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VPS Web Hosting – Do Your Really Need a Control Panel?
Control panels are certainly a vital element in today’s web hosting operation, helping to transform complex tasks into simple processes that can be handled by users of varying skill levels. The vendors that distribute these products and the hosting industry in general have no trouble pushing the software on the market, but critics are now questioning whether control panels are truly necessary in the VPS environment and what value they actually provide.
Potential Issues
In terms of performance and security, industry leading control panels such as cPanel and Plesk are not always what they are cracked up to be. These powerful applications consume a great deal of resources and often force customers to upgrade their packages to continuously thrive in a VPS hosting environment. This consumption is due to HTTPD processes ran by web servers like Apache that make a VPS more susceptible to performance issues and less able to handle exploits such as DOS (Denial of Service) attacks. Though very useful, cPanel and Plesk are both resource hogs that are more likely to reduce the overall responsiveness and performance of web applications, leading customers to upgrade to more costly packages they do not necessarily need. In addition to this, even simple tasks such as creating email account and managing databases are slow and lagging processes that generally take too long to complete.
Alternative VPS Control Panels
cPanel and Plesk are ideal for shared and dedicated hosting arrangements but could result in more problems then you bargained for when using them with a virtual private server. Two more efficient control panels you may want to consider for your VPS hosting solution are DirectAdmin and LxAdmin as both are incredibly lightweight and consume notably less system resources than cPanel and Plesk. This essentially means they are far more responsive, faster and likely to give you a better performance than the leading products. A number of tests are increasingly showing that they are also more stable and secure than the competition.
Many observers are stepping out to the make the claim that cPanel’s days as a VPS control panel are numbered, attributing this to the fact that is the most resource leeching solution. Due to its mass popularity and widespread use, it is also among the highly targeted by hackers, which presents numerous potential security risks to your hosting environment and sensitive data. For this reason, you may want to carefully consider utilizing this control panel with your virtual private server. Unless you have a robust VPS plan with a lot of RAM or absolutely require automation, it might be worth the risk to install a glamorous commercial product.
Conclusion
We are not telling you to refrain from using cPanel or Plesk as both are on top of the control panel market for obvious reasons. However, in many situations, going with a lighter product or performing command line administration will allow you to get the job done in a faster, more efficient and secure manner. Fortunately, there are several control panel applications specifically designed for the VPS environment, better assuring the optimal performance and adequate security you need to thrive with your web presence.
Tags: control panel, cPanel, DirectAdmin, DoS, HTTPD, Lxadmin, Plesk, RAM, VPS, VPS enviornment, VPS plan
