AnyHosting

I’ve been shopping around for virtual web hosting control panels. At this point, I am interested only in providing end-users things like file management, basic database administration, pre-defined package mangement.

They seem to fall into three broad categories:

1. expensive proprietary packages
2. free open-source packages
3. custom software developed by hosting companies

The leader in #1 seems to be cPanel. I am not at all impressed with their demo, it looks very cluttered to me and I really want something simple, easy and aesthetically pleasing.

I have checked out all of the free/open-source web hosting control panels that Wikipedia lists, and I am also very displeased with the UI, and the code doesn’t look very easy to jump into to me. There seems to be a lot of custom code (I’d be happiest with something based on Django, but the PHP ones could at least use Cake). This makes me a little worried on the security aspect (XSS, SQL injection, etc.). Most of these code bases seem to be very old and not necessarily very active.

So is #3 the way to go? I’ve seen and heard about lots of great hosting control panels that only exist behind close doors, is this the big differentiator for modern hosting companies?

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 10:43 pm and is filed under web hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.