Goodbye Cyberpanel. Been using it for over 6 years. From CentOS 7.6 till now. Moving on doesn’t mean it was all bad. I chose it over cpanel back then because it was free and easy to use and I wanted to try out LiteSpeed, my first time away from apache, ngnix and IIS. Cyberpanel was regularly updated and patched issues very quickly back then. But like many of these platforms, got too busy to focus on making money, and forgot to keep all, including or particularly free community, users happy. Bugs and security issues are not fixed quickly. Migration from CentOS to Ubuntu wasn’t a one click job. Far too many money making features which I don’t need anymore.
So I want to get back to basics with cloudpanel. Hopefully will last for another 5-10 years. I am not a heavy users as such. Just prefer to host my own WordPress another other simple PHP or node.js projects without having to spin up a new VPS each time. Kind of a dev playground. 10-20 bucks a month on digitalocean, can easily have 5-10 small dev projects on there. Back to simple Nginx, PHP, PHP-FPM, node.js, mysql, etc. Goodbye LiteSpeed, it is supposed to be the fastest for WordPress, but I haven’t hit that kind of traffic volume to notice yet. It seems that Cyberpanel is there just for pushing more LiteSpeed Enterprise business.
“Missing” features which I will get around:
- Domain Aliases – There is no easy way to setup domain aliases on cloudpanel for WordPress sites (not just adding it to Vhost files). There is a work around, check out this gist, I will follow up with detailed instructions later. (Mainly, you need to add the line, “root <path to webroot>;” where it says {{root}}.) Can take a look at this sample answer.
- Git Webhook – I know this is not “proper”, to have webhook setup so every commit gets auto pushed to the site. But as I said, I am using this as a more lively dev site for some prototypes. Was a nice feature of Cyberpanel, but it was very buggy with many issues over the years. Will try to set it up again using cloudpanel’s dploy and webhook.
Ref: https://medium.com/the-sysadmin/deploy-from-github-gitlab-to-server-using-webhook-d1cb6496368f; https://github.com/cloudpanel-io/dploy; https://github.com/adnanh/webhook
Migration and Setup Tips:
- I used Duplicator to migrate my WordPress sites. Simple. Install plugin on existing site, backup, download zip file, setup new plain WP site, update dns, login to new plain site, install plugin, upload via sftp, run restore, remove plugin, delete backup with sftp.
- Reminder about certificates, you might get error when issuing Let’s Encrypt certs. If you are using Cloudflare, check the SSL/TLS settings make sure you use “Full” with the self signed certs or “Full (Strict)” after you have setup Let’s Encrypt certs.
- It’s good practice to keep your server passwords. Sure, you can reset most of them if you have root access anyway, but you will then have to hunt around your code to see where you have config files or hardcoded the passwords/keys. Use the private/locked Notes on your iPhone if needed.
- To update/change a domain name for a WordPress site on Cyberpanel is not that difficult. I needed to do it to get access to some of the old domains I no longer have. Can just update the domain names in the mysql database using phpmyadmin. Steps are: 1. Edit domain name in websiteFunctions_websites table of cyberpanel database. 2. Issue new certificates with the new domain names. 3. Update the wp_options table of the WordPress site database to have the right siteurl and home. Restart OpenLiteSpeed.
- DNS, haven’t done this for a while. But still keeping with both www and bare domain. Using A records for both www and bare as I only have a simple setup, avoiding having an extra DNS lookup when using CNAME for www. Leaving TTL to auto as I don’t plan to update the servers too often. But yes, will get better at hiding IPs and leave Cloudflare to proxy all/most traffic.
Leave a Comment