• SysCP
• Domain Technologie Control, DTC
• Virtualmin (also Webmin, Usermin)
• ISPConfig
• RavenCore (no longer developed)
• GNUPanel

SysCP: looks good to me (though demo isn’t functional), 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 are 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 was a promising 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.

Update: DTC is indeed easy and pleasant to use. I had problems allowing FTP and SSH access using MySQL authorization, but at least FTP was an easy one to fix (SSH access with MySQL authorization is still unconfigured, but that’s a low priority for me). There is a minor concern about the files and directory permissions setup, but thanks to chrooted environment that is only minor concern. Use of a single Apache installation for hosting admin and serving user sites might be a sub-optimal decision, but it works. Traffic and disk space accounting are plain superb! Server memory use for the dtc-toaster installation is troublesome, but for a powerful RAM-my server that is not a problem (I now have about 800-900MiB RAM occupied, but that includes the XCache’s cache, quite big MySQL cache, and loads of Apache and PHP modules).

But I’m still willing to try other control panels. As I expected, GNUPanel hasn’t released anything yet; Ravencore‘s online demo is still unfunctional; ISPConfig has recently released RC (and their demo is working as it should and as it used to); SysCP is also up and running fast. If my little hosting service starts pouring in some cash, then I’ll try SysCP on my second server – to compare it with DTC, and choose one of them for further support/extension/localization.

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.

int main () {
unsigned int i;

for (i = 0; i < 2 ; i++ ) { i = 0; } return 0; } [/c] compiled it and executed several times on the GoDaddy shared hosting server. I did observe the program running for the maximum of 20 seconds of CPU time, not a second more. Please note, that 20 seconds of CPU time can be much more of “real” time, if the script isn’t using 100% of CPU, which often the case for shared hosting. Thus if you have in your php.ini max_execution_time set to, say, 60 seconds, your php script may actually execute as long as one minute; but I’m pretty sure that if your script has lots of CPU-intensive procedures, then as soon as it uses 20 seconds of CPU time, it will be terminated (however, this statement still needs checking – anyone?). To verify, I also created a cron job with the same file. It ran for 30 seconds CPU time. Strangely, this behaviour is not documented anywhere. This limit may also explain a number of other problems, if you have heavy web-applications: they just might be killed before they are finished, causing errors. I do understand the reason for this limitation, and am sure similar limitations exist in other shared hosting environments. The only important thing here is that this limit should have been documented and even put upfront somewhere in the hosting plans descriptions. I also wonder if the limit is the same for all godaddy shared hosting plans, or if it differs. 20 seconds when executed from PHP, and 30 seconds when executed as a cron job were observed on the Deluxe Linux Hosting plan. Extensions, additions and comments are welcome.

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.
Update 8: this blog is not at godaddy anymore for the reasons which have nothing to do with speed.

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.

Based on that same tracker, when plain-html file was tracked, no downtime was observed. It was only after I started tracking the PHP-generated file, that “downtimes” became obvious. Evidently, CPU is not powerful enough to handle all the processing from multiple shared-hosting accounts at GoDaddy server(?s), thus time-outs are observed.

I used the reverse-IP tool from domaintools.com to find out, that

There are 3707 domains hosted on this IP address.
Here are a few of them:

1. 100-downloads.com
2. 101artisanlane.com
3. 107threnegades.net

(Well, with 100GB storage and 1TB traffic I think I could have the 100-downloads-like web-site, but only based on pure-html pages, with no scripting at all. With scripting, that would be a dead site, deducing from my blog’s page generation speeds.)

(You could also try an alternative reverse-IP tool)

I will contact GoDaddy support with the “slow page generation, low CPU?” question to see if anything can be done. So far I’m satisifed with GoDaddy, even as my demands continue to grow since 2005. With static pages I think there would be no problems, but who uses static pages nowadays?

Meanwhile, I found the Linux Tera-Host hosting plan from hostican attractive, as for 10$/month. Well, “unlimited bandwidth” does look slightly suspicious, as it can be 40kbit/sec “unlimited” :). Please comment if you had any previous experience with hostican… or with decreasing page-generation times on GoDaddy shared hosting.

Update: after I contacted GoDaddy support with “slow page generation”, the page generation speed actually increased. So far the timings for a single page generation are within 1-10 seconds, and I do not get any more “downtimes” in my hosting uptime tracker. However, communication with support did not reveal anything new concerning my question. As long as page generation times do not increase, I’ll archive and forget about this problem. (…doubting that any other shared hosting provider will ensure enough CPU to get less-than-a-second-per-page times.)

Update 2: there’s also more important information about GoDaddy hosting, namely about their scheme of preventing one shared hosting user eating up 100% of system resources.

Update 3: as of January 31, 2008, there are 2924 domains hosted on my shared hosting server (according to reverse-IP tool).

Update 4: as of April 6, 2008, there are 2834 domains hosted on the server with the same IP as mine. I must add that it seems as though since that short MySQL outage everything is faster at GoDaddy shared hosting. Did they upgrade database server(s)? I have no idea, but I like the change.

Update 5: as of June 3, 2008, there are 2754 domains hosted on my shared hosting server at GoDaddy.

Update 6: as of July 16, 2008, there are 2697 domains hosted on my shared hosting server at GoDaddy. Moreover, the Deluxe shared hosting plan now has 1.5 times higher disk and bandwidth limits, and 5 times more FTP users per account. Page generation times have improved noticeably, though some slowdowns in the peak hours can be still observed.