Hey all.

I have a sever here and while i got cpanel i've found that i don't really need cpanel and was thinking about getting an OS reload to save myself the $20 per month. The server is just hosting personal sites and some sites for friends. i rarley access WHM or anything like that after i set up a site. PHPMyAdmin is probably the most used program and i can just install that free myself.

Now i've never admined a server without cpanel so i was wondering how much more difficult would it be to do everything that cpanel does automatically. I know i can install apache/php/mysql from ports but what about setting up sites? Setting quotas for a site, attaching a domain and all that jazz. Setting up FTP users and a email address via a mail server.

No need to go into specifics on how to do the above, just if it's worth the hassel to do it via command line to save myself the 20 bucks.

Thanks!

Could do a try using webmin: http://www.webmin.com

if you know how to administrate a server through console, i say lose cpanel. if you dont though, you may want to learn first.

i went the opposite way, i learned console then learned cpanel. i dont mess with cpanel anymore, i used to though when i had a server running a hosting business. those days are over though for now and so is my cpanel days

unless someone wants to pay me to do cpanel administration...

well i'm confortable with doing things via console and i used it to secure the system down update ports and that kinds of things. I just never learned how to do what cpanel does via the commanline in the way of setting up FTP, mail and websites accounts.

I saw some pretty good guides at http://www.bsdguides.org/ for setting up php/mysql/apache/qmail/etc... so it's a start.

Well, even with a control panel you shouldn't be administrating the server through the panel. You should know how to run your boxes from CLI and not depend on buggy control panels, that will get you a crashed/hacked box.

Console based management is easy as pie if all you're doing is a few websites. The ports tree is your firend and will take most of the hard work out of it for you.

and the ports tree :P


i've found, control panels just add more hastle, but thats my opinions

I administrate two servers on the servermatrix network just using CLI, the ports tree and some handwritten scripts.

The owners are that much happier as their servers are more responsive. They only miss the fact that everything that could be changed for a website was in one place, now it is scattered around.

administrate the FreeBSD server is easy,I administrate many server just using SSH