Plesk Alternative: CyberPanel! Hosting Control Panel for LiteSpeed

We’ve recently discussed CyberPanel as a viable cPanel alternative. Plesk is another popular control panel used by many out there. But if you are here, it means you are already looking for its alternative. There can be various factors/reasons for you looking for a Plesk alternative. Such as:

1. Pricing: Plesk has mid-range pricing. But still, some people out there can’t seem to afford, and then they start to look for an alternative.
2. Complexity: Plesk is a complex control panel, for first-time users, it can be confusing due to lots of options provided.

There can be many other factors as to why you look for a Plesk alternative. As we’ve talked in our cPanel alternative article, we are again going to talk about why would you choose CyberPanel over Plesk. We are not going to talk about the faults in Plesk here, as any software has pros and cons. But since you are here looking for Plesk alternative, we will see why you can use CyberPanel and still get the same features plus slightly better performance due to native support for OpenLiteSpeed and LiteSpeed Enterprise (comes with CyberPanel Enterprise).

CyberPanel is free

Yes, you heard is right, even though there is a pricing page on CyberPanel. Many people think that CyberPanel only has paid options. However that is not true, CyberPanel has a free version that comes with OpenLiteSpeed web server. Now your mind will start asking questions what is the difference between the free and paid version of CyberPanel.

 

Difference is server that comes pre-installed. When you install free version of CyberPanel you get OpenLiteSpeed, and when you install CyberPanel Enterprise, you get LiteSpeed Enterprise Web server included already in the cost.

 

But then you need to understand the difference between OpenLiteSpeed vs LiteSpeed Enterprise. Now that you have got a better idea of the difference between these servers, you will have a clear picture of what version of CyberPanel you want to choose.

Now that is the only difference between free and paid CyberPanel, apart from that 100% is the same. You get the same working and features in both free and paid versions. Now if you want to set up CyberPanel and get started with it, you can read our cPanel alternative article as it explains how you can easily get started with CyberPanel. We will take a little different approach in this article and leave out the technical details for cPanel alternative article, you can go down there and learn the technical points. However, in this article, we will see that how for different kinds of sites CyberPanel fits perfectly compared to Plesk and weather you will be needing a paid or free version of CyberPanel.

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CyberPanel as Plesk Alternative for WordPress

If you go down at W3Techs to see WordPress usage statistics. You can see WordPress usage as a content management system, right now at the time of this writing WordPress is used by 60.8% of all the websites whose content management is known to W3Techs. Now 60.8% is a big number. Which means that out of 100 people using CyberPanel there is a higher chance that they will be running WordPress sites.

Plesk have a WordPress toolkit to help you with WordPress related tasks. But if you see on CyberPanel side you get free of cost WordPress one-click installer, that not only installs WordPress but also installs LSCache plugin for you, which means your site is ready to be super fast as the default web server is OpenLiteSpeed (when you use the free version of CyberPanel).

For Bloggers

If you have blogging sites, then the free version of CyberPanel will be good for you. Because blogging does not require ESI caching which is only available with LiteSpeed Enterprise. So this is the best case where you can use CyberPanel for free.

For WooCommerce Shops

Shopping sites usually require ESI hole punching with their caching, so here you would need CyberPanel Enterprise (thus getting LiteSpeed Enterprise with ESI hole punching).

If you are not convinced, you can go here and see the performance of openlitespeed vs nginx. You can clearly see that OpenLiteSpeeds easily outperform NGINX in most cases especially with WordPress. On top of that LiteSpeed Enterprise is even faster then OpenLiteSpeed.

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CyberPanel as Plesk Alternative for Developers

Developers can also use CyberPanel in their development lifecycle. If you are a developer and use GIT version control in your development environment, then CyberPanel got you covered. You can attach your GIT repositories to the CyberPanel website and set up webhooks so that CyberPanel can update your code with each push. Following providers are supported:

 

1. Github
2. Gitlab

 

To get started you first need to create website in CyberPanel. Once a site is created you can go and manage this site -> Websites -> List Websites -> Manage. You will land on a website launcher, there you can click Git on bottom of the page.

 

 

First, you need to deploy your key to Github.

 

 

You need to add this key to your account level.

 

Github

 

To attach the key on Github visit -> https://github.com/settings/keys

 

Click New SSH Key and then add the key that you found from the box above.

 

Gitlab

 

To attach the key on Gitlab account visit -> https://gitlab.com/profile/keys

 

Once keys are added come back to CyberPanel and attach your repo.

 

Attaching Repo

 

 

1. In box 1, you need to enter the username of your Github/Gitlab account.
2. In box 2, enter your repository name.

 

This also works with private repositories, just make sure to add key properly. You can also select the branch to be attached.

Setup Webhooks

If you want to auto-update code on CyberPanel after every code push to your repo, you need to set up Webhook, so that your code is properly synced between CyberPanel and your repository.

Github

To setup webhook on Github visit https://github.com/username/reponame/settings/hooks

 

Replace username and repo name accordingly. Click Add New Hook.

 

1. Payload URL -> https:/<Server IP>:8090/websites/cyberhosting.org/gitNotify (Replace server IP with actual server IP or hostname).
2. Content-Type -> Application/JSON

3. SSL verification -> Disable SSL verification if you not issued hostname SSL and used hostname instead of IP in webhook URL.

4. Which events would you like to trigger this webhook? -> You can select anything, normally just select the push event.

 

And finally, click Add webhook. Now whenever you push code changes to your repository, it will be auto-synced to CyberPanel website that you have attached your repo too.

 

Gitlab

 

To setup webhook on Github visit https://gitlab.com/username/reponame/-/settings/integrations

 

Replace username and repo name accordingly.

 

1. URL -> https:/<Server IP>:8090/websites/cyberhosting.org/gitNotify (Replace server IP with actual server IP or hostname).

2. SSL verification -> Disable SSL verification if you not issued hostname SSL and used hostname instead of IP in webhook URL.

3. Trigger for push events only.

 

And finally, click Add webhook. Now whenever you push code changes to your repository, it will be auto-synced to CyberPanel website that you have attached your repo too.

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CyberPanel as Plesk Alternative for DNS only Servers

 

You can install CyberPanel as DNS or even Mail Only. To install as DNS only run this command

 

1. sh <(curl https://cyberpanel.net/install.sh || wget -O – https://cyberpanel.net/install.sh)

 

 

1. First, it will ask if weather to install CyberPanel or Addons. You can enter 1 to install CyberPanel.
2. It will then ask Install CyberPanel with OpenLiteSpeed or LiteSpeed Enterprise, now that is totally up to you.
3. Next, it will ask to Install minimal service for CyberPanel? You need to answer no here, because it will then skip installation of Email, DNS and FTP server. But we want to install DNS server, so you have to choose yes here.
4. It will then continue to ask whether you want to install Postfix, DNS and FTP servers select no for all except for DNS server.

 

Once the installation is completed, you can then use CyberPanel as DNS only. Similar you can also use for Mail only, if you choose not to install some components, these components will not show up in the CyberPanel interface.