of having a control panel, or the benefit of not having one, for a server that serves just one website, vBulletin being the most of it.


cPanel is great for making updates easy. However if you can spare the time or money for a proper system admin it'd probally be better spent.

[Ramiel]

Hi Peter,

A VPS may even be slower than a Shared Hosting, though it gives you more control over the OS. Dedicated hosting is best, and on a any bigger site, it's best not to use any control panel.

Control Panels, cPanel etc don't let you tune many features. And you are often limited to the version they provide you. For example if you go with cPanel you are stuck with their 1.3.x version and you can't use the apache 2.0 which is much faster. I've hacked the insides of cPanel a few times to get custom apache modules to work since they ship with very few modules.

InterWorx is another control panel which is a lot better for performance tunning; but over all it is best to not have any control panel.

OS wise, Red Hat, CentOS are both good, I prefer Debian since it has the least foot print and lets you do a lot of things which you can't do with the Red Hat equivalents. For example in Debian you can run Kernel 2.6 and the older 1.3 apache, or you can run apache 2.0 with kernel 2.4 etc...these are things you can't do with Red Hat and Red Hat like OS'es. More people are familiar with Red Hat though.

I'm not trying to make any sales pitch for you; but if you are interested in a quote for a dedicated server which includes 24x7 managment with performance tunning on premium bandwidth (level3 or abovenet); my company does this. You can email me if you are interested.

This is my first post on this site, but I've been using vBulletin since I guess 2003? One of my customer's has a vB sites with over 10Mil posts and we manage it fully.

Kindly,
Ramiel


One of my forums is getting too big for the VPS I have it on now. I've done dedicated servers in the past, and generally prefer cPanel. However, since the server would be for the sole use of a single website, I'm wondering if cPanel is an expense I could do without. Can anyone comment on the necessity of having a control panel, or the benefit of not having one, for a server that serves just one website, vBulletin being the most of it.

[Andy]

I use Webmin and it works great!

[Ramiel]

Hi Andy,

Yes! You are right... Webmin is one good one. It doesn't screw with your OS much like the other control panels. I set that one up all the time for my customers so they can edit their email accounts and make small changes on the fly.

I should have thought of recommending that! Thanks :-)


I use Webmin and it works great!