Since a couple years I'm hosting websites on a my own dedicated server.
This gives a lot of freedom and flexibility, you can install whatever
daemons you like, you have plenty of disk space and you can amortize
some of the cost by hosting other (customer) sites on your server or
even make a business this way.
But with this freedom comes a lot of responsibility. First of all you need to make sure your server is secure, otherwise you might find yourself hosting someone you don't even know or your server is abused for sending spam or attacking other servers. This means constantly keeping your server's software up to date by installing bug fixes and security updates. Even when you're on vacation!
Secondly, you have to be able to efficiently manage your server's configuration. Editing system configuration files directly not only requires in-depth knowledge of most parts of a Unix/Linux server, it is also time-consuming and brings a certain risk of making mistakes which might take down the whole server. And if you host other people's sites, those people must also be able to configure their domain, databases, email-settings and so on without interfering with the rest of the system.
For the configuration and administration, there are a bunch of web-based apps out there that give you a nice browser UI and hide the way the system is configured under the hood. You just add domains, email addresses and databases without having to know how Apache configures virtual hosts, how Courier authenticates users, how access permissions are managed in MySQL and so on. Some of these apps are commercial, some are free, and they all have different scopes of use.
Webmin (BSD license) is such a tool, and it lets you configure just about everything on your system. But it's not primarily designed for hosting environments, where you have to be able to manage settings per customer and where customers should be able to log in with restricted rights to manage their own domain and ftp and mail users. There is some progress in this direction, but others do it much better.
For my scenario described above, apps like Confixx or Plesk work great, but they are commercial software and quite expensive. That's ok if you have a lot of paying customers, but for smaller installations, the monthly license fee for Plesk is already as high as the hosting cost of a simple server. If you are lucky however, your hoster already includes a Plesk license in your hosting contract at no additional charge.
I have worked with Confixx for a while, and then had to switch to Plesk. Yes, I had to, because Confixx was discontinued and when I switched from one server to a faster one, only Plesk was available. I thought maybe it's not so bad because Plesk is made by the same company (they were bought by Parallels later) and it is the official successor to Confixx, so there should be an easy upgrade path. The reality was quite different. There was a migration tool from Confixx to Plesk, but that failed to migrate my server's data. So I had to manually re-setup all the customers, domains, email-addresses etc. Eventually I had it running and the people could start getting used to the new user interface.
While Confixx was mostly focused on pure virtual host configuration, Plesk goes beyond that and also lets you do some low level administrative tasks, like setting up cron jobs and making backups. I thought the backup feature was particularly useful. Until one day I had to reinstall someone else's server and it turned out that Plesk's restore tool (pleskrestore) was not able to restore a backup made with Plesk's backup tool (pleskbackup), using the same version of Plesk!. It turns out I wasn't the first to encounter this. There were posts on the support forum that described the same problem, from last year, and there was no solution. Shame on Parallels for not being able to fix this. They shouldn't offer this backup tool if the restore is not working.
So my experience with these tools has been quite mixed. As long as they work, they work great, but it's very hard to tweak the configuration beyond what's offered by default. This and the unsure migration path for the future made me look for alternatives. There are a couple of free tools that can be seen as direct replacements for Plesk. The more known are VHCS / ispCP Omega and SysCP. You can try them out, they have demo versions online. VHCS seems to have more features at first look, but there are plugins for SysCP as well that add extra functionality. ispCP Omega is based on VHCS and has the best looks of the three.
Currently I'm migrating another server and the new hoster doesn't give me Plesk, so I chose to go with SysCP, as there seems to be the most activity in the support forum and regular software releases.
The installation is a piece of cake for Debian with apt-get. The configuration is a bit harder, but well documented. Follow the step-by-step guide and you'll have SysCP up and running in a couple of hours or less. Unfortunately, they missed to mention one important setting, which seems to be essential: In "IPs and Ports" you need to enable "Create NameVirtualHost statement", "Create vHost-Container" and "Create ServerName statement", otherwise SysCP will not be reachable after you set up the first vhost.
