Autarchy of the Private Cave

To cut the long story short: for the final evaluation, I had this line of control panels:

• SysCP
• Domain Technologie Control, DTC
• Virtualmin (also Webmin, Usermin)
• ISPConfig
• RavenCore
• GNUPanel

SysCP: looks good to me (they have a working demo), has customer billing module. Unsure as to where it is used, but most probably sponsors are also the users of SysCP. Majority of support forums is in German.

DTC: has no demo, only some screenshots. Has a set of packages for Debian lenny (which is a huge plus for maintenance and future upgrades). DTC is being developed by GPLHost, and is also used by GPLHost - so this is a live (used) distribution. Seems quite feature-rich.

Virtualmin claims to be the “world’s most powerful and flexible web server control panel”. Virtualmin offers 4 means to control it: Web, mobile device, command line, and remote API. There are both screenshots and demo. Has both GPL and Professional versions. GPL version has a number of limitations, comparing to Pro version. From what I’ve read about Webmin (all three - Virtualmin, Webmin, Usermin - are just different “layers” of server control), it is a framework with a number of “interface scripts”, which allow to control various services. As such, it is easily extendible, but is not monolithic - in the sense of module inter-dependencies and action triggers.

RavenCore, if it had a working demo, could be an option. It seems to be quite actively developed, but all the screenshots are outdated, and demo isn’t working. However, based on what I’ve read, at least some people seem to be satisfied with this CP.

GNUPanel is a year-old control panel, but has a news item on the front page (dated August, 17) promising new, completely rewritten release somewhere in October. By the feature list, looks promising. However, I need the panel right now, and even in October, that will be quite a rough release, not really used/tested anywhere, so not a good option as well. But GNUPanel is a panel to check in half a year for progress.

As the final choice, I had ISPConfig (which seems to be the best by people’s comments), and which is also quite widely used, and is easy to install onto Debian (at least the Perfect setup: Debian Etch says so), and DTC. I discarded Virtualmin (for the poor functionality of the GPLed version), RavenCore (for the lack of current descriptions and non-functioning demo), GNUPanel (which just isn’t ready yet), and SysCP (because ISPConfig seems better ).

As DTC has Debian packages (and will be easier to maintain/upgrade), I decided to try it first. I already have it installed (that’s easy, esp. if you first read the DTC Debian Express Setup). Later I might post my impressions from using DTC.

I have just joined AN Hosting Affiliate Program - you can tell by the new link in Web Hosting section in the right sidebar, and by the real huge banner on the blog hosting page (so huge actually that it won’t fit completely with smaller resolutions like 1024×768 and less). I do not yet know if this affiliate program is worth the trouble, but I did find good feedback for their hosting on Drupal forums (here and here and search for more), so that really was the initial reason to put the links to them.

I would be interested in AN Hosting feedback, as I do plan to try their services one day.

P.S. A Small orange (direct link) also has lots of positive feedback.

Today I learned that eco-hosting (or green hosting) exists not only as a words combination. On one of the “hostings rating” websites there was even a category titled “green hosting”.

In short: green hosting operates on the principles of minimal ecology harm. E.g., solar energy is used (mostly in the form of photovoltaic panels - PVs), and a bunch of other “green” technologies.

I expected green hosting to be more expensive than common shared hosting… so I took a look at aiso.net’s hosting plans. Well, at least it doesn’t look 1000%-oversold, as many shared hostings look. For 10$/mo, you get 500MiB web storage, 500MiB email space (who needs it anyway?), and 5GiB traffic/mo. Everything else seems as usual - PHP, MySQL, Perl etc (I was looking at Linux hosting). Not much, but if you can use those 5GiB of traffic in one day - that is, if there are no other stronger limitations such as low CPU - then it’s still good. And - this is the most “basic” plan, I took it only because it’s also the closest to what is widely known in the shared hosting market as “common price”. This isn’t the only green hosting provider out there, I just satisfied my interest and didn’t look for more.

AISO - see for yourself.

Update 7: I’m now quite satisfied with page generation times. See other updates at the end of the post and comments to find out more.

Note: have a look at other hosting options.

I’m currently using GoDaddy shared hosting plan. I noticed that my blog, as it grows in popularity and visitors, displays a wide range of page-response times. The best I had seen so far was below 3 seconds of page generation time (note: _not_ page loading, but page generation). If it were the average, I would be happy. However, much more frequently observed times are in range of 20-30 seconds per page. Sometimes pages even timeout, as my uptime tracker service is reporting (For February, there were 100 minutes of unresponsive pages, for March - already over 10 hours!!!).

For example, today around 16:00 GMT the following statistics were reported by my blog:

22 queries.
33.416 seconds.

Evidently, this is unacceptably slow.
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