So far I'm quite happy with SysCP, it works fine and everything seems much more transparent than back in the closed-source Confixx and Plesk. (It's not very beautiful by default but I'm sure that can be changed.) During installation you also learn where the configuration is kept in the system and you'll know exactly what to back up and how to restore it.
Secondly, you have to be able to efficiently manage your server's configuration. Editing system configuration files directly not only requires in-depth knowledge of most parts of a Unix/Linux server, it is also time-consuming and brings a certain risk of making mistakes which might take down the whole server. And if you host other people's sites, those people must also be able to configure their domain, databases, email-settings and so on without interfering with the rest of the system.
For the configuration and administration, there are a bunch of web-based apps out there that give you a nice browser UI and hide the way the system is configured under the hood. You just add domains, email addresses and databases without having to know how Apache configures virtual hosts, how Courier authenticates users, how access permissions are managed in MySQL and so on. Some of these apps are commercial, some are free, and they all have different scopes of use.
Webmin (BSD license) is such a tool, and it lets you configure just about everything on your system. But it's not primarily designed for hosting environments, where you have to be able to manage settings per customer and where customers should be able to log in with restricted rights to manage their own domain and ftp and mail users. There is some progress in this direction, but others do it much better.
For my scenario described above, apps like Confixx or Plesk work great, but they are commercial software and quite expensive. That's ok if you have a lot of paying customers, but for smaller installations, the monthly license fee for Plesk is already as high as the hosting cost of a simple server. If you are lucky however, your hoster already includes a Plesk license in your hosting contract at no additional charge.
I have worked with Confixx for a while, and then had to switch to Plesk. Yes, I had to, because Confixx was discontinued and when I switched from one server to a faster one, only Plesk was available. I thought maybe it's not so bad because Plesk is made by the same company (they were bought by Parallels later) and it is the official successor to Confixx, so there should be an easy upgrade path. The reality was quite different. There was a migration tool from Confixx to Plesk, but that failed to migrate my server's data. So I had to manually re-setup all the customers, domains, email-addresses etc. Eventually I had it running and the people could start getting used to the new user interface.
While Confixx was mostly focused on pure virtual host configuration, Plesk goes beyond that and also lets you do some low level administrative tasks, like setting up cron jobs and making backups. I thought the backup feature was particularly useful. Until one day I had to reinstall someone else's server and it turned out that Plesk's restore tool (pleskrestore) was not able to restore a backup made with Plesk's backup tool (pleskbackup), using the same version of Plesk!. It turns out I wasn't the first to encounter this. There were posts on the support forum that described the same problem, from last year, and there was no solution. Shame on Parallels for not being able to fix this. They shouldn't offer this backup tool if the restore is not working.
So my experience with these tools has been quite mixed. As long as they work, they work great, but it's very hard to tweak the configuration beyond what's offered by default. This and the unsure migration path for the future made me look for alternatives. There are a couple of free tools that can be seen as direct replacements for Plesk. The more known are VHCS / ispCP Omega and SysCP. You can try them out, they have demo versions online. VHCS seems to have more features at first look, but there are plugins for SysCP as well that add extra functionality. ispCP Omega is based on VHCS and has the best looks of the three.
Currently I'm migrating another server and the new hoster doesn't give me Plesk, so I chose to go with SysCP, as there seems to be the most activity in the support forum and regular software releases.
The installation is a piece of cake for Debian with apt-get. The configuration is a bit harder, but well documented. Follow the step-by-step guide and you'll have SysCP up and running in a couple of hours or less. Unfortunately, they missed to mention one important setting, which seems to be essential: In "IPs and Ports" you need to enable "Create NameVirtualHost statement", "Create vHost-Container" and "Create ServerName statement", otherwise SysCP will not be reachable after you set up the first vhost.
So far I'm quite happy with SysCP, it works fine and everything seems much more transparent than back in the closed-source Confixx and Plesk. (It's not very beautiful by default but I'm sure that can be changed.) During installation you also learn where the configuration is kept in the system and you'll know exactly what to back up and how to restore it.
